By Anne Brodie
Familiar real-life trauma comes back to haunt us in Coup! Joseph Schuman’s sly, winking look at the 1918 global influenza pandemic in an American seaside mansion rife with double-crossers, thieves, and a weak master. Peter Sarsgaard, Billy Magnussen, and Sarah Gadon star as Horton, a billionaire liberal, Floyd, a cunning interloper, and Julie, the lady of the house. An unknown drifter shows up and insinuates himself into the Horton mansion, he’ll cook, with no references, while Master drones on about his noble liberal views while safely removed from the lower classes. He’s written an angry letter to the president (Woodrow Wilson) concerning his mishandling of the pandemic. Wilson told citizens to keep businesses and schools open, resulting in countless deaths. But news of the pandemic was suppressed because WW1 was ending and people had had enough heartbreak. Those choices killed millions. The Master is safe in his stately home for the duration, food hasn’t begun to run out and no outsider is allowed on the property –his bubble realm. Without subtlety, the Chef plants the seeds to dominate him and take charge. The servants will get household bedrooms, not basement hovels or they leave. Granted. They will swim in the private pool. OK. They will drink his alcohol. Done. Master is a strict conscientious vegetarian, but go kill us some food. OK. Double our wages or else. Fine. Master is powerless and before you can say scam, Chef’s sleeping with his wife, you see Master has no courage, just money and a name, and Chef has no conscience. Thus is the stage set for …. Witty, elegant, high-minded, and archly anarchically political, the story is triggering for our times what with COVID, US politics, and the pretense of being all-powerful as simply a mirage. Coup! Is a fun, gently bitter satire on us. Select theatres.
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about already, given flood, fire, famine, doom, defeat, despair, and politics, we have another reason to fret. The future! VIAPLAY’s acclaimed series The Fortress takes our current and recent experiences with isolationism, pandemic, xenophobia, and environmental decline and distills them into one horrific view of the future, set in fictionalised 2037 Bergen, Norway. Natural and man-made disasters have challenged survival globally but Norway’s government has found a way out, it believes, by cutting all connections to the outside world. That means complete autonomy, living off what they can produce without the need to go abroad. That means raising crops, intense fish farming, and revamping every aspect of common care. Tough new laws are passed. As expected, immigrants are discouraged, non-Norwegians are sent away, and surveillance increases on land, sea, and in the air. Meanwhile, folks in Europe and the UK are keen to get into safe and secure Norway as their countries collapse. It’s heart-wrenching as families are separated by harsh guidelines, and Norwegians feel imprisoned. Enemy forces are at work infiltrating the country and it appears a young woman hired as the Prime Minster’s speechwriter may be one of them. Then disaster strikes within the food industry; the salmon is contaminated by “bacteria from foreign waters”; vaccines have failed. The disease spreads to humans, animals, and then to tomatoes. The dread we felt not so long ago feels familiar and circumstances entirely horrifically possible; the bacterium is linked to the Black Death that decimated Europe and the UK in the 1300s. The Fortress stars several of Norway’s leading actors who do their part to upset our heart rhythms in this complex, fast-paced and frankly scary thriller. Streaming now.
OK ladies, drop everything and jump into BritBox’ original series The Change S1 on August 1. British stand-up comedian Bridget Christie writes and stars in a genius six-part comedy-drama about menopause! Yes, she went there; this is the first time in series streaming history. It’s utterly hilarious and a teeny bit scary and you’ll binge the half-hour episodes in record time. She’s Lin, a 50-year-old wife and mother who is fed up, after realising what her life has become via a daily diary of every tiny, “invisible” chore she does, like dusting the lampshades, the time taken and she’s suddenly awake. Plus, she’s forgotten the word for “shoe”. She tells her doctor she has several diseases and is told it’s all one thing – menopause. Time to revolt. Lin dusts off her ancient Triumph motorbike without permission and heads to the Forest of Dean; her excuse is finding the tree she climbed as a child and the box she left in it. It begins a journey that brings her roaring back to life; the villagers take to her, she sits in bars and cafes and drinks alone for the first time, meets an old lech and tames him, boards at the local eel farm and gets to know the villagers – uniquely weird each one. The sanest is Pig Man who lives in a cave in the woods with his herd of boars and makes the best coffee she’s ever had. This is living! Her nosy neighbour phones to shriek at her to get back home, her husband’s lost, hungry and the place is filthy. The community gets into major scrapes re-protesting the development of the ancient forest, will the lech do his proud, naked dance at the next General Meeting and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The one-liners come fast and furious; the sight gags are glorious and you’ll be in stitches. Exquisitely funny, beautifully written, and top actors fill out the roles of nutty villagers. Christie is a revelation for North American audiences, her wit and understanding of the way people think, her late-blooming adventurous spirit – inspiration in droves. The Change is like nothing you’ve seen before and you will be hooked but good.
The new Gen Z talk series Influenced, produced by Reese Witherspoon, on Prime Video,features bright-eyed, energetic hosts Achieng Agutu, Agutu, Eyal Booker, and Tefi Pessoa; their focus is dissecting what you’re talking about online and turning it into entertainment. A series about social media as it were. It’s ambitious, covering topics including but not limited to lifestyle, food, fashion, home design, travel, beauty, entertainment, popular culture, mental health, spirituality, and wellness. The set’s eye-catching, très chic, modern, and moveable, built to switch subjects at the same rate as our attention span. Which is lightning fast. Nothing gets too deep and so far, there is little to back up what the hosts are pushing but I don’t care. It’s fun, fast and jolly. The hosts describe their first or worst jobs, each taking about five to ten seconds, so it’s not like they’re trying to tell a story or enlighten us. Anyway, I don’t always want to think and because they are so decorative, so fun and so excitable, they get away with it. That’s as deep as it gets. Like a Tweet. It’s revolutionary, bringing attention deficit to the masses; they’re singing to the choir, as its audience is, my guess, 16 and under. That’s cool, there is room for everyone. I’m simply concerned that it will guide content makers to create more of this mindless social media copying as mainstream TV. Wait a minute, much of TV IS already mindless! I do love the hosts’ diversity and energy and I want some of that. Streaming now.
There’s a new teen detective in town. Netflix’ series A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is a terrific amalgamation of the British village murder genre and the Nancy Drew oeuvre starring Emma Myers as Pip. She has grown up in Little Kilton an idyllic seeming community, where everyone knows everyone. It’s a tight but was rattled five years earlier by the disappearance and supposed murder of Andie Bell, a popular girl. The blame landed on her boyfriend Sal Singh who killed himself but all this time later, Pip believes he’s innocent and is determined to find the real killer for her school term paper. Bell’s body has never been found. Pip’s smart and ballsy and approaches Andie’s intimates for info for her investigation, some agree to speak and others behave suspiciously, warning her off and some friends turn on her. She’s told “Be careful, you don’t know what you’re digging up” which of course fuels her commitment. Her mother (Anna Maxwell Martin) is concerned when she finds charts and tables dominating Pip’s bedroom but allows her the space to carry on. Ravi (Zain Iqbal) Sal’s brother joins her hoping to clear Sal’s name. As happens in village murder stories, Pip uncovers a network of hidden things, lies, and deceit and is threatened and shunned. No wonder. She discovers Andie was dealing drugs and having an affair with a physically abusive teacher and now she is in mortal danger. Based on the hugely successful, New York Times bestselling mystery YA series by Holly Jackson. A smart series that doesn’t speak down to teens and shows them in an honest, unsentimental way. Good stuff. I foresee a hit and adaptation of the following books in the series. August 1
A superb police procedural new to BritBox has landed and it’s worth your attention. Now the UK produces the best police series ever, even surpassing the Scandinavians, and leaving American series in the dust. No Offence set in a Manchester detachment stars Joanna Scanlan, Elaine Cassidy, and Will Mellor and a huge cast. The great thing is that it follows the personalities, politics, and culture of police staff. Faced with the worst society has to offer yet keeping buoyed by one another. An amusing police series? Yup. They know how to have fun, how to skirt the rules for the greater good, and make the best of things. The department is run by DI Deering (Joanna Scanlan) an extrovert as empathetic as she is tough as nails. DC Kowalska (Elaine Cassidy) is sharp and fearless. She jumps into rancid local pier water to collect a floating, wrapped body and manages to revive the girl. Unfortunately, she gives chase in a dress and heels to a perp who broke bail, he trips and is run over before her eyes. Nothing ordinary about this one. Deering knows she’s committed and highly skilled but passes her over for promotion because a video has emerged of her walking away from the run-over perp; she didn’t report it. There’s a serial killer at large, two young women with Down’s Syndrome are murdered and the third girl, found in the river has similar facial features. Kowalska takes her home after the department pays for plane tickets for the girl’s parents in Spain to come to her; they take the money and fly elsewhere. Deering doesn’t like it but the only other option is putting her into “the system” so she allows the girl to stay. The pace is frenetic, a lot is happening, and it’s well captured and interpreted by the filmmakers. We are caught up in a fascinating whirlwind of activity and see cops for what they are, just folks like us, flawed, sassy, human and caring.