Steve on TV: Dahlonega gets a starring role, and Ryan Murphy’s bonkers body horror is tolerably trashy

The knotty, nutty Georgia-shot mystery His & Hers doesn’t have the guns, booze, horny teen boys, sapphic gymnastics and terrible wigs of that other Netflix epic, Hunting Wives. But it offers plenty of its own bad behavior, multiple vehicular sex scenes and gonzo plot twists in sleepy Dahlonega, along with side trips to big-city Atlanta. It’s cheap kicks.

A dead body left to bleed out on a car hood starts it all. It’s Rachel (Jamie Tisdale), a Dahlonega woman married to a rich local guy, but she’s recently been hooking up (yes, in her car) with local detective Jack Harper. Played by Walking Dead’s Jon Bernthal, with his glorious Cro-Magnon brow, he’s the His of the miniseries — as in, his side of the story.

Hers gets taken up by Anna (Tessa Thompson), Jack’s estranged wife and former hotshot Atlanta news anchor who grew up in Dahlonega. She’s ghosted her job and marriage for months but suddenly swoops into her hometown, determined to cover the story for her old station. This is despite being replaced by Lexy (Rebecca Rittenhouse), blonde and Barbie-ish enough to work for Fox News or the White House.

In a story full of petty grievance and mortal revenge — plus an insensitive/satisfying dementia subplot featuring Atlanta veteran actor Crystal Fox as Anna’s mom — Anna gets busy bedding Lexy’s cameraman husband Richard (Liev’s brother Pablo Schreiber). Why? Just to be a bitch. Plus, well, because Schreiber has a hot, Cro-Magnon look a little like Bernthal’s.

As Anna schemes (one of Thompson’s specialties) and John breaks multiple laws trying to cover up his connection to the murder victim, the show’s six episodes move along with bingeable swiftness. Based on Alice Feeney’s book, it’s also so disposable that I had to study my notes to remember a lot of the story line. It includes the inevitable Dark Secret From the Past, captured in video snatches shot during Anna’s sweet 16^th, celebrated with a passel of North Georgia mean girls from her school. (Like other shows shot here, His & Hers oozes honeyed accents over its actors, trying to make them sound “Southern,” but my ears didn’t bleed too hard.)

On a footnote, actress Marin Ireland sustains her long streak of being better than the material she’s in, and leaves too soon. She plays John’s sis, a single drunk mom, and that’s pretty much the only thing the script gives her. Still, she brings intensity and danger to her too-few scenes. There’s also too little of Sunita Mani as Priya, a police colleague of John’s and the only one on the show who demonstrates any common sense. Enjoy!

HULU

If His & Hers doesn’t sound nearly trashy enough for you, it’s been a month since my last column. That means there is at least one new Ryan Murphy show gleefully lowering our taste and intelligence. Batter up! It’s The Beauty. And it’s deranged enough to be more tolerable than those Murphy shows that tiptoe into what its creators consider “relevance.”

For the record, I’m weighing whether I’m strong enough to sample the other Murphy production out there, Love Story. I’m scared of what his production company’s conveyor belt might do to the half-lived lives of poor little John John Kennedy and his wife Carolyn.

Anyway, Beauty is loosely based on a graphic novel I know nothing about. All you need to know is, it features Isabella Rossellini in a dayglo pink hoop skirt and brilliantined hair that sticks to her head like a plastic doll’s, sipping a cocktail and telling her husband (Ashton Kutcher as Byron Forst, the show’s billionaire big bad), “Every night, I pray for your death.” Fun! 

Longtime Murphy star player Evan Peters is our lead, an FBI agent named Cooper who’s in a highly sexual situationship with his partner Jordan (Rebecca Hall). They get sent to Europe when a supermodel (Bella Hadid, in a leather bodysuit as red as the blood she’s about to shed) goes on a rampage on a Paris catwalk. Then, she explodes like a water balloon full of Robitussin. 

Coop and Jordan slowly realize there’s a new STD in town, a chemically created virus known as The Beauty that turns the infected into physically perfect, muscled, 20-something versions of themselves. That gives the show a plausible T&A justification. Formerly normal schlubs ogle their perfect, naked “after” selves in mirrors, letting us ogle them in the process. Only problem is, after 855 days as a Venus or Adonis, the infected pull a Hadid and pop like human ticks.

Like most Ryan Murphy joints, The Beauty steals from whatever works. It features spurts of body horror, like David Cronenberg-lite, and some moody interiors that call to mind David Lynch films. And Kutchner, though not stark naked, gets to dance through a mansion like Barry Keoghan did at the end of Saltburn. But the main vibe is TV trash, not art house film. If you can get past the groan-inspiring, on-the-nose dialogue (did you know that beauty is “the oldest, purest form of currency there is”?), the show has enough sloppy wit and brazenness to keep you watching. Caveat: The seventh episode, featuring an actor with the premature aging disease progeria, indulges in Murphy’s worst instincts for exploitation. But at its best, Beauty lets him indulge in what he’s best at: surfaces. The 11-episode show continues weekly through March 4. 

DISNEY+

Though it won an insane amount of Emmys, I never made it to the end of Apple TV+’s The Studio. Seth Rogen’s comedy was like a metastasized take on The Player. It’s a series whose self-referential jokes about Hollywood became the entire shiny point. Hollywood is now the world’s biggest example of the place where there’s no there there. But filmmakers (like Quentin Tarantino with Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood or Bill Hader with Barry) can’t help staring with love into that flashbulb-lit abyss.

The latest version of that navel-gazing trend is Wonder Man. For a Disney/Marvel project, it has a surprisingly modest scale. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (of Candyman and HBO’s terrific, Georgia-shot Watchmen) plays Simon Williams, a struggling LA actor who loses the few gigs he gets by obsessing over his one-line character’s motivations. (We see him fired off the latest Ryan Murphy iteration of American Horror Story, a low bar.) He’s also been dumped by his girlfriend (Olivia Thirlby) because he was too emotionally constricted to let her in.

There’s a reason for that. If he lets his emotions get out of control, Simon has telekinetic powers that make everything around him go kaboom. Though superheroes are accepted in this Marvel universe, they’re forbidden from acting jobs, due to something called the Doorman Clause. (The fourth of the show’s eight episodes, starring Byron Bowers as a club bouncer, amusingly fills in that backstory.)

The core of Wonder Man is the friendship between Simon and Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley). Trev was introduced as the evil Mandarin in Iron Man III, who turned out to be just a drunk actor hired to play a terrorist. Trevor befriends Simon under false pretenses, assigned to spy on the younger man by the Department of Damage Control, a fascist federal agency personified by Arian Moayed (who played sleazy private equity investor Stewie in Succession). As both actors audition for the reboot of a comic-book movie called, you guessed it, Wonder Man, will Simon learn of Trev’s betrayal?

The chemistry between the two actors carries you along. They’re my second-favorite odd couple right now, after Dunk and Egg on HBO Max’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. (I’ll write about that series some other time.) Kingsley has to pull more than his share of the work. Abdul-Mateen is easy on the eye, but his Simon can be a little blank … when he’s not being annoying. That’s where Wonder Man can’t overcome a serious problem. Except for his superpowers, Simon really is just a narcissistic, run-of-the-mill actor, an avatar of red-carpet, step-and-repeat emptiness.

PRIME VIDEO

Ten years ago, a thrilling adaptation of John le Carré’s novel The Night Manager came out, starring Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine, a newly recruited M16 agent working undercover, trying to take down a glamorous arms dealer called Richard Roper, played by Hugh Laurie. The two actors’ electric, dangerous bromance and a supporting cast that included Olivia Colman and Tom Hollander made the whole thing crackle.

So I had equal parts excitement and dread about this long-aborning sequel, not based on anything written by the late le Carré. Both of those expectations wound up being fulfilled. Hiddleston returns. So do some other members of the original cast, including, briefly, Colman. Instead of Turkey and Syria, the new thriller unfolds mainly in Colombia, where Pine, under a new name, has to make nice with Miami businesswoman Roxana (Camila Morrone) and Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva), who poses as a philanthropist but is secretly stockpiling arms for an unnamed bigwig who wants to kick off regime change. (The series flirts with, well, Pine’s flirting with both Roxana and Teddy, but though the three commingle on a nightclub floor, their dancing stays strictly, disappointingly vertical).

At its best, this sequel series, created by original show runner David Farr, maintains a level of pleasurable dread as Pine struggles just as fiercely as Simon Williams to hide his true identity. The cast includes strong new recruits, including Indira Varma as Pine’s ruthless MI6 boss and Hayley Squires as his Girl Friday. But no, this Night Manager doesn’t live up to the original, especially in its last hour. It eliminates some of its prime assets in a feel-bad finale that left a sour taste in my mouth that even a third season might not wash away.

Oh yeah, I also watched The Rip on Netflix. It’s the artillery-heavy drama starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as Miami cops stuck in a house full of cartel money, beset by gang members and crooked cops both inside and out. I almost forgot to mention it. That fact may be all you need to know about the movie.

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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous columns here.