Streaming in February: “Stay Close,” “A Hero,” “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” more

I got hooked on Coben and his ridiculous, addictive plotting with 2006’s French adaptation of his Tell No One, which had the audacity to deliver its twisty tale in a mere two hours and 11 minutes. Long movie, yes. That’s nothing compared to what’s followed. His books have now become Exhibit A of streaming sprawl. The latest is Stay Close (Netflix, eight episodes). It comes in the wake of limited series Safe, The Stranger, The Woods and The Innocent. 

Reader, I watched them all. 

Stay Close presents us with three storylines, strands we can be certain will be braided together as surely as Phil Burbank’s ropes in The Power of the Dog. Megan (Cush Jumbo) is living a cushy life in the British suburbs. Mother of three kids with her loving boyfriend, she’s about to marry — until she gets a surprise message from someone calling her “Cassie,” who insists on meeting. That someone is Lorraine (Sarah Parish), owner of a strip club called The Viper, where Megan, under her previous name, danced many years ago. 

Meanwhile, a once-famed photographer, Ray (Richard Armitage), now works for hire as a fake paparazzo for rich kids. His fall began around the time his girlfriend disappeared on him; her name was Cassie. 

Also, meanwhile, detective Broome (James Nesbitt) is investigating the disappearance of a young man who vanished while partying during carnival celebrations at, you guessed it, The Viper. That disappearance might link up to some yearly vanishings of men around the same age, in the same vicinity. 

To say that complications ensue is an understatement. In Coben’s series, characters often run around in panic through the nighttime woods, disappearing or winding up dead. It’s like a mashup of  a Shakespeare comedy and Agatha Christie whodunit. Mistaken identities, ridiculous coincidences and a cartoonish duo of shiny, dancing young assassins known only as “Ken” and “Barbie” get thrown into the mix. In the end, Stay Close gives us a serial killer whose identity is both implausible and right in front of us the whole time. The murderer is someone we can’t help but feel was justified. The series is superficial trash, yes, but lovingly polished trash. I couldn’t stop watching. 

Maybe it’s because Kristen Bell starred in The Good Place, one of the funniest and deepest TV comedies of the 21st century. And maybe because the title is such a snarky, promising one. But the limited series The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window raises comic expectations it doesn’t meet.

It’s a victim of streaming’s expanding bloat: Why make a single movie when you can stretch out a plot for seven or eight hours, no matter how thin the material? (Granted, the series’ eight episodes are half an hour each, but that’s still a lot of spins around the clock.) At a snappier length, this could have been a witty commentary on the lucrative chick-lit subgenre that it’s parodying, first and foremost Netflix’s own crash-and-burn film version of The Woman in the Window from last year. 

Bell plays Anna, a divorced woman who spends her days drinking goldfish bowl-sized glasses of red wine and staring out the window of her lux suburban house. On the other side of the street, she spies a newcomer: standard-issue sexy British man named Neil (Tom Riley) with an adorable daughter, Elizabeth (Appy Pratt), and a tragic/mysterious backstory (wife, dead, drowning). So far, so by-the-book. But surreal details accumulate, like the handyman, Buell (Cameron Britton), who has been in Anna’s driveway every day for months, fixing her mailbox. Then there’s Anna’s mania for cooking chicken casseroles — and forgetfully taking them out of the oven with her bare hands and dropping them on the kitchen floor. “How do I keep forgetting that?” she murmurs to herself, newly burnt.

Then the familiar, paperback plot kicks in: Anna thinks she sees Neil’s girlfriend being murdered. Did she? Or is she just drunk? That’s pretty much the basis for most of these novels, which also give their heroines a phobia or disability to overcome (Anna’s is a comical, paralyzing fear of rain). The problem is, the humor here is too mild and intermittent; often, TWITHATSFTGITW plays things straight long enough that the parody grows limp. Yes, there’s an enjoyably OTT battle to the death in the final episode. But if Stay Close is often ludicrous when it doesn’t intend to be, when Bell’s show aims for the idiotic, it only gets halfway there. The best joke in the series is its tagline, alluding to Anna’s drinking: “When it rains, she pours.” 

Speaking of the advantages of shows coming in at an appropriate length, the documentary The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman runs a mere three episodes, each an hour long at most. Following two timelines, set in the 1990s and the 20-teens, it’s the story of one Robert Freegard, who goes by multiple names, and has the charismatic power to convince people of very implausible things.

At a pub in 1993, British student John Atkinson meets a fellow called Rob, who confides in John that his college is secretly a hotbed for Irish Republican Army plotters. (This was at a time of political bombings in the UK.) Explaining that he’s secretly an MI5 agent, he asks if John will act as a mole at his university and help uncover the terrorist cell. John agrees – but that leads to taking a road trip with Rob, along with John’s two female housemates, Sarah and Maria. It’s a road trip that winds up lasting some 10 years spanning Europe, as Rob manipulates the students into hiding their identities and gouging their parents for financial support. The story is so crazy, at times you question the kids’ gullibility. But as one FBI agent who’s drawn into the case puts it, “Freegard’s lies are so completely off the grid that they’re almost believable.” 

Later, in 2011, teens Sophie and Jake Clinton grow increasingly concerned with the man their divorced mom has started dating. He calls himself Dave, moves into their home, hints at his personal wealth but never leaves the house or appears to have a job. He also begins to isolate their mother and pit the kids against her. Things get much worse. Puppet Master is an absorbing watch, but it leaves you hanging; Freegard and at least one victim are still out there somewhere. The collateral damage the man has caused is immense. Even when one of his victims reunites with her estranged, long-suffering family, the ache of lost years (and lots of money) remains. 

Influenced by paranoid, your-neighbors-may-be-satanists Roman Polanski thrillers like Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant and Repulsion, Archive 81 has a video preservationist named Dan (Mamoudou Athie) hired for $100,000 to digitize a bunch of old videotapes made by a young woman named Melody (Dina Shihabi). She shot them back in the 1990s, when she was trying to create a collective portrait of the residents of a creepy old apartment building, where she thinks her mother, who abandoned her as an infant, once lived. 

Partly another riff on the first-person-footage genre spawned by The Blair Witch Project, Archive 81 makes it increasingly hard to believe that Melody is shooting almost 24/7 with her bulky camera, even when when she’s running from cultists trying to usher a demonic god into our world from a parallel dimension. Yes, it’s that kind of show. It’s fun, at times, in its derivative way. But yes, at eight episodes it’s way too long. And though they’re attractive, the two leads are not much more than serviceable in the acting department. 

To enjoy Being the Ricardos, you have to get over a couple of things, all concerning Nicole Kidman’s face. No matter how convincingly red her hair is, she doesn’t really look like Lucille Ball. And whatever mix of prosthetics and, possibly, cosmetic interventions are involved, there’s a doll-like stiffness to her expressions. That may sound like a big problem, but otherwise Kidman is terrific, showing us the sexually charged (and jealous) woman who, with husband Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem, also somewhat miscast, but also really good), created a TV empire and established production techniques still used in Hollywood today.

Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, Being gives us a week in the second year of I Love Lucy, when Ball suspects Arnaz of cheating on her (he did, a lot), they have to break news of her real-life pregnancy to squeamish sponsors, and Walter Winchell airs news of Ball’s long-ago support of the Communist Party. The movie shows how Ball survives these challenges by doing what she does best: being completely serious about being funny. The strong supporting cast includes Alia Shawkat as a head writer, Nina Arianda as Vivian Vance, and the excellent J.K. Simmons as William Frawley (aka Fred Mertz), a functional alcoholic who also sees clearly.

If one of the pleasures of A Hero is not knowing where it’s headed, most people are familiar with the plot of The Tragedy of Macbeth: Scottish nobleman meets witches, who prophesy his ascension to the throne, triggering a regicidal blood lust in the man (and his scheming wife), leading to their triumph and their doom. What makes this retelling of interest is several things: Multiple Oscar winners Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand play Macbeth and his Lady, and the direction is by Joel Coen (working for the first time without brother Ethan). 

What’s most memorable, though, is the movie’s look. It’s shot in black-and-white on stylized, Brutalist sets. The chilly gray landscape blends G.W. Pabst expressionism and the surrealist vistas of the painter de Chirico. Intimate and well spoken by the cast, the new film is much better than the murky recent version with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, and it’s probably better than Roman Polanski’s 1971 film. There’s a dangerous midnight power to the play’s story and language, so much that you can understand why actors won’t speak the title aloud in theaters. But while Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s shortest, most propulsive plays, something at its core seems to refuse being captured on film. Consider this a good, striking attempt. 

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CATCHING UP: The Witcher (Netflix), The Great (Hulu), Ozark (Netflix)

Meanwhile, I’ve been digging back into returning series I never watched before . . .

Now in its second season, The Witcher (Netflix) is a lot of gory, magic-woo-woo nonsense, trying to be the next Game of Thrones, but not taking itself too seriously. Henry Cavill plays the white-maned title character, Geralt, a semi-immortal committed to cleaning his fictional land of all sorts of monsters. The first season is loads of fun; the couple of episodes of Season 2 that I’ve watched seem a little more static. 

Maybe even more fun, in a very different genre, and also admittedly fictional, The Great (Hulu) is a grand, foulmouthed, oversexed 18th century romp. It purports to tell the hitherto unknown stories about Russia’s Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning) and her adorably loathsome consort, Emperor Peter (Nicholas Holt). Holt starred in The Favourite. Given the similarities of tone between that film and the series, you won’t be surprised that the show’s creator is Tony McNamara, one of the writers of that Olivia Colman Oscar winner. 

As for one last returning series, the Georgia-shot Ozark has dropped on Netflix with the first half of its fourth and final season. The first eight episodes will be followed by six more later this year. It wraps up the tale of the morally, murderously compromised Byrde family, with Jason Bateman and Laura Linney as a seemingly wholesome couple who are closer to a 21st-century Macbeth and his Lady. 

That’s a throwback to earlier in the column. You’re welcome, and happy watching.