Streaming in March: “Somebody Somewhere,” “KIMI,” “I Want You Back,” more

As we struggle through the final mucky days of February, there are plenty of almost-there and downright awful shows on streaming, and only the occasional must-see. (Yes, I hear Hulu’s Pam & Tommy is a fun watch, but sex-tape hijinks and bleak wintertime is a combo I couldn’t manage right now …)

I’ll start with some good news. HBO Max’s Somebody Somewhere centers on Sam (Bridget Everett), a middle-aged, never-accomplished-much woman who returns to her windswept Kansas hometown to care for her ailing sister. Once sis dies, Sam remains there, adrift, working at a soulless job grading students’ exams, squabbling with her living sister Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison) and worrying about their mom secretly boozing her way through the days. Despite how that sounds, it’s a comedy. Well, when it isn’t being heartbreaking, anyway, accumulating lived-in, Midwestern details that ring true, sad, sometimes hilarious. 

Known mainly as a comic and singer, Everett gives the show a surprisingly deep, soulful core. Her Sam knows she’s stuck, but doesn’t quite know how to get unstuck. She’d be much less successful without great support from Mike Hagerty as Sam’s sweet, bleary bear of a farmer dad, and especially Jeff Hiller as gawky, gay Joel. He worshipped Sam when they were in high school choir together (she doesn’t remember him) and now provides community and an emotional lifeline, hosting a late-night “church-adjacent” choir practice (really a refuge for the LGBTQ members and general oddballs of the small town). 

https://youtu.be/K3sqnljyJy0

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HBO MAX | KIMI

Something else worth watching on HBO Max, the stand-alone thriller KIMI from director-editor Steven Soderbergh is derivative in a lot of ways. It pulls on plot details from paranoia classics Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and Brian De Palma’s Blow Out. And its agoraphobic protagonist spends hours staring out at other people’s apartments, a la Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. (Cliff Martinez provides a score recalling of some whispery, moody passages from Hitchcock’s longtime composer Bernard Herrmann.)

New Catwoman Zoë Kravitz, with neon-blue hair that deserves second billing, plays Angela, suffering post-pandemic PTSD, and working from home in her lux Seattle loft. Her job is to be a human liaison with the algorithms that drive a Siri/Alexa-like home operating system called KIMI. (Soderbergh’s ex-wife Betsy Brantley provides the device’s voice.) Basically, Angela logs into her home computer to answer and fix users’ problems about the service. On one incoming message she hears what she thinks is a woman being tortured and killed. So she does the one thing that’s stupid to do in a movie like this: She overcomes her fear of the world outside to report her discovery to corporate headquarters downtown. 

There she meets Rita Wilson (very good) as an executive, the smooth, manicured corner-office type who says she needs to nip out of her office to speak with HR, when she’s secretly going to the basement to phone a cartel to plot your murder. Sure enough, Angela is soon running from a couple of lethal goons. If we’ve seen this story a million times before, Soderbergh’s low-budget, no-fat filmmaking makes for an enjoyable (and brief, 89-minute) ride. 

Sure, there’s a wish-fulfillment ending that turns Angela into a ninja wielding power tools. But the vengeance-is-hers finale satisfies. All in all, KIMI may not be that distinguishable from the women-in-the-window subgenre (parodied ineptly in a recent Netflix limited series starring Kristen Bell), but it’s a superior version of them as compared to The Girl Before  (below) . . .

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HBO MAX | The Girl Before

The Girl Before is an example of TV show runners’ wrongheaded belief that, if they can spread 90 minutes worth of plot into a four-hour view-a-thon, they should. 

In London, Jane (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) takes a too-good-to-be-true lease on a sleek, automated condo programmed by its architect Edward (David Oyelowo) to anticipate a tenant’s every need, from mood-appropriate playlist to proper shower temperature. The tradeoff? Jane has to frequently answer personal and philosophical questions that factor into some sort of experiment Edward is conducting with his dream house. Also, the house comes with 200-plus finicky rules (no clutter, no books, no clothes on the floor). 

Jane’s present-day storyline is shadowed by the three-years-earlier tale of Emma (Jessica Plummer), who rents Edward’s home with boyfriend Simon (Ben Hardy). If the toggling timelines are confusing at first, that’s because Jane and Emma (and Mbatha-Raw and Plummer) are styled to look nearly identical to each other. Plot point! Menacing things occur. An “accidental” death is deemed suspicious. And both Jane and Emma are saddled with Painful Incidents in Their Past (a rape, a miscarriage) that are de rigueur in these gyne-traumatic entertainments. Meanwhile (and this all takes a very, very long time, padded with ominous, silent tracking shots of the smart house), both women become romantically entangled with the physically jacked-up but creepy Edward. (The often-shirtless Oyelowo is way buffer than he was when playing MLK in Selma.) 

If you’ve watched any sort of thriller like this, it’s a snap to guess where it’s going, which makes the series’ attenuated length even harder to justify. Among the underpopulated cast of characters, you know that if someone is transparently a damaged obsessive, he’s innocent, and if someone is sweet and helpful, better watch out . . . 

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HBO MAX | The Gilded Age

Since Downton Abbey is still plugging along (a movie sequel is due later this year), you should know that I loved the first season and parts of the second. Then I bailed, tired of creator Julian Fellowes’ arbitrary, melodramatic plotlines. He didn’t even seem to be writing the script in his sleep, merely scribbling on Post-It notes and handing them to the cast. Still, given that Abbey started strong, I had hopes for the long-aborning The Gilded Age, his drama about old moneyed and arrivistes mingling (or not) in 1980s New York. 

Reader, my hopes were betrayed. The Gilded Age isn’t even fun as a hate watch. The characters swan around chattering either about money or of famous figures, names clumsily plopped into the dialogue like a Wikipedia cut-and-paste. (“JP Morgan, of course, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts — every opportunist in New York,” says one character, shuddering at the thought of these wealthy, rich newcomers.) 

It’s a trial for viewers, but probably worse for a talented cast. A Stradivarius of dramatic hauteur, Christine Baranski stars as an old-family snob but has only one sour note to play. Same for Cynthia Nixon’s Ada, delivering a nonstop simper as her spinster sister. In a role based on Alva Vanderbilt, Carrie Coon plows ahead strongly as Bertha Russell, a tough-minded New York newcomer determined to make the local aristocracy accept her. But she’s also defeated by the tissue-thin writing. As her railroad magnate husband, Morgan Spector, strong as the father in HBO’s The Plot Against America, is here little more than a smirk in a beard. One admirable touch in the show is the inclusion of Denée Benton (of Broadway’s Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 ) as a young middle-class Black woman, hoping to launch a journalism career. Her mother is played by fellow Broadway alum, the estimable, record-breaking Tony winner Audra McDonald. Neither actor has enough to do. 

Given the widespread wealth of talent, the show’s strangest choice is the casting of the young heroine Marian, who comes to live with her wealthy aunts (Baranski and Nixon). Louisa Jacobson plays the role with a pinched voice and a stiffness that’s startling when you learn she’s Meryl Streep’s daughter. One might suspect that, with this casting choice, Fellowes’ obsession for hobnobbing with the elite isn’t entirely confined to his scripts.  

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NETFLIX | Inventing Anna

In 2019, BBC Radio Four dropped the podcast Fake Heiress, the tale of Russian-born Anna Sorokin and her spectacular burn through New York’s hungry, old- and new-money society. Under the new name Anna Delvey and a fake identity as a German trust-fund kid, she busily tried to found an artistic society … with other people’s money. The podcast covered the story thoroughly in six half-hour episodes. TV doyenne Shonda Rhimes optioned Sorokin/Delvey’s story (through a New York magazine article by Jessica Pressler). And she Shonda-fies it into a 10-hour-plus yawn, Inventing Anna.

Rather than focus only on Anna’s (the always welcome Julia Garner, of Ozark) exploits, the limited series gives equal focus to Vivian, a stand-in for Pressler. Played by an overacting Anna Chlumsky (Veep), Vivian defies basic journalistic ethics, inserting herself into Anna’s defense attorney’s business, and even persuading the Russian, in prison awaiting trial, to reject a lenient plea deal. 

Rhimes’ version of the fake-heiress story is padded with unnecessary detail about people about whom we don’t care. All this extra stuff seems designed to distract you from the central, fascinating truth about the fraudster at its center: The more you try to figure her out, the more it becomes clear that there’s no there there. The same goes for Inventing Anna. The show has drawn criticism from some for glamorizing a crook like Sorokin/Delvey, but its biggest crime is being boring. 

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NETFLIX| The Tinder Swindler

As a palate cleanser — and example of how to finesse a story like this the right way — consider Felicity Morris’ documentary The Tinder Swindler, which presents a con artist as outrageous as Sorokin/Delvey, but with an extra dose of emotional sadism on top of economic fraud. And it tells his story in under two hours. 

The scammer is an Israeli man, Simon Leviev, but the film’s main drivers are two of his victims. Norwegian woman Cecilie Fjellhøy swipes right on the titular dating app and finds herself on whirlwind trips with apparently rich playboy Leviev, while Swedish Pernilla Sjöholm also meets Leviev on Tinder and becomes a platonic friend. Both are soon fielding requests from the man who, despite his self-proclaimed wealth (he’s from a rich diamond dynasty, or wait, did he say he’s an arms dealer?), says he needs them to cover his expenses — just temporarily, of course. Hundreds of thousands of dollars later, it becomes clear he’s working an international, self-funding Ponzi scheme with so many moving parts and gullible women, he’d almost be impressive if he weren’t a loathsome predator. Swindler shows how Cecilie and Pernilla learn the truth about Leviev and decide to stop him. Of course, when they expose this dangerous crook, they’re slut-shamed in the press and reader/viewer comments. (Yay, humans!) But in the long term, the women’s victory is sweet.

https://youtu.be/_R3LWM_Vt70

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As an old-fashioned romantic comedy with some wry updates, I Want You Back isn’t half bad. Its real selling point is the selling of Atlanta. Our city has been host for many years to films that repurposed our urban vistas into someplace else. Here, Atlanta plays itself, and the film features shots of the Plaza Theatre, restaurants on Crescent Avenue, Peachtree Center, the Silver Skillet on 14th Street, a whole lot of Piedmont Park, plus places I’m not hip enough to recognize, all of it capped with a finale in Savannah. 

Emma (Jenny Slate) and Peter (Charlie Day) encounter each other in the stairway of their office tower, crying after being respectively dumped by boyfriend Noah (Scott Eastwood) and girlfriend Anne (Gina Rodriguez). Each of their exes has already hooked up with new partners (Clark Backo as a baker, Manny Jacinto as a high school theater teacher). So Emma and Peter, finding themselves in an OG romance that requires action, make a pact to infiltrate each other’s exes’ lives and break up the new relationships. Complications ensue, including the inevitable we-were-meant-for-each-other revelation for Emma and Peter. Not a classic flick, but you’ve wasted two hours in worse ways …

(Read ArtsATL’s interview with I Want You Back director Jason Orley here.)

In the eight-episode show, based on the series debut novel Killing Floor, Ritchson plays Jack Reacher, a former military major who’s detained in Margrave, Georgia, and finds himself embroiled first in a murder, then in the far-reaching shenanigans of the small town. 

There’s a glimmer of self-awareness in Ritchson’s eyes, a “Gosh, I’m acting” vibe that’s distracting. But he fits the bill in brawn and in the dated, paperback details. (Of course he’s a White guy who loves the blues, and of course when he temporarily lands in jail, he has to beat up a stereotypical, thuggish Black inmate who wants to rape him.) It’s pulp, but people like this sort of thing. The makers of Reacher seem to understand their assignment, good news to fans of the series. For me, after the first episode I was one-and-done. 

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Also on Prime, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is back. In 2019, Season 3 broadened standup comic Midge’s (Rachel Brosnahan) horizons, gave her too much fame, and thus had to punish her with a slightly homophobic storyline that sent her back, for the new season, to the old grind and hustle. It’s on my watch list, but I plan to proceed with both optimism and caution.