Homecoming: Memory Spliced, in Ten Short Parts

A powerful, unusual, vexing yet ultimately satisfying short series on Amazon Prime - ten 30-minute episodes - created and directed by Mr. Robot's Sam Esmail (with Micah Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz), starring Julia Roberts, with great supporting acting by Boardwalk Empire's Bobby Cannavale & Shea Whigham, and Stephan James, whom I've seen here for the first time.

The plot concerns a government contractor with a plan for PTSD soldiers - treat them with a drug that will make them forget the memories that are unraveling them, with the result that they will be whole and happy again.  Julia Roberts plays social worker Heidi, with a heart and a brain.  Cannavale is her boss Colin, in charge of the project.  Whigham is government investigator Thomas looking into this.  And James is Heidi's patient Walter, beginning to fall in love with her, as patients in therapy often do.

But that's the best of what's happening.  The worst, we soon discover, is that four years later, in 2022 (the present are the Spring months of 2018), Heidi has lost all of her memories of working in Homecoming, and Walter is nowhere to be found.  We're now not only in Mr. Robot territory - one of differentiating truth from lies, what's real from what's implanted - but in Chris Nolan's pathbreaking world of Memento. 

And Homeland delivers, with one of the most memorable performances ever delivered anywhere by Julia Roberts, a storyline that surprises and yet all fits into place, and even an ending that's good for your heart.  Cannavale is suitably megalomaniacal yet vulnerable,  Whigham is aptly dogged and a little clumsy, and James has a winning quality, making it not surprising that Roberts' Heidi has reciprocal feelings for him.   Hats off to all concerned, including whoever came up with the square and letterbox screens, as a way of showing limited and full memories.   I predict that by 2022,  Homeland will become as much a classic as is Memento.

 

Mr. Robot Bhack with 2.0

Mr. Robot, the cyberpunk, age-of-Snowden masterpiece that debuted last summer, was back tonight with the start of its second season.  It was altogether surreal, cinematic, and superb - even more cinematic, in fact, than the first time.

Among my favorite "sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" (William Gibson) scenes -

*Phil Collins' "Take Me Home" playing so faintly, almost indiscernibly in the background, and gradually getting louder, all as prelude, building up to the burning of a truckload of cash - 5.9 dollars to be exact - as our hackers get a moment in the sun, or at least the big flame of all that cash.  Hey, I love Phil Collins - he's second only to Paul McCartney and maybe some of Abba in soaring pop music - in fact, I'm listening to that song right now.

*The guy on the basketball park bench talking to Elliot, and saying that he (the guy) knows about as much about digital as his dog does about e. e. cummings.  Or maybe his dog was e. e. cummings compared to what he understood about computers - either way, his name is spelled with no caps, but you don't find a capital throwaway line like that on any other television show.

*Angela's in bed with the guy (different guy) who picked her up in the bar - reminding us that she belongs with Elliot - he's asleep, she's waking up, and throughout all this we see a skyscraper gleaming in the night through an open window.   It's a soft-spoken, almost poetic image of Big Brother out there in the heart of the cold, cold city.

*Elliot with the white bandage around his head for the bullet wound he didn't really have and the hoody looking like a nun or a sheik.

*Real speeches from Obama and Leon Panetta expertly cut to sound as if they're talking our fsociety hackers.  (I'd have found these clips even more eerily disconcerting, though, if Obama had said something about Trump.)

And there were lots more.  But as to the story, Elliott's bound-to-fail struggle against his father in his Fight Club head is nobly rendered, including the slight tinge at the end that maybe, just maybe, Mr. Robot isn't really dead?   No, he's dead, but  having him speak to Elliott remotely, via old-fashioned phone, instead of in-person as he usually does, is a very nice touch, because it shows that Elliott has both succeeded in getting his father out of face but never out of his life.

There's also an unexpected death - but on the slight chance that you haven't seen it, I won't tell you who.

And I''ll be back here with a review next week - though possibly not in quite so good a mood, since earlier this evening I was at the Mr. Robot season 2 launch party at Story, and the hors d'oeuvres were just scrumptious, though I wouldn't have minded a little Phil Collins music...

See also Mr. Robot: Cyberpunk Triumph

#SFWApro

a different kind of cyber-esponiage

Story board at Mr. Robot launch party

American Crime Season 2: Too Little Info

American Crime, arguably one of the best and most important series ever on any kind of television - network, cable, streaming - which I would be happy to argue on behalf, ended last night on a less than stellar note, with too many unanswered questions.

First and foremost, we still can't be sure what happened to Taylor, on the night he presumably was raped, or had unconsensual sex with Eric.  The problem is that both Eric and Taylor seem sympathetic and convincing in their contradicting assertions.  I'm not sure I see the point in casting and leaving this situation in such ambiguous terms.   And just to add more insulting ambiguity to the injured storyline, we also aren't told if Eric is getting into that car at the end - a car which represents his coming out into a very new kind of life.

I also wasn't happy with the way the show morphed into a cautionary tale about hacking, again with no resolution.  The result not only diverted from the important sexual assault, gun violence, and racism stories, but with its hackers-being-hacked message pitched us into the paranoid world already and much more effectively explored in Mr. Robot.

Don't get me wrong - I love ambiguous endings, in some cases, as I made clear in my Sopranos End and the Closure Junkies little essay about the sudden cut to black at the end of The Sopranos.  But that was very different from what we saw last night in American Crime, which was more frustrating that suddenly, bi-explicably shocking.

Nonetheless, American Crime remains in a class of its own - a very good class, as I said above - and I'm therefore very much looking to a third season, which hasn't been announced at this moment.  I hope a third season brings back the repertoire company which played so well in the first two seasons, including Benito Martinez, who put in a brief, unexpected appearance last night.

See also: American Crime 2.1-3: So Real, It Hurts ... American Crime through 2.6: Brilliant and Unflinching

And see also: American Crime, American Fine ... American Crime 1.7: The Truest Love ... American Crime 1.10: The Exquisite Hazards of Timing ...American Crime Season 1 Finale: The Banality of So-Called Justice

a different kind of crime

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My List of the Top 10 Television Series of 2015

This is the first time I've made a list, which includes television on network, cable, and streaming.   Runners-up - superb but not quite making this list - include Chicago Fire (NBC) and Vikings (History Channel). Also worthy of Honorable Mention this year are Empire (Fox) and American Crime (ABC). But here's my Top 10 for 2015:

10. Deutschland 83 (Sundance): An unwilling East German spy undercover as a West German soldier at the height of the Cold War, i.e., 1983, and much easier to buy than The Americans. Outstanding.

9. Humans (AMC): The best android story ever on television, and likely in the movies.  Isaac Asimov would've loved this.

8. Rectify (Sundance): He has the heart of a poet and the native literacy of a Dylan.  Is there any chance he's guilty of the murder for which he's been released from death row on a technicality?

7. Mr. Robot (USA Network): A hacker show in a class by itself, that'll keep you on the edge of your seat in extreme suspense when you're not chuckling at the dark humor.

6. House of Cards (Netflix):  Not its best season, but still a masterpiece of political intrigue including murder.

5. Nashville (ABC): What can I say?  I just love the music.

4. The Good Wife (CBS): Easily the best show on network television, mixing up-to-date 2016 Presidential politics, NSA, courtroom drama, and romance, with its best season so far (sorry Will).

3. Fargo (FX):  Very loosely derived from the movie, but staking out a wacked-out intensely compelling territory all of its own.   This past season, for example, which had little in common with the first, had Ronald Reagan and a UFO as crucial parts of the story (well, the UFO anyway).

2. The Affair (Showtime):  The writerly life as realistically as it's ever been portrayed on television - plus a top-notch whodunnit, and then there's that hot affair.

1. The Man in the High Castle (Amazon):  Philip K. Dick's masterful alternate history of the Nazis and Japan winning World War II brought to the screen so effectively that, when you look away, you can almost believe that the reality we're now living in is the dream.

Mr. Robot: Cyberpunk Triumph

Well, my number-one television guilty pleasure this summer was "Mr. Robot" on the USA Network - though it was so good, easily the best new show on TV this summer, indeed of the year, maybe even the past year or two, that there's nothing whatsoever to feel guilty about watching it.  It was just a pleasure, rare, keenly intelligent, and provocative.  I saw most of it in the past few weeks, and the finale tonight.

Hackers have appeared in all kinds of TV series, most of them obvious, a few like CBS's CSI-Cyber not half-bad, but Mr. Robot is something else, in a class all its own.  Impossibly suave and gritty at the same time, as lyrical as Rectify - the other out-of-left-field masterpiece to come along in the past few years - but hipper, with words like louche in  it, and with a heart and soul and slap-in-your face realism and cynicism that's not to be believed, but is plausible all the same, you disbelieve Mr. Robot at your peril.

Cyberpunk has attained impressive heights in writing - Sterling, Gibson, Varley - but not so much on the screen.   Mr. Robot takes its place right up there with its story - its only competition screenwise being Bladerunner, an utterly different kind of tale.

There are elements not only of Occupy Wall Street and V for Vendetta but Fight Club in Mr. Robot, but I won't say which ones or what, because I don't want to spoil your surprise and fun if you haven't yet seen it.  But unlike Fight Club and its progeny, in which the narrative is completely situated in the minds of the characters, in Mr. Robot we have a ratification or support of this in the very digital age we in fact inhabit, in which the difference between the fantasies on screens and realities in first-hand tangible experiences in hand have never been less.

Like many series, the next-to-last episode, and the one before that, packed more of a punch than the finale.  But that doesn't matter, because the story is continuing, the series will be back next year, which makes tonight's finale not a finale at all, but a bridge, and a short one at that.

I'll be here next year with more.

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