NETFLIX: One Day
I admired Hulu’s Normal People so much, I was hoping Netflix’s One Day would kindle the same kind of magic. No cigar, but the good news is that the recently released show sometimes comes close to Hulu’s dreamy and wise 2020 series.
Here again, in One Day, we meet an attractive, young couple from different backgrounds engaged in a protracted will-they-won’t-they attraction, followed by a can-they-make-it-last relationship. Though they’ve seen each other around campus, monied dreamboat Dexter (Leo Woodall) and scruffier idealist Emma (Ambika Mod) only meet at a dance following their graduation at The University of Edinburgh.
It’s after midnight, 1988 on July 15 — St. Swithin’s Day for lovers of arcana. Though Em and Dex stumble tipsily back to her apartment, they don’t do the deed; they talk instead through the night and into the day. The series’ 14 pleasantly brief episodes catch up with the duo through highs and lows every year on July 15 for two decades. Wanting to change the world, Emma instead finds herself slaving away at a chain Mexican joint in London, singing “La Cucaracha” to customers who enjoy it no more than she does. Vowing to get rich and famous, Dex achieves both, sort of, becoming a deeply obnoxious veejay and TV host.
Their fortunes change, and so do their romantic partners — people that we know are really only placeholders until Dex and Em burn through their we’re-just-buddies delusion and realize their jagged edges fit together perfectly. For Emma, it’s funny-annoying wannabe comedian Ian (Jonny Weldon). Meanwhile, Dex goes through a series of arm-candy models before settling for beautiful Sylvie (Eleanor Tomlinson). Her parents (played by grown nepo babies Toby Stephens and Joely Richardson) are a ghastly posh pair who could be besties with the Saltburn clan. (Dex’s own, well-off but sympathetic parents are played by Essie Davis and Tim McInnerny, while Emma’s South Asian kinfolk are relegated to unseen voices on the phone.)
David Nicholls’ source novel came out in 2009 and was made into a stand-alone film starring Anne Hathaway two years later — right before the emergence of streaming and limited series as the perfect format for this sort of time-spanning story. The length and pacing of the new version feel just right, sneaking up on us piecemeal over multiple days of viewing or packing a wallop in a binge watch.
Woodall has the overripe, pretty-boy look of Michael Pitt in his youth (circa The Dreamers) but greater talent. His Dex has more challenging emotional scenes than Mod, who’s strong in her own right but stymied by being the story’s personification of decency and good common sense. Niceness can be a drag. We know, because the structure tells us, that Emma and Dexter are destined to be together. It’s just a shame that Woodall and Mod’s on-screen chemistry doesn’t convince us of that inevitability quite as much as the spark between Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones did in Normal People.
In its last chapters, One Day throws in an emotional monkey wrench that seems cruel and arbitrary (on the page and onscreen) until you realize this is the very crux of the story it’s trying to tell. Life and love are great, folks, but they’re not forever. There’s an astute moment near the end when Emma observes that, though they met as adults, she and Dex grew up together. One Day celebrates being young enough to make mistakes, fall in love with the wrong people, find the right one if you’re very, very lucky and grow up long enough to enjoy life before it’s over.
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NETFLIX: Griselda
Also on Netflix, Griselda is the sort of guilty-pleasure watch that is the equivalent of eating an entire pizza then wondering why you feel sorta awful. Late of Modern Family, Sofīa Vergara stars as cocaine “godmother” Griselda Blanco. After killing her abusive husband in Colombia, the real-life Griselda brought her sons and a kilo of coke with her to Miami. There, she set up a 1970s empire of drug traffic as lucrative as it was murderous.
One of its executive producers, Vergara does a decent, surface-level job in the role. But she’s not nearly as impressive as the makeup and prosthetics that thicken and smear her normally stunning features while never making her look like the real, fat, plain Blanco.
Possibly like the mob boss herself, Griselda wants to have it every way it can. On the one hand, we’re encouraged to side with her rise in illegal business as a sort of you-go-girl, chica-makes-it-rich narrative. But when one of her mob hits takes out a kid as collateral damage, the series begins a tsk-tsk trajectory, aiming toward Blanco’s legal capture and moral comeuppance. Like the drug at its center, it wants to give us a rush then make us feel like crap for having a good time. Mission accomplished . . . um, thanks?
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HULU: FEUD: Capote vs. The Swans
In the familiar rise-and-fall of so many true-life stories, the rise is always the most interesting part. The downfall not so much. That means the last episodes of Griselda aren’t fun. One of the problems of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans is that the entire, painfully protracted eight episodes (weekly through March 13) are all about the decline of its talented tiny terror.
Playing Truman Capote in the wake of Philip Seymour Hoffman (who won the Oscar) and Toby Jones, British actor Tom Hollander has the stature and annoying, chuckling lisp down pat. A straight actor, Hollander has cultivated a sideline playing toxic queens (The Night Manager and White Lotus). Ryan Murphy’s show surrounds him with a talented cast — Diane Lane, Naomi Watts and Calista Flockhart chief among them — as the New York socialites who saw Tru as their bestest gay pal ever . . . until he put their secrets in print in one of his tawdriest bits of writing, “La Cote Basque,” published by Esquire in 1975.
How Capote would have envied fellow novelist Tom Wolfe’s name for this ilk of fashionable, anorexic women: not swans, but “social X-rays.” But by the time The Bonfire of the Vanities coined the phrase in 1987, Capote was three years dead. In the last decade of his life, the Southern-born bard was known less for creating Holly Golightly or forging the novelistic true-crime saga In Cold Blood than for turning up drunk on talk shows, unable to recover from his former friends’ ghosting.
“Everything the swans do is skin-deep,” Capote complains in a visit with James Baldwin (Chris Chalk, strikingly good and gone too soon). “That’s why they’re not truly interesting people.” Neither was Capote at this stage of his life. Feud doesn’t bother to make us care about the long-ago talent being squandered by his indulgence in booze, drugs, rough trade with a married man (Russell Tovey) and, especially, his melodramatic self-pity.
The title for his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, was meant to be a warning against getting what you wish for. That could apply to mega producer Ryan Murphy. The guy can make anything he wants, but his prolific output (all those American Horror Story iterations, plus that awful Dahmer series and Hollywood and Ratched on Netflix) is a parade of diminishing returns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YabKNs66eeg
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APPLE TV+ Masters of the Air and Constellation
Taking over from HBO, which mined this particular seam of nostalgia in executive producer Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers and The Pacific, Masters of the Air goes back to World War II for more Greatest Generation fetishism. Spielberg is involved with the new series, too, and it shows in the expense and care that’s been lavished on it. Its skillful directors include Cary Joji Fukunaga, who directed every episode of 2014’s True Detective.
Austin Butler and Callum Turner play Buck and Bucky, two flyboys in the 100th Bomb Group — U.S. Air Force pilots stationed in the United Kingdom during the war. Their fact-based exploits are dramatized with a surrounding cast of talented British actors playing Americans, in the tradition of Band of Brothers. (Saltburn’s Barry Keoghan has a particularly rusty hinge of an American accent.)
I’ve only watched the first couple of installments of the show, which concludes its nine episodes on March 15. Strangely enough, the older I get, the less interested I am in productions like this that are aimed for older people like me. Go figure. Others are likely to fall for its old-fashioned and beautifully crafted charms.
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A more typical AppleTV+ genre — the ambitious but uneven sci-fi series — is represented by Constellation (eight episodes, continuing weekly through March 25). The original Lisbeth Salander, Noomi Rapace plays astronaut Jo Ericsson, part of the team aboard the International Space Station. After a mysterious object strikes and damages the ISS and the others evacuate, she stays behind to fix things. (Yes, the first two episodes will remind you very much of Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, with Rapace in the Sandy Bullock role.)
When she returns to Earth after exposure to a MacGuffin of a mechanism sent up by mad scientist Henry Caldera (Jonathan Banks), Jo discovers that life back home is . . . off. Constellation is laced with quantum physics and allusions to Schrodinger’s cat, as Jo’s reality on Earth seems to keep splitting off into alternate scenarios. Doubles and Alice in Wonderland are recurrent motifs. For instance, we see Banks glaring repeatedly into mirrors. The doubling effect is made literal by having Banks also play a twin brother, a former astronaut. In either role, the actor is a distracting, snarling, unpleasant presence. Veteran German actor Barbara Sukowa, as a Russian former cosmonaut, brings some balance to their scenes together.
Three episodes in, Constellation tells its story with a fractured chronology that seems intentionally confusing. My gut tells me it’s one of those tricky but exhausting puzzle boxes, like Netflix’s Dark and 1899 and Apple TV+’s own Shining Girls. With all this cleverness at play, I’m worried its solution might turn the whole show into a version of that snow globe the autistic kid is playing with at the conclusion of St. Elsewhere.
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SHOWTIME/PARAMOUNT: The Woman in the Wall
Actor turned writer-director Peter Mullan’s 2002 drama The Magdalene Sisters was my first exposure to the dark legacy of involuntary servitude of “fallen” young women in a workhouse run by the Irish Catholic church. A new film on the subject starring Cillian Murphy, Small Things Like These, just screened at the Berlin Festival. Meanwhile, The Woman in the Wall tells the same story in six episodes, based on discoveries made around 10 years ago regarding so-called Magdalene Laundries and its racket of putting up “unwanted” babies for adoption.
Luther’s Ruth Wilson stars as Lorna, an Irish woman known for causing havoc around her small town during bouts of violent sleepwalking. She’s a blunt, husky-voiced outcast, obsessed with her days as an unwed teen in one of the laundries, trying to discover the fate of her baby and becoming embroiled in the murder investigation of a Catholic priest in Dublin. Lorna joins forces with the young detective, Colman (Daryl McCormack of Bad Sisters), assigned to the case and himself a onetime Magdalene orphan. Their scenes together click, but for too much of the series’ first half, we’re stuck with Lorna. She’s alternately depicted as insane or shrewd, depending on the needs of any given scene. A little grim and slow, but worth watching for some of the other actors, including a riveting Hilda Fay as a tough hotel owner.
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NETFLIX: Mea Culpa
Shot partly in Atlanta but set in Chicago, writer-director Tyler Perry’s latest drama is a pleasurably stupid watch. Mea Culpa stars Kelly Rowland as, yes, Mea, a power-suit-wearing Chi-town attorney with a mama’s-boy husband (Sean Sagar) and a sneering mother-in-law (Kerry O’Malley).
Against popular opinion, she takes on the case of Zyair (Trevante Rhodes), a fabulously successful painter accused of murdering his missing last girlfriend. Based on the evidence on the walls of his loft, his bigger crime is painting amateurish, lush-lipped portraits of past conquests, work that deserves to be rendered on black velvet and sold in parking lots. Perry wants to revive that weird, “erotic thriller” era of the ’80s and ’90s when we fell for stuff like Fatal Attraction, Body of Evidence, Jade and Jagged Edge. But nope — those days are dead. “Everything in your body says you’re attracted to me but won’t admit it to yourself,” Zyair growls to the uptight Mea. Soon, in a startling exercise of client-attorney privilege, they’re making a naked, body-paint masterpiece on a canvas splayed on the floor.
This whole column could’ve been devoted to every wrong step Mea Culpa makes. But I’ll give it this much: From the ludicrous plot revelations to the terrible acting (O’Malley, so good as a doomed secretary in The Killer, takes home the Golden Worst in a competitive field), this really is one of those so-so-bad-it’s-good disasters.
Thank you, Mr. Perry, for your service.
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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 Streaming columns here.
