DISNEY+: Renegade Nell
When a scrappy 18th-century heroine is held up by highwaymen in the opening minutes of Renegade Nell, a mystic light flies into her mouth . . . and she suddenly has the strength to slap away bullets with her bare hands and hurl men through the tree canopy. I almost turned the show off, thinking, “Just what we need — another superhero saga from Disney+.” But a couple of things kept me watching. First, Nell is played by Louisa Harland, whose performance as the ethereal Orla on Derry Girls always gave that show (which is on Netflix) an oddball center, even when the jokes weren’t landing.
More importantly, the eight-episode show is created by Sally Wainwright, the mind behind Britain’s Happy Valley and the rollicking, sadly canceled Gentleman Jack. Her stuff is always pretty great. That’s true for Renegade, which plays like a savory mashup of Tom Jones (the 1963 Oscar winner starring Albert Finney), The Favourite and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.
In the year 17-something, the recently widowed, tomboyish Nell is returning to her hometown when she’s beset by, then bests, said highway robbers. The source of her strength? A winged pixie called Billy Blind (Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed), who can’t explain either to himself or to Nell why he’s been assigned to be her protector. (It’s like a fairy tale leavened with existential questioning.)
When the local rich lout Thomas (Jake Dunn) kills Nell’s publican father, then frames her for the murder of his own father, Nell is forced to go on the lam with her two younger sisters, while the press turns her into a “most wanted” legend. The lively yellow journalism of the day is embodied by wealthy news magnate Eularia (Joely Richardson), who’s engaged to a fellow toff named Devereux (Frank Dillane), who has a sideline as a highwayman himself. It’s all comically complicated.
A corrective to the testosterone-driven picaresques it pays homage to, Renegade is very female-forward. While the spoiled Thomas is positioned to be Nell’s chief target for revenge, a wilier nemesis emerges in his sister Sofia (Alice Kremelberg). A widow like Nell, she knows that if her brother’s reputation is ruined, as a woman, she will not inherit the estate but be at the mercy of distant kinsmen. Trying to destroy Nell, Sofia colludes with a fellow noble with a skill in the dark arts, Lord Poynton, played by esteemed Black stage actor Adrian Lester. (Renegade unfolds in a post-Bridgerton landscape that doesn’t really reflect historic England of the 1700s.)
With so many elements and tones — comical, magic, political — thrown together, Renegade Nell doesn’t always work, and the episodes not written by Wainwright herself sag a little. But even when the disparate elements don’t quite blend, the show is still an interesting stew.
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NETFLIX: Damsel and 3 Body Problem
Another revisionist take on a familiar tale, Damsel would seem like a surefire winner… emphasis on fire. Alas, it’s a squib. Stranger Things darling Millie Bobby Brown plays the headstrong elder daughter of Lord Bayford and his second wife (Ray Winstone and the ageless Angela Bassett), who reign over a land where crops are failing and people are starving. So Daddy B accepts the offer to marry off Elodie to the son of a wealthy king and queen (with a vamping Robin Wright showing us what might have happened to Buttercup if she’d wed evil Prince Humperdinck in The Princess Bride).
Against her instincts, Elodie finds herself liking her bland betrothed (blandly played by Nick Robinson). But there’s a big catch: She’s unknowingly to be tossed into a cave as meal for a fierce dragon (voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo) in a centuries-old deal that keeps the monster from burning down the kingdom.
Sounds fun, right? But as Elodie battles her way through various underground CG landscapes, evading CG fire blasts from the CG dragon, the short movie seems to last forever. Attributed to screenwriter Dan Mazeau, it rather feels like something generated by lazy AI.
Much cleverer forms of AI play a role in 3 Body Problem. The return to epic longform for Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the eight-episode series is based on novelist Liu Cixin’s trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past. I haven’t read any of the books. My impulse is that you might get the most pleasure from the show’s many surprises if you go in cold.
The sci-fi tale centers on five “pet geniuses,” former students of a brilliant physicist who, in the opening minutes, kills herself at the particle accelerator where she works. That may be because her facility has started generating nonsense results, just like other accelerators around the globe. Meanwhile, other famed scientists are offing themselves, complaining of an eerie countdown.
While the five friends, whose nominal leader is the brilliant Jin (Jess Hong), try to figure out what’s happening, their moves are monitored by British intelligence expert Clarence (Benedict Wong) and his boss Wade (Thrones alum Liam Cunningham). Of particular interest are sleek golden helmets that Jin and her old entrepreneur pal Jack (John Bradley, another Thrones vet) discover, letting them play hyper-realistic virtual reality games featuring alien landscapes and peculiar planetary challenges.
So what does all of this have to do with the Ye Wenjie (played in younger and older iterations by Zine Tseng and Rosalind Chao), mother of the scientist who leaped to her death in episode one?
In their co-written scripts, Benioff and Weiss bring clarity to abstract scientific concepts in the same way they helped us untangle the bloodlines of the families vying for that spiky metal chair in Westeros. The cast is generally good, including Jovan Adepo as one of the five core friends distracted from his life’s purpose by women and weed. But two of the five friends can wear out their welcome: Alex Sharp, as a saintly fellow pining silently for Jin , and model-gorgeous Eliza González, whose acting is limited to variations on anger or anxiety.
Even so, 3 Body Problem asks high-minded questions about the very nature of consciousness and civilization that keep you constantly engaged, and it’s often a visual marvel that shows off its budget. It’s smart, spooky and one of the better original dramas from Netflix in a while.
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APPLE TV+: Manhunt
Based — a little loosely, I understand — on James L. Swanson’s 2007 nonfiction book, Manhunt focuses on the 12-day search for John Wilkes Booth after his murder of Abraham Lincoln in April of 1865. The seven-episode show, continuing weekly through April 19, clearly wants to be a work reflecting the political volatility of April 2024.
“We replace our presidents with elections, not with coups,” is one line of dialogue that grabs attention. So does this from one of the conspiracists involved with the assassination: “I could fire this [gun] on Wall Street in broad daylight, and nothing would happen to me.”
These stabs at contemporary relevance come at the expense of dramatic clarity. While the title Manhunt conveys a sense of propulsive forward motion, the show gets slowed by digressions, flashbacks and some invented padding — like the subplot given to Mary Simms, the recently freed house servant of Dr. Mudd (played winningly if a bit wishfully by Lovie Simone).
But I’m losing the central focus, something the show also does. Stalwart British actor Tobias Menzies plays Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, whose service to Lincoln (Hamish Linklater of Midnight Mass) during the war continues after the president’s death. Even as he fights the asthma that will kill him, Stanton rallies the remains of Lincoln’s cabinet to track on-the-lam Booth (Anthony Boyle) as the actor struggles to find his way to Richmond and delusional dreams of Confederate heroism. Stanton’s investigation leads him to suspect Jefferson Davis, aided by Lincoln’s successor, Southern sympathizer Andrew Johnson (Glenn Morshower), may have had a hand in the assassination. These speculations too often get sidetracked by fictional interludes with Booth and his pal David Herold, having adventures nobody should care about as they elude the law.
Some of Manhunt’s casting fractures the show’s intended mood of deep seriousness. As a detective tracking Booth, comedian Patton Oswalt sticks out oddly. So does Matt Walsh, familiar from his comic work on Veep, here playing the vile racist Dr. Mudd. Likewise, Will Harrison as Herold is as fresh-faced and appealing as he was in Daisy Jones & the Six. As he travels with the self-aggrandizing Booth, you find yourself wishing he’ll be given a lenient sentence — even though he’s abetting an assassin whose action resulted in the Reconstruction-wrecking aftermath that plagues our nation to this day.
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PRIME VIDEO: Road House
Nobody really needed Patrick Swayze’s janky, original 1989 Road House, though it has its very-1980s charms. So why remake it? Director Doug Liman and star Jake Gyllenhaal go pretty far in making their case with this deliriously violent and stupid movie. Only the bare bones of the original story remain, and that’s OK. A distractingly ripped Gyllenhaal plays Dalton, an ex-UFC fighter with a dark secret in his past who accepts a month’s gig as a bouncer for a seaside bar owned by Frankie (the engaging Jessica Williams). Her Road House (that’s its name) has a sign boasting “American owned and operated,” even if the movie was shot in the Dominican Republic.
Dalton finds himself fending off a biker mob mobilized by local rich boy Brandt (Billy Magnussen, resurrecting the comic, spoiled-stud persona he perfected in Made for Love). Brandt wants the land the bar is built on so he can erect a McMansion of a resort on it, and his jailed dad enlists a psycho named Knox (actual mixed martial fighter Conor McGregor). McGregor looks great naked (it’s how he’s introduced in the movie), but his lousy acting nearly sinks every scene he’s in. Still, the insane final 20 minutes and Gyllenhaal’s off-kilter, quietly ironic performance make the movie a guilty-watch good time.
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MAX: The Regime
The Regime on Max still has me wondering what happened. On paper, it looks fantastic. Kate Winslet stars as a deranged chancellor of a fictional European nation who cuts ties with America while encouraging her staff to nurture her paranoid fantasies and whims. Creator Will Tracy wrote the haute-restaurant satire The Menu and was on the writing team of Succession. The strong cast includes Matthias Schoenaerts, Martha Plimpton, Hugh Grant and especially, as Winslet’s harried factotum, chameleon actor Andrea Riseborough. (No matter how out-of-nowhere the Oscar nomination seemed, her stunning performance as a recovering drunk in To Leslie deserved the recognition.)
But despite its credentials, Regime thuds on the screen like a muddy medicine ball, the comedy and politics delivered with clumsy obviousness. Maybe it’s just because the real political scene, here and abroad, is so toxic, but Regime doesn’t seem to be offering anything either amusing or insightful. The six-episode show continues weekly through April 7, though I bailed after the second try.
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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.