Television

I was well into my thirties when my parents acquired a television set, for no good reason that I could discern after they’d gone so many years without one without obvious damage to their health or intellects. Growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, my sister and I were permitted to watch two television shows while visiting with relatives. One was Topper. The other was Perry Mason, which they occasionally joined us for: a small family grouping that was the closest thing the Williamsons ever came to resembling a painting by Norman Rockwell. Over the past year and a half, I have been re-watching episodes of the original show starring Raymond Burr as Mason, Barbara Hale as Della Street, William Hopper as Paul Drake, Ray Collins as Lieutenant Tragg and William Talman as Hamilton Burger.

If you’ve been involved in the production of a film, you know how intoxicating it can be. The prospect of seeing your work projected in a theater is reason enough to put up with a nightmare of unrelenting stress — for some people, anyway. Others might struggle to understand how an entire town (Narrowsburg, an admittedly very small town in Upstate New York) could be so easily swindled by a cartoon mobster and a mysterious woman with a French accent who tells people she’s from South Africa or Normandy, or descended from French royalty. Then again, Richard Castellano did appear with Billy Crystal and Robert De Niro in Analyze This, and Jocelyne Castaldo, well, who in America wouldn’t be charmed by such an accent?

Would you sign up for a screening streaming service that only had a dozen movies? A handful of series, and no classics? You might pause and ask if it’s worth it, compared to the range of options on other streaming providers. But if you’re like many of us, you might decide to pony up — after all, it’s only $5. Of course, I’m describing Apple TV+. It’s cheaper than Netflix or Hulu. But what you get, at least for now, is pretty limited. That’s not to say what they have isn’t good: they’ve pumped in a massive budget to lure creators like Oprah and Werner Herzog to this enterprise. Their movies have major stars. There just aren’t many of them. But they could have gone the other way.

An epic new sci-fi series executive-produced by the director of Blade Runner and Alien: who wouldn’t want to watch Ridley Scott’s Raised by Wolves? Myself for one. When I heard the name, I assumed Raised by Wolves was an update of the forgettable 2013 sitcom based on Caitlin Moran’s chaotic childhood in the industrial city of Wolverhampton, England. Caitlin’s very strong on stuff like vaginas and the importance of female empowerment, but I’d rather be stuck aboard an attack ship on fire off the shoulder of Orion than have to endure any of that. To be honest, I’m not sure that Scott’s drama is any more enticing than Moran’s sitcom.

In The Dark Knight, one of the best superhero movies, the Joker presents Batman with a serious dilemma: he must choose between saving his romantic interest, Rachel, or Gotham’s ‘white knight’ DA, Harvey Dent. Batman makes the ‘wrong’ decision and runs off to save Rachel, only to discover the Joker has tricked him, and sent him to Harvey instead. The moral gray area isn’t that rare in modern superhero movies. Tony Stark (Iron Man) is otherwise a pompous, drunken lothario. Thor and Hawkeye react to a crushing defeat in battle by becoming a fat, lazy shut-in and a vigilante, respectively.

Halloween wasn’t quite the same this year: no trick-or-treating or bobbing for apples, no packed parties, not even a socially distanced haunted house. As a lover of all things horror, I had to rely on television to put the spooky in the season. Netflix’s new series The Haunting of Bly Manor is the sister show to last year’s wildly popular The Haunting of Hill House, created by Doctor Sleep’s Mike Flanagan. (Flanagan is also behind Hush, one of the smartest horror movies I’ve seen in a few years and definitely worth watching.