Emmy Predictions 2018, Part 2: Limited Series

Okay, so now we’re on limited series/TV movie. I’m only slightly more informed here, because my favorites of the year, The Terror and Howards End, were snubbed completely. But I’m going to do my best.

LIMITED SERIES

Ryan Murphy's 'ACS' is likely to come out on top in the limited series race this year

• The Alienist
• The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story
• Genius: Picasso
• Godless
• Patrick Melrose

I’m guessing Assassination of Gianni Versace takes this (which I will now refer to as ACS for abbreviated typing purposes), because it has the most nominations and seems to have the most buzz. The only one I’ve seen is Patrick Melrose, which was really good, but I don’t think this category is very competitive.

Winner: ACS

Alternate: Patrick Melrose

Dark Horse: The Alienist (this was sort of a surprise nomination but it has a cult of fans behind it)

MOVIE/MINI ACTOR

I think this is going to Cumberbatch, but this category is very difficult

• Antonio Banderas, Genius: Picasso
• Darren Criss, ACS
• Benedict Cumberbatch, Patrick Melrose
• Jeff Daniels, The Looming Tower
• John Legend, Jesus Christ Superstar
• Jesse Plemons, USS  Callister: Black Mirror

So I think this one is between Darren Criss and Benedict Cumberbatch, and I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen here. Cumberbatch is an old Emmy favorite and he gives a fantastic performance in Patrick Melrose (career best, really), but then Jeff Daniels is also popular with the Academy as well. And John Legend and Jesse Plemons are inspired choices here too, so this is a really stacked category. Leaning towards Cumberbatch, but if ACS is going to sweep, Criss could be taken along with it.

Winner: Benedict Cumberbatch

Alternate: Darren Criss

Dark Horse: Jeff Daniels

MOVIE/MINI ACTRESS

Laura Dern has the upper hand with all the critics

• Laura Dern, The Tale
• Jessica Biel, The Sinner
• Michelle Dockery, Godless
• Edie Falco, The Menendez Murders
• Regina King, Seven Seconds
• Sarah Paulson, American Horror Story: Cult

This one’s easier. I’m almost sure it will go to Laura Dern, whose performance in The Tale was briefly talked about for Oscars before the movie was picked up by HBO. It’s a pretty easy category, although I did like Paulson in AHS (the one season of the show I’ve ever watched).

Winner: Laura Dern

Alternate: Sarah Paulson

Dark Horse: Michelle Dockery

MOVIE/MINI SUPPORTING ACTOR

This one's a wild guess, but Daniels is an Emmy veteran with two nominations this year

• Jeff Daniels, Godless
• Brandon Victor Dixon, Jesus Christ Superstar
• John Leguizamo, Waco
• Ricky Martin, ACS
• Edgar Ramirez, ACS
• Michael Stuhlbarg, The Looming Tower
• Finn Wittrick, ACS

I’m really flying blind on this one, because I haven’t seen any of these shows (except Jesus Christ Superstar, but I don’t expect that to win) and I also haven’t quite heard who the supposed frontrunner is. I suppose this is where they could reward their old fave Jeff Daniels though. I think three actors from ACS will cancel each other out.

Winner: Jeff Daniels

Alternate: Brandon Victor Dixon (maybe the different kind of performance will stand out?)

MOVIE/MINI SUPPORTING ACTRESS

An even wilder guess- really not sure who has the upper hand, but with 'ACS' expected to do well, Cruz is the bigger name, so perhaps it's her

• Sara Bareilles, Jesus Christ Superstar
• Penelope Cruz, ACS
• Judith Light, ACS
• Adına Porter, American Horror Story: Cult
• Merrit Wever, Godless
• Letitia Wright, Black Museum: Black Mirror

This is another crapshoot for me. Ummm….maybe Penelope Cruz? I’m gonna go with her.

Winner: Penelope Cruz

Alternate: Merritt Wever (a former Emmy winner, so they’re aware of her

More Early Emmy Winners Feature RuPaul, Anthony Bourdain, 'SNL'

There's more! The second round of the Creative Arts Emmys were tonight and RuPaul wins best host for the third year in a row, John Legend becomes an EGOT winner (yay, Jesus Christ Superstar Live!), and Anthony Bourdain unsurprisingly wins quite a few posthumous Emmys. Also, John Oliver wins for variety series writing (predicting his win in the series category next week), and the celebrated Netflix revival of Queer Eye wins several Emmys.

• OUTSTANDING STRUCTURED REALITY PROGRAM: Queer Eye 
• OUTSTANDING UNSTRUCTURED REALITY PROGRAM: United Shades Of America With W. Kamau Bell
• OUTSTANDING HOST FOR A REALITY OR REALITY-COMPETITION PROGRAM: RuPaul, RuPaul’s Drag Race 
• OUTSTANDING DOCUMENTARY OR NONFICTION SERIES: Wild Wild Country 
• OUTSTANDING DOCUMENTARY OR NONFICTION SPECIAL: The Zen Diaries Of Garry Shandling 
• OUTSTANDING VARIETY SPECIAL (LIVE): Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert 
• OUTSTANDING VARIETY SPECIAL (PRE-RECORDED): Dave Chappelle: Equanimity 
• OUTSTANDING INFORMATIONAL SERIES OR SPECIAL: Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown 
• OUTSTANDING INTERACTIVE PROGRAM: Last Week Tonight With John Oliver
• OUTSTANDING CREATIVE ACHIEVEMENT IN INTERACTIVE MEDIA WITHIN AN UNSCRIPTED PROGRAM: Conan Without Borders 
• OUTSTANDING SHORT FORM NONFICTION OR REALITY SERIES: Anthony Bourdain: Explore Parts Unknown 
• OUTSTANDING SHORT FORM VARIETY SERIES: Carpool Karaoke: The Series 
• OUTSTANDING WRITING FOR A NONFICTION PROGRAM: Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown 
• OUTSTANDING WRITING FOR A VARIETY SERIES: Last Week Tonight With John Oliver 
• OUTSTANDING CHOREOGRAPHY: Mandy Moore, So You Think You Can Dance 
• OUTSTANDING MUSIC DIRECTION: Tony Bennett: The Library Of Congress Gershwin Prize For Popular Song 
• OUTSTANDING ORIGINAL MUSIC AND LYRICS: “Come Back Barack” Saturday Night Live 
• OUTSTANDING NARRATOR: Sir David Attenborough, Blue Planet II

Netflix's 'Queer Eye' wins structured reality program

Early Emmy Winners Include 'Black Mirror,' GLOW,' 'The Crown'

The Creative Arts Emmys were held tonight and included USS Callister winning for Best TV Movie, even though it's an episode of a TV show, NOT a movie, while Tiffany Haddish won Guest Actress for SNL and GLOW's stunt coordinator became the first woman to win an Emmy in that category. Here were some of the other winners ahead of the telecast next Monday.

2018 CREATIVE ARTS EMMY WINNERS:

OUTSTANDING GUEST ACTRESS IN A COMEDY SERIES: Tiffany Haddish, Saturday Night Live

OUTSTANDING GUEST ACTOR IN A COMEDY SERIES: Katt Williams, Atlanta 

OUTSTANDING GUEST ACTRESS IN A DRAMA SERIES: Samira Wiley, The Handmaid’s Tale

OUTSTANDING GUEST ACTOR IN A DRAMA SERIE: Ron Cephas Jones, This Is Us

OUTSTANDING TELEVISION MOVIE: USS Callister: Black Mirror

OUTSTANDING CHILDREN’S PROGRAM: The Magical Wand Chase: A Sesame Street Special

OUTSTANDING ANIMATED PROGRAM: Rick and Morty

OUTSTANDING CHARACTER VOICE-OVER PERFORMANC: Alex Borstein, Family Guy

OUTSTANDING SHORT FORM ANIMATED PROGRAM: Robot Chicken

OUTSTANDING CASTING FOR A COMEDY SERIES: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

OUTSTANDING CASTING FOR A LIMITED SERIES, MOVIE OR SPECIAL: The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story

OUTSTANDING CASTING FOR A DRAMA SERIES: The Crown 

OUTSTANDING SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS: Game of Thrones

OUTSTANDING STUNT COORDINATION FOR A DRAMA SERIES, LIMITED SERIES OR MOVIE: Game of Thrones

OUTSTANDING STUNT COORDINATION FOR A COMEDY SERIES OR VARIETY PROGRAM: GLOW 

OUTSTANDING PERIOD COSTUMES: The Crown

OUTSTANDING FANTASY/SCI-FI COSTUMES: Game of Thrones

OUTSTANDING CONTEMPORARY COSTUMES: The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story

Tiffany Haddish wins for Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for hosting SNL last year

Emmy Predictions 2018, Part 1: Variety/Reality

Ok, so the Emmys are coming up and even thought these things are a total crapshoot and I’m convinced there’s no real way to predict them accurately, I still do my predictions, because I’m a masochist I guess. And there’s always a chance that this is my year, right? So let’s jump in.

REALITY SERIES

• The Amazing Race
• American Ninja Warrior
• Project Runway
• RuPaul’s Drag Race
• Top Chef
• The Voice

My least informed category. I don’t watch any of these shows, I admit to not being much of a reality fan, despite a huge consumer of TV in general. I do feel like it’s been these same exact nominees for quite a long time now. For the last eight years it’s been bouncing back and forth between The Amazing Race and The Voice, but I don’t know, I feel like it’s time for RuPaul to win this thing, don’t you? Not likely, I know. I guess it’s safe to just go with The Voice again.

Winner: The Voice

Alternate: The Amazing Race

Dark Horse: RuPaul’s Drag Race

VARIETY SKETCH SERIES

• At Home With Amy Sedaris
• Drunk History
• I Love You, America
• Portlandia
• Saturday Night Live
• Tracey Ulman’s Show

This one’s easy. SNL won it last year and will do so again, due to its total dominance of political coverage of course. Even though it’s Portlandia’s last season and that show never won, I don’t think anything’s taking it from SNL for the foreseeable future.

Winner: SNL

Alternate: Portlandia

VARIETY TALK SERIES

• The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
• Full Frontal with Samantha Bee
• Jimmy Kimmel Live!
• Last Week Tonight With John Oliver
• The Late Late Show with James Corden
• The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

I don’t think this one’s very suspenseful either. Nice to see The Daily Show get back in, but John Oliver owns this category currently and I don’t see an upset coming (although if it did, it would probably be Colbert). 

Winner: Last Week Tonight With John Oliver

Alternate: The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Dark Horse: Full Frontal with Samantha Bee (her special did get nominated in a lot of individual categories this year, so they like her)

REVIEW: "The End of the F***ing World" Season 1

It’s hard to explain the feeling of falling in love with a show or a movie when seeing it for the first time. You know when it happens to you, and usually before it ends- the movie or in the case of television, the season in question. As much TV as I watch and enjoy, that particular feeling is still a rare thing to come by- I’d say the last time it happened for me might have been the first season of Outlander. But I’m happy to say that it’s happened once again with the absolutely perfect black comedy gem, The End of the F***ing World.

This eight episode show, a co-production for Channel 4 in the UK and Netflix, plays less like a series and more like a movie, in large part due to all eight episodes being written by the same woman, Charlie Covell, and quite artfully directed by the same duo, Jonathan Entwistle (also series creator) and Lucy Tcherniak, who keep the tone entirely consistent and the story entirely self-contained. It also helps that each episode is just twenty minutes, ensuring that you can watch this whole thing in under three hours.

Game of Thrones fans will recognize Gemma Whelan here as a lesbian cop

Based on a graphic novel of the same name, the show stars Alex Lawther (who I’m starting to become a big fan of, after his Black Mirror episode “Shut Up and Dance,” Howards End and now this), and Jessica Barden as two damaged, miserably outcast teens who find each other almost in spite of themselves and embark on a wild road trip that turns in parts thrilling, joyful and violent. There’s a dark, surreal element from the very beginning, as the isolated and traumatized James (Lawther) fancies himself a psychopath whose primary attraction to Alyssa (Barden) is as a potential murder victim, and Alyssa is a neglected, angry rebel already prone to break the law and drawn to James on account of his seemingly non-threatening, baby-faced innocence. 

The gruesome black humor of the show steals laughs from the two teens who narrate their own stories in their heads simultaneously, as their adolescent moods swing back and forth while they experience one horrific incident after another and grow more and more attached to each other as a result, somehow becoming more open and lovable in comparison to the jaded anger and cynicism they feel towards the world and themselves at the beginning. The supporting cast of perplexed parents and two female detectives (Gemma Whelan and Wunmi Mosaku) assigned to their case gives the plot a familiar framing structure but it all pales in comparison to the budding romance of these delightful oddballs at the center. By the end of the story, I was conflicted about a second season, which has just been greenlit by Netflix, seeing how this one ends on such a perfect note and covered the whole of the graphic novel, yet I can’t deny my biggest wish was only that there were more episodes to watch. Now there will be, and though it’s hard to see where it goes from here and likely that it can’t match the top to bottom greatness that was Season 1, I can’t help but be excited about seeing these two crazy kids again. I can’t wait.

Grade: A+

James and Alyssa are a perfectly mismatched match

REVIEW: "Casual" Season 4

The final season of Casual is a lovely coda to the character’s journeys over four seasons, and it does feel like one, since the writers decided to do something a bit different this time and orchestrated a time jump of at least a few years. Since the show always took place in a very present day Los Angeles, that puts us in the future, and sets up jokes about a world where driverless cabs and other futuristic tech have more or less taken over people’s lives.

That touch is a little odd (though it does give us a funny joke about Scott “remember him?” Pruitt being shot dead in Ukraine), since the jokes about a world where the NFL has officially been disbanded and people are celebrating the “last Super Bowl” gives the show a feeling that it never had before and kind of places it in the realm of sci-fi (if only very mildly), but thankfully the relationships between the characters are still the focus of this highly character driven dramedy. 

In the few years since we last saw them, Alex and his roommate Rae have had a child (an adorable little girl named Carrie) and are co-parenting and living together platonically, at least for now. Laura has spent the last two years traveling around Europe and has now come home with a new, worldly girlfriend in Tatiana, and Val has mostly been running in place, with not a lot having changed, except her newfound comfort with herself as a single woman who doesn’t necessarily need to have a man in her life (besides her brother of course). Alex and Valerie, the co-dependent siblings, remain the heart of the show, but a surprising amount of focus is given to supporting lovebirds Leon and Lea this season, as they decide whether they should have a baby, and Laura’s ups and downs with Tatiana and her new career as a burgeoning chef.

Alex has a new family of his own now

As always, the Laura stuff doesn’t quite work, as I never found that the show ever really knew exactly what to do with her, and it’s near impossible to care about her relationship with the new girlfriend. She finds it in herself to want to commit at last, which is growth for her, but her inherent smugness remains annoying and unpleasant. However, Michaela Watkins and Tommy Dewey bring it for the final eight episodes, with Alex and Valerie as close as ever, supporting each other while Val decides to quit her job and open a wine store, and Alex veers into the world of virtual reality dating before realizing he might be in love with Rae after all. The best episode of the season sees the original trio in Alex, Valerie and Laura heading out on an aborted road trip to see the ever flighty and awful grandma Dawn (Frances Conroy), and another highlight is the funeral of said Dawn, where the siblings can’t help but skewer it in their contagious hysterics. The finale is a love letter to the brother-sister duo, who devolve into sobbing messes at the thought of their coming separation, that after all these years, has a gut punching impact as Dewey and Watkins’ real life closeness and camaraderie bleed off the screen. 

Although I think the show peaked with the transcendent third season, a perfect series finale counts for quite a lot, as what I will remember from this season is Alex and Valerie’s last successful double date and searing final scenes together. Casual was the rare show that celebrated an adult brother-sister relationship in ways not often seen onscreen, it was funny and moving and often sparklingly insightful, and for that it will live on fondly in my memory.

Grade: B+

The original makeshift family says goodbye

REVIEW: "Cloak & Dagger" Season 1

Superhero shows are a dime a dozen these days and ever multiplying in the near future, so it’s nice to see Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger, which is one of the more intriguing superhero origin stories, taking a different kind of approach. It airs on Freeform, so it’s a little more teen oriented than usual, and while that involves some sillier elements (this show probably has the most obvious soundtrack in terms of lyrics describing feelings and plot as it’s occurring onscreen that I’ve ever seen), it mostly wants to be far more character driven than action, which is a nice change. And yet, the ten episode first season still feels like it has more potential to evolve into something great than it’s delivered so far, as the series showed signs only in the last few episodes of really finding itself as its main duo took center stage as a duo.

Cloak & Dagger is a beloved, but a bit more obscure comic book property, created in the 1980’s by Bill Mantio and Ed Hannigan, centering on two teenage runaways, Tyrone Johnson and Tandy Bowen, a black male and a white female, as they were kidnapped and experimented on, resulting in the discovery of superpowers that bound them together physically. The show tweaks this origin story a bit, to dispel with any problematic stereotypes (in the comics, Tyrone was a homeless street teen while Tandy came from a rich family- that’s gender flipped here for obvious reasons), and in order to really delve into issues of racial justice which lie at the heart of Tandy and Tyrone’s pairing.

The two were thrown together as children after an accident

The premise hands the show a strong foundation, but the execution is a little clumsy at times, mostly because the show’s insistence on a slow burn origin story keeps Tandy (Olivia Holt) and Ty (Aubrey Joseph) apart for the majority of the first half of the season, as each of them embark on their own separate quests for justice. The pilot episode establishes Tandy and Ty as having gotten their powers due to the explosion of an oil rig when both were eight years old- they ended up in the water at the same time following tragedies that befell each of them at the same moment, and now as teenagers, are just waking up to their powers when meeting again for the first time. But Tandy is preoccupied with seeking vengeance for the corporate malfeasance that killed her father, while Ty wants justice for a dirty cop who murdered his older brother the night of the explosion.

This leads to some plodding scenes as each goes about their business, with the majority of intrigue coming from the discovery of their powers, which are kind of all over the place. First off, Tandy creates literal daggers of light from her hands which can kill people, while Ty has the ability to teleport, but that’s not all. When Tandy touches someone, she’s transported into the world of their greatest hopes, and when Ty does, he takes the person into their greatest fears. When they combine these powers, well…it’s vague, but it appears to be all knowing, mystical and somewhat unlimited. We’re talking mind warps, dreams, etc.- who knows what they could use these powers for?

The show has a lot of components to explore here, because Cloak & Dagger’s telepathic powers are largely undefined, especially the visions and mind control. That can lead to visual interpretation of basically whatever you want, I mean you can send these two into multi-dimensional travel if the desire arose. Luckily, the two young actors cast as the leads have a natural chemistry and the show comes alive in their scenes together. In the back half of the season when they finally start to pair up, the difference in momentum is immediate. So much so that when it drifts into their separate lives again, it deflates a bit. I understand the value of not wanting to burn story out, but in this case, the show is absolutely the two of them working as a pair, and I hope the writers have figured that out by now. It’s a show with a slower pacing and less superhero action overall, preferring to explore character’s feelings through the spiritual nature of Ty and Tandy’s powers, but seeing as how the best scenes in the entire season involve the two kids themselves, I’d say play that up next time, put them on adventures together every episode and we’ve got ourselves a show. There’s no sign of a love story yet, but since it’s comics canon, I’d expect that to happen eventually and I’d advise them not to be afraid to go there either, since romance has been jettisoned in a lot of superhero properties these days, and these two could be one of the strongest. The show left a lot of untapped wells in the first season, but it’s all there waiting to be explored, leaving next spring’s upcoming Season 2 one of my most anticipated shows. 

Grade: B

Cloak & Dagger enter the mind of a comatose man- just one of the many things their mindpowers can do

'The Americans' Wins Big at the TCA Awards

The TCA may have gone a little overboard on The Americans love tonight. I know it was the final season and it's in the pantheon of great shows now, but for Keri Russell to beat out all those nominees for achievement in drama- Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer, Darren Criss, Elisabeth Moss and her own co-star Matthew Rhys, it's just...really? I'm as big an Americans fan as anyone, but the truth is I always thought Rhys took the cake over Russell pretty easily. And for this season I probably would have picked Jodie Comer over both of them

2018 TCA Winners:

Program of the Year - The Americans
Achievement in Comedy - The Good Place 
Achievement in Drama - The Americans 
Achievement in Movies, Miniseries and Specials - The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story
New Program - Killing Eve
Individual Achievement in Comedy - Rachel Brosnahan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
Individual Achievement in Drama - Keri Russell, The Americans
Achievement in News and Information - Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown 
Achievement in Sketch/Variety Shows - Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Achievement in Reality Programming - Queer Eye
Achievement in Youth Programming - Sesame Street
Heritage Award - Friends 
Career Achievement Award - Rita Moreno

'Killing Eve' gets best new program

REVIEW: "A Very English Scandal"

Hugh Grant is having something of a career comeback, after his hilarious turn in Paddington 2 and now his darkly funny and sharp edged performance as Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal, a superb BBC miniseries concerning one of the most astonishing political scandals in British history. 

Director Stephen Frears also does some of his best work here, as the three brisk hours it takes to relay this insane series of events absolutely fly by, never a dull moment or dry line of dialogue spoken as we’re swept back into the past and placed in the minds of Liberal MP Thorpe and his twenty-something lover Norman Scott (Ben Whishaw), whom he eventually conspired to have murdered (really). Grant inhabits the perfect amount of perverse cheekiness as he seduces the young man in 1962, brazenly bringing him to his mother’s house and putting him up in a hotel room for a period of years (at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain), before tiring of him and attempting to send him away as he aspired to climb the political ladder, even becoming Leader of the Liberal Party in 1967.

Attempted murder gone wrong

But Norman Scott wouldn’t vanish so easily, and Whishaw plays him as an openly gay man who freely drifts his way through life, attaching himself to people (men and women) who momentarily give him some direction before always coming back to blaming his misfortunes on the ill-fated affair with Thorpe. For his part, Thorpe also blames Norman for anything that goes wrong in his own life, from his wife’s death to the allegations against him that he has squashed by the police over a number of years in the 1960’s. Eventually Thorpe fixates on having Norman killed, which leads to an extremely bungled assassination attempt in the mid-1970’s, the aftermath of which reveals the depth of the scandal to the public and plays out in the press in sensational fashion.

If you didn’t know anything about this historical episode (I didn’t), the show is especially fascinating and enormously entertaining, playing out as a playfully dark comedy, all the more stunning given the truth of the details. In some ways it’s the English equivalent of I, Tonya, involving incompetent hitmen, clumsy blackmail attempts, and Thorpe's increasingly desperate moves to cover his tracks and deal with the oblivious and naive, yet determined Norman. And still there’s a core sadness to this affair, as the deeply closeted and self-loathing Thorpe envies the freedom Norman possesses to accept himself, while the system’s unbending and predictable outcome in delivering justice to the oppressed is a stark reminder of the way the powerful never fail to close ranks and protect each other even in the face of all evidence and hypocrisies. Grant and Whishaw are fantastic as the two leads, deft at carrying the tone through the three hour-length episodes, and are ably supported by an ensemble of actors including standouts Alex Jennings, Eve Myles and Blake Harrison. Check this one out, people- it’s well worth your time and one of the best shows of the year.

Grade: A

Jamie and Claire Are Back in 'Outlander' Season 4

YES!!! Outlander returns in November and we now have the first look at Season 4, where the Frasers are new residents of colonial America. As a newly converted book reader, I now have the pleasure of knowing what's going to happen, but I'm hoping they decide to be more liberal with the changes to this season in particular (Drums of Autumn had quite a bit of Roger/Bree stuff that doesn't necessarily need to make it to the screen, let's just say). Even seeing a hint of the show again makes me excited though- I can't wait!