Welcome to my Monday newsletter. After a busy week last week, it was a quiet week so here are some thoughts on the latest episodes of Lessons in Chemistry and The Morning Show as well as brief thoughts on the rest of The Fall of the House of Usher.
"LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY" HITS ME RIGHT IN MY WEAK SPOT
I don't know exactly why, but for some reason I just can't handle dogs in distress on TV (or in real life, obviously). Now I know what you may be thinking. That's not really a hot take. No one likes to see that. But it's very out of character for me when it comes to fictional properties. I can handle sad things, I can handle scary things. I don't get emotionally overwrought about sad or heavy TV scenes. I don't have any trouble in general separating fiction from real life so deaths of human characters generally do not put me in a very emotional place. But I can't watch or read anything where a dog dies or gets hurt or feels sad without crying. I actually actively stay away from things like that because I don't want to cry.
I already was already worried about the poor dog in Lessons in Chemistry after how the second episode ended and then they went and had the dog narrate the opening to the third episode. If I was my usual discerning self, I might sit and mock that choice. But again, it's my weak spot. So I couldn't even handle the idea of the dog feeling responsible for the death of Lewis Pullman's character. Thankfully, it wasn't the whole episode and the a lot of "Living Dead Things" dealt with the grief of Brie Larson's Elizabeth Zott, something I was much more equipped to handle.
Brie Larson is really the reason Lessons in Chemistry works as well as it does. She is pretty mesmerizing in the main role and displayed grief in a way that was totally true to the character we met in the first two episodes. Larson can display a lot of emotion without saying anything and even sometimes with a straight face. We can see it in her eyes in certain scenes.
"THE MORNING SHOW" CONTINUES TO TURN INTO "THE NEWSROOM"
This summer, I watched The Newsroom for the first time ever. Well, I watched the first season and then decided I had seen enough. The melodrama mixed with then-almost current events just didn't work for me because it was Aaron Sorkin at his most self-righteous and self-indulgent.
The Morning Show is sadly turning into The Newsroom. The problem is definitely the incorporation of real life events. From COVID to January 6 and now to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the show can't get out of its own way with clunky connections to news items that are still relevant but also just slightly in the past already. It wasn't always this way. While there were obvious connections to the Matt Lauer story, the first season centered around a fictional #MeToo scandal. And a lot of the news within the show that the characters reported on was fictional too. The final episode of the season, which aired in December 2019, even had a fictional news story about a quarantine on a ship just before COVID entered our lives.
The seventh episode of the season, "Strict Scrutiny," was on its way to being much better than the previous couple episodes. The Jon Hamm and Jennifer Aniston stuff felt a little less forced and those two actors had nice chemistry with each other. Greta Lee was involved in her best story yet and even poor, beleaguered Reese Witherspoon's Bradley got to take a little break from her terrible storylines to accompany Billy Crudup's Cory to a trip home to see his mother (a strong Lindsay Duncan).
Then at the end of the episode, the show had to tie in the leak of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision and it thrust itself back into dealing with characters finding out shocking news more than a year after we did in real life. It all just felt so forced and borderline comical which, like January 6th, is not how we should be responding to some of these serious news stories. I don't know why the show can't just make up fictional news events. The West Wing never suffered from finding fictional national and world stories that had parallels to real-life events but weren't actual real-life events. I was prepared to write a more positive review of The Morning Show this week until the end of the episode but once again, it just can't get out of its own way.
SCRIPTED PREMIERES THIS WEEK
It's a very quiet week before a busier weekend for premieres. Up first on Thursday is the third season of the anthology American Horror Stories on Hulu/FX. Since it didn't finish filming a full season before the strikes, it's being billed as a four episode Halloween event. Friday has the streaming premiere of Showtime's Fellow Travelers before the linear premiere on Sunday. The epic limited series starring Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey has been heavily promoted by Showtime and could be an awards player. Sunday has the return of The Gilded Age on HBO. The series aired on Mondays for its first season but was upgraded to Sundays in light of several other planned shows not being ready with the strikes. The show had its fans in Season One but didn't quite break through. Maybe it will with less competition.
THOUGHT TO END TODAY
I was going to do a full section on the rest of The Fall of the House of Usher. But after being pretty positive on the show last week after the first two episodes, I didn't really end up enjoying it all that much. There were good jump scares and some strong performances but the episodes were way too long and it all started to feel a little bit repetitive after a few episodes. I think it didn't really hold up over the course of a full season. The Haunting of Bly Manor easily remains my favorite Mike Flanagan show.
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