Welcome to my Monday newsletter! This week I am looking at the third season of The Bear, the new Apple TV+ show Land of Women, the Emmy race for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series and more!
Stay tuned as the Benjamonster Awards start today with a daily post throughout July! The next newsletter will be Monday, July 15 with a look at the big three Emmy races shortly before nominations are announced on July 17.
I've watched the first four episodes of the third season of The Bear and I have some mixed feelings so far. It's still a great show but I'm not sure it's not as strong as the first two seasons. It's also not anywhere close to as terrible as some hysterical people on the internet are saying. In the first four episodes, I felt like we had two really strong episodes and two weaker ones.
I loved the ambition of the first episode of the season but it just didn't work for me. It felt like 36 minutes of a "previously on" segment. I understand the show was trying to give more depth to Jeremy Allen White's Carmy in the past and present but I just felt like we had seen too many of the scenes and giving them extra context was not something I wanted to spend an entire episode on. The Bear has been super ambitious before with episode structure and approach and it's worked great ("Review" in Season One of course being the most famous example). So I don't want them to stop trying but this episode bored me and just didn't work.
I enjoyed the second and third episode much more. I thought those were much more in like with the great and often stressful feel of The Bear. The second episode played out almost like a stage play with most of the episode having the characters standing around the table. All the arguments and conversations were true to character and there was more humor than The Bear sometimes includes. I thought the third episode was the best of the four as it showed a month in the life of the restaurant. The episode covered a month very effectively giving characters their due while also helping us really understand what happened over the course of the month.
Then, we had the fourth episode which was really underwhelming. It felt like almost nothing happened in the entire episode and it dulled the momentum from the third episode. So right now The Bear is batting 50% for me. It typically does better than that but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. And an inconsistent season of The Bear is still pretty darn good television.
Amidst the hype of The Bear, there were some other shows dropping last week. One that flew under the radar was Land of Women, a new Apple TV+ series starring Eva Longoria and based on the novel by Sandra Barneda. The series is about a woman who flees to Spain with her college-aged daughter and elderly mother after her husband finds himself in serious financial peril.
I really liked the first episode and was more mixed on the second. I thought the first episode established the characters really well and had a healthy dose of humor mixed with a thriller and a sort of nostalgic vibe. The second episode made me concerned the show might end up being more of a frothy-Virgin River type show instead of something a little stronger than that (no offense to Virgin River fans but I'm just not interested in a show like that). The three family members at the center of the show are strong with Longoria giving a convincing performance. The scenic rural Spain setting is absolutely gorgeous. I'm curious to see what type of show it ultimately becomes. While I don't want it to get too soapy, I also hope they don't pivot to a thriller at the end of every episode. We don't need a cliffhanger each time. So I guess I'm not sure what I want this show to be but maybe it doesn't know yet either. There was enough I liked to keep watching.
The Lead Actress in a Limited Series race is an interesting one with Shogun out of the field and some strong contenders like Baby Reindeer not having a Lead Actress. So a lot of the guesswork here depends on predicting how much nominators respond to certain shows. The leaders at the moment seem to be two Oscar-winning actresses: Jodie Foster for True Detective: Night Country and Brie Larson for Lessons in Chemistry. Neither show is beloved but the performances from Foster and Larson were nearly universally acclaimed. A more acclaimed show was Fargo so Juno Temple seems very likely to get a nomination. After that is where the real guessing game begins. Sofia Vergara received strong notices for Griselda but the show was less well received than Night Country or Chemistry. An even bigger toss-up is Kate Winslet. She's an awards darling but her HBO show The Regime was panned even if Winslet received good notices. It feels like an uphill climb to get in for that show even if its Winslet. While the Supporting Actresses from Feud: Capote vs. the Swans may cannibalize each other, there's only one Lead Actress in the race so Naomi Watts has a better chance in my eyes. Just like Tony Shalhoub in the Actor category, there's always a chance an actress could get in for a TV movie and in this case, it's awards darling Jessica Lange for her acclaimed turn in The Great Lillian Hall. It would be foolish to count her out because she was in a TV movie. Painkiller and Expats got almost no traction but you can't rule out Uzo Aduba or Nicole Kidman respectively. Some dark horse contenders include Julianne Moore for Mary & George, Joey King for We Were the Lucky Ones, Annette Bening for Apples Never Fall and Emma Corrin for A Murder at the End of the World.
Current Projected Nominees (ranked in order of confidence):
1. Jodie Foster, True Detective: Night Country
2. Brie Larson, Lessons in Chemistry
3. Juno Temple, Fargo
4. Naomi Watts, Feud: Capote vs. the Swans
5. Sofia Vergara, Griselda
Possible Spoilers:
6. Jessica Lange, The Great Lillian Hall
7. Kate Winslet, The Regime
8. Uzo Aduba, Painkiller
ODDS & ENDS
- I think Clipped has been up and down. The show did the requisite flashback/origin story episode for its fourth episode. I don't know why every show feels the need to do an episode like that, especially in a short season. Of course they work sometimes but it feels like it's a requirement for prestige shows to do one episode that breaks form or shows us how we got to the current story. This is one that didn't need it. The fifth episode got back on track story-wise but it did illuminate something for me. I have heard others complain about how some of the basketball players look nothing like their real-life counterparts. I don't watch basketball so it hasn't bothered me because I don't really know what the real versions of the players look like. But this week they didn't even try to have someone look like Barbara Walters so I get why it pulls people out of the show.
- I've watched half of the new batch of episodes of That 90s Show and the series is pretty much the same as the first season, if perhaps a little more sure of itself. The problem with the show continues to be that the legacy cast (primarily Kurtwood Smith and Debra Jo Rupp) is the strongest part of the show. The group of kids, aside from star Callie Haverda, have nothing on their That 70s Show counterparts.
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