Recommendations: Week of 9/26/22

The Peacock edition

I’m not sure who writes these descriptions, but when you Google “Peacock” these days, you’re told that “Peacock is an American over-the-top video streaming service owned and operated by the Television and Streaming division of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast.” Assuming this description is sanctioned, endorsed, and blessed by NBC itself, it’s intriguing that Peacock sees itself as an “over-the-top” streaming service. It doesn’t strike me as more over-the-top than any other streaming service; Netflix is the one with the Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy deals, after all. But perhaps they see themselves in a particularly clear light, for the two shows I am recommending this week are definitely over-the-top, in their own ways.

The Resort: The Emmys this year were extremely enamored of the show The White Lotus. Following the antics of the wealthy guests at a Hawaiian resort, the limited series was weird, razor-sharp, and excellent. The Resort has therefore been frequently looped in with Lotus, as it is also weird, set in a resort, and vaguely about an impending murder. I wish to decouple these two shows, as I don’t think they have that much in common beyond the superficial plot points described above. For one thing, The Resort is a piece of science fiction, while Lotus is self-consciously trying to say something about our current reality. The Resort follows a married couple on vacation who have fallen out of step with each other. Instead of reconnecting them, the falsity of the Mayan Riviera with its excursions and other bored tourists only pushes them further apart, resulting in the wife, Emma (Cristin Milioti), grasping at any opportunity to distract herself. That distraction takes the form of a mysterious cell phone she finds in the woods, which she discovers belonged to a tourist who went missing at a nearby resort 15 years earlier. The series is at its funniest when it gently parodies Emma and her husband Noah (William Jackson Harper)’s attempt to solve this mystery. But it’s far more than a mystery/comedy (this it does share with Lotus). It’s also a work of speculative science fiction, specifically about the nature of time and memory. No matter how hard Emma and Noah try to unravel this mystery, there’s a bigger picture here that keeps intruding at the edges. Watch if you like self-aware parodies of internet sleuths ( a la Only Murders in the Building), slow-burn sci-fi, and these two actors (because they’re great).

Angelyne: Going into this series, I had never heard of the mysterious 80s LA billboard bombshell/singer/model Angelyne. So the first reason I am recommending this is that if like me, you don’t know her history, this series is going to teach you something new and interesting. The second reason I would recommend it is that Emmy Rossum, as Angelyne, turns in a pretty excellent performance. Briefly, the limited series dives into the life and times of Angelyne, born Ronia Tamar Goldberg, an unnaturally beautiful woman with a thirst for self-invention and Hollywood fame. She achieves that fame through sheer force of will, stepping on everyone to achieve dubious notoriety for her mysterious billboards, constructed identity, and pink Corvette. The series has a yen to say something serious about nascent influencer culture (she has also run for governor twice, so you know, Trump), but it is at its most fun when it leans into the camp aspects of Angelyne’s character. One thing that threw me at first but I later learned to love is how each actor plays their character in the 80s and then in present-day wearing pounds of terrible and obvious aging makeup. There’s just this uncanny camp aspect to a beautiful woman playing an old version of a beautiful woman who is struggling to appear as her younger self. It reminds me of some of the unsettling imagery in David Lynch’s work. Watch if you like The Kardashians, Rossum on Shameless, and Twin Peaks.