The fourth season of ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING has the leading trio of Charles, Mabel and Oliver (Steve Martin, Selena Gomez, Martin Short) digging into the murder of Charles’ stunt double and friend Sazz (Jane Lynch) while coping with producer Molly Shannon’s plans to adapt their experiences into a movie (with Eugene Levy, Eva Longoria and Zack Galifinakis in the corresponding roles). And what role do the tenants in the Arconia’s West Tower play in all this? The solution was a little too out of left field but overall this was excellent viewing. “Never hesitate to keep looking, unless it’s at an eclipse, Medusa or the time I stapled my handouts to my jacket.”
Adapted from Robert McCammon’s Stinger, Peacock’s streaming TEACUP was a disappointment. A handful of farm-country residents discover they’ve been cut off from the world by an energy field that kills anyone who crosses it. There’s an alien refugee among them, a bodysnatching alien hunting for the fugitive and nobody knows who’s who — plus all the characters’ old issues are coming to light.
That’s a good mix for a story and for the first half it held my attention. As it approached the end, things began to flag, leaving me wondering if they were just giving us a stretch of calm before the socko, gut-wrenching season ender. Well, no, the ending was bad too, and I can’t say plans for a second season inspire me to watch further. “So is the problem that you’re not telling us everything, or that you’re lying?”
AN ADVENTURE IN SPACE AND TIME (2013) was a BBC special recounting how flamboyant BBC director Sidney Newman (Brian Cox) cooked up the idea of a kid’s program that would involve a grandfatherly figure leading the audience through history (very educational!) and appointed Verity Lambert (Jessica Raine) as producer, a radical move for the early 1960s. She recruits reluctant but respected actor William Hartnell (David Bradley) to play the lead — but is she seriously considering these ridiculous “Dalek” creatues as villains in the second serial? I’m not sure how faithful the details are but this was enjoyable. “Cavemen and doctors and bloody disappearing police boxes?”
When my family first arrived in the US, one of my favorite shows was My World and Welcome To It, a whimsical comedy about a crotchety cartoonist (William Windom) based on James Thurber (one episode has everyone trying to figure out what the Thurber cartoon above means). Some of the creative team went on to make THE WAR BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN (1972) with Jack Lemmon as a misanthropic cartoonist trying to cope with the possibility of losing his sight and the equally unsettling possibility he’s fallen in love with Barbara Harris — OMG, is it possible women aren’t utterly awful. This doesn’t work as well as the series did (at least as far as memory can tell) and the treatment of Harris’ stuttering daughter (Lisa Gerritsen, who played the daughter role on the TV show too) — torment her until she gets so emotional she stops stuttering — is, I’m fairly sure, not good therapy (and the story gets close to “You could fix your disability if you only made the effort!”). Jason Robards plays Harris’s ex. “Nothing Henry Miller has to say is of the least interest to me.”
THE GREEN GIRL (2014) was TYG’s and mine post-prandial film, a documentary about Susan Oliver, who appeared in dozens of guest-star roles on TV in the 1950s and 1960s, most notably as Vina in Star Trek‘s pilot episode The Cage (later reworked into the two-part Menagerie) — someone quips that as Oliver’s green Orion slave woman was worked into the closing credits, millions of people watching Trek reruns see her in that, if nothing else. As the documentary shows, she was in lots of other shows (this was an era when continuity was loser so she could play one role on Route 66 one season and a different character the next), plus directing (though opposition to women directors killed her opportunities) plus becoming a skilled recreational pilot.
The talking heads (including actors Monte Markham, Lee Meriweather and Biff Manard) argue that the advantages of her guest-star career were that Oliver was never stuck working a series day in and day out; the downside was that as she grew older and parts harder to come by, she didn’t have the studio contracts or steady roles to fall back on. An interesting look at a strong-minded and talented woman. “Under ‘other victims’ — my name, listed alphabetically.”
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