Month: August 2024

I would consider it a personal failure if I didn’t, at least once a year, remind everyone about a show that is so good, I believe it my personal responsibility, not only as a professional film/TV writer (I have, on occasion, been paid to do this, amazing enough) but as a human, to make sure everybody watches it. The show is After Life, and can be found on Netflix.

There are three seasons of After Life (18 30-minute episodes), and it was created, produced, directed, written by and stars Ricky Gervais. Now WAIT…..if you don’t like Gervais, and I totally understand it if you don’t, give me a chance to still convince you to watch the show.

After Life is the most emotionally affecting and humanistic show I’ve ever seen. It is laugh out loud hilarious, featuring oddball characters that are insanely weird and typical Gervais humor that is cringe-perfect, insulting and self-effacing. Yes, that’s all true. But what Gervais manages to do, in his genius way, is to blend all that humor, all that cringe, all that weirdness with a deep, abiding and soulful compassion and humanity, creating an experience that will both fill your heart and break it, in all the right ways.

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If you didn’t already believe Martin Freeman could do anything, you need to check out The Responder, a dark and unforgiving BritBox original that has Freeman as far away from Bilbo Baggins as one could possibly imagine.

American audiences probably best know Freeman as the beloved titular hobbit from Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, but he also made quite an impression from his roles in Love, Actually or his stint in the MCU as Everett K. Ross in Captain America: Civil War and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. More hip American audiences may recognize Freeman as Watson to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes in four seasons of Sherlock, but Martin’s best American work was in the stellar first season of Noah Hawley’s masterpiece series Fargo, which continues to be one of the best shows to have ever existed.

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Somehow, I missed this show when it first aired back in 2013 to 2016. The Fall is a drama starring Gillian Anderson as a British policewoman who becomes obsessed with catching a Northern Irish serial killer, played by Jamie Dornan. Played out over three seasons of six episodes each, The Fall is a gripping, often thrilling but extremely disturbing series that gives you all you want from a drama like this, with the added benefit of Anderson and Dornan’s considerable talents.

Dornan plays a serial killer who seems normal, but deep down is as evil as they come, a guy with serious mommy issues who takes out his psychosis on young, pretty women, leaving a trail of murders in Belfast. In comes Anderson’s steely, no-nonsense British investigator, flown in from London to crack the case. But you’re not going to have Anderson and Dornan without giving their characters some deep backstories and lots to play out, so we get to know both characters intimately, and it’s left to the audience to figure out why they feel so drawn to each other.

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In honor of Dexter now being available on Netflix and the recent announcements of both a new sequel AND prequel series, I want to recommend the ORIGINAL series to you, even if you know exactly what it is and have refused to watch it in the 18 years since it debuted in 2006.

I was one of you. I had heard all my friends raving about this show back in the day, everyone telling me how great it was, but I absolutely stood my ground, saying I was NOT INTERESTED in watching something so dark, so violent, so upsetting.

See, Dexter is a VERY dark show about a really messed up guy who feels a compulsion to kill. BUT his policeman father taught him at an early age to channel that need for good, so….Dexter only kills bad guys. That makes it ok! So weird….so upsetting…right?

Well, that’s the thing about Dexter, the series, which stars Michael C. Hall, who you may remember from the brilliant HBO series Six Feet Under. Dexter is nowhere near the dark and depressing journey you think it would be. While the plot is undeniable and there is a lot of blood and really bad people that need disposing of, the rest of the show is as mainstream as it gets. It’s a standard police procedural, with a collection of charming characters who banter and tease each other, and a central character who is so normal by day, most consider him to be a totally boring dork. It’s kind of like Superman, if Clark Kent were a forensic blood spatter analyst by day, and one-man-humanity-cleanser-by-night.

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It’s easy to forget Stephen Merchant. Everyone knows that Ricky Gervais created The Office, both the original, British version, and the massively popular American version, which now has found a renewed popularity in a post-pandemic world. But most people don’t realize that Gervais partnered with Merchant to create The Office, and as much of its brilliance is due to Merchant as it is to Gervais. Much of the credit to Gervais has possibly come to the fact that Gervais has continued to be so visible in his post-Office career, while Merchant has struggled to make an impact anywhere close to The Office since. That’s not to say he hasn’t been quietly delivering solid work, from his under-appreciated HBO series Hello Ladies (2013) to being a producer of the massively popular Lip Sync Battle TV show, to producing the great little indie movie Fighting with My Family (2019), but nothing nearly as notable as hosting the Golden Globes or breaking the World Record for Stand-Up.

Well, Merchant may not be as flashy and in-your-face as Gervais continues to be, but he may finally be getting the appreciation he deserves with his latest series, The Outlaws, whose third season dropped this past May on Prime Video.

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