Ranking Every TV Show of 2021: #s 94-84

Jeremy BeckTV Rankings
Julia Goldani Telles in The Girlfriend Experience; Daveed Diggs in Snowpiercer; Anthony Mackie in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier; Juno Temple in Little Birds; Rosamund Pike in The Wheel of Time

We’re ranking every TV show of 2021. If you missed the first installment, you can find it here.

Tier 9: Possibly marginally interesting
94. The Girlfriend Experience (Starz, Season 3; 2017 rank: 46 of 108). If the first season of The Girlfriend Experience was about demythologizing the mystique of sex work (and proving Riley Keough’s star bona fides) and the two-for-one second season was about the dangerous costs of possessive obsession, Season 3 is about… neural net technology? Data mining? Brunettes posing as blondes? I don’t mean to be glib, but there’s an alarming disregard for narrative coherence on display here, which is maybe meant to be a bold storytelling choice but which really just serves to dilute any thematic impact. Stories of messy relations between sex workers and their clients are always interesting, and Julia Goldani Telles certainly has screen presence, but this latest batch of episodes inspired by the (coughs, overrated) Steven Soderbergh feature is far too detached and off-kilter to hold viewers’ attention. I hope this isn’t the end of this strange, experimental series about body commodification and the literal price of desire, but new showrunner Anja Marquardt (taking over for Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz) has shifted things in a bizarre, thoroughly unpersuasive direction. Sex work is indeed work, but a show about it shouldn’t feel this impersonal and cold. Read More

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Ranking Every TV Show of 2021, Part I: #s 108-95

Jeremy BeckTV Rankings
Nicole Kidman in Nine Perfect Strangers; Jennifer Aniston in The Morning Show; Tim Robinson in I Think You Should Leave; Renée Elise Goldsberry in girls5eva; Peggy Carter in What If

Need proof that the COVID-19 pandemic is over? I only watched 108 TV shows last year.

OK, I’m kidding, at least on the first part. But as the omicron variant rages and hospital admissions soar troublingly toward their 2020 levels, it’s vaguely comforting to know that television remains, well, there. I’m not interested in (or capable of) qualitatively comparing an entire year of an artistic medium against past annuals, but quantitatively speaking, TV is still a powerhouse. Sure, my total of 108 shows looks a tad inferior compared to the 124 I watched in 2020, but I still think it’s a pretty healthy (i.e., unhealthy) figure.

Were all 108 series good? Of course not. Were most of them watchable? Pretty much. The ensuing list, which will be revealed over the course of the next five days (concluding with the top 10 on Friday), is decidedly not a bell curve; once we reach the top 70 or so, we’re pretty much in “I’m glad I saw that” territory. That, of course, doesn’t make these rankings any less infantile, which is also what makes them fun. So clock out, strap in, and turn on your streaming device of choice as we explore the vast and varied year that was. Read More

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Scream: The Ghostface That Launched a Thousand Quips

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jenna Ortega and Ghostface in Scream

Scream is the fifth movie in the Scream franchise, which launched a quarter-century ago with a movie that was also called Scream. If you find this title repetition annoying, you aren’t alone; the film’s characters agree with you. “It should’ve been called Stab 8, not just Stab,” someone grouses at one point, referring to the series within the series that has apparently suffered from creative drought. This kind of meta commentary can be exhausting, but here it carries an element of sincerity. Despite being a bunch of cheap slasher flicks with no big stars, the Scream pictures have always aspired to a fairly lofty level of ambition, striving to combine playful semiotic analysis with genuine cinematic terror. These movies don’t just want to mock the clichés of classic horror; they also want to be horror classics.

Which this new Scream is not. Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the duo behind the similarly sly Ready or Not, it’s more functional than suspenseful, serving up the usual medley of shrieks, spurts, and shocks with formulaic toil. But it’s nevertheless appealing, with solid performances and a witty script (from James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick) whose insights extend beyond the usual canned callbacks and self-referential humor. The movie is predictably stocked with insignificant twists—who’s the real killer? who cares?—but its biggest surprise is that it actually has something to say. Read More

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Red Rocket: A Star Is Porn

Jeremy BeckReviews
Simon Rex and Suzanna Son in Red Rocket

Cognitive dissonance is a valuable artistic tool, but there’s something especially fascinating about Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, which is one of the most enjoyably disturbing—and disturbingly enjoyable—movies I’ve seen in quite some time. On one level, it’s a blaring warning beacon—a chillingly persuasive portrait of exploitation and predation. Yet it’s also a pleasingly relaxed hangout comedy—a sun-kissed ode to the eternal pleasures of sex and drugs and NSYNC. It’s appalling and enthralling; I was aghast watching it and can’t wait to see it again.

The force of nature who provides Red Rocket with its queasy allure is Simon Rex, a journeyman actor and chiseled beefcake whom I’ve never seen before but will almost certainly be seeing again. Armed with a rippling chest and a wolfish smile, Rex plays the coyly named Mikey Saber, a washed-up porn star crawling back home to his impoverished roots in Texas City, where he attempts to shack up with his estranged wife (Bree Elrod); unable to secure legal employment thanks to the lengthy gap in his résumé (“You can call Brazzers and ask for a pay stub…”), he starts scratching out a living by selling weed to local oil riggers. He also manages to ingratiate himself with his wife and her couch-potato mother (Brenda Deiss), thanks to his rugged charm, not to mention his other talents. As his prior occupation suggests, Mikey is good with his dick and also slick with his words, which helps compensate for the black hole where his soul should be. Read More

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Don’t Look Up: May the Planet Jest in Peace

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jonah Hill, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, and Jennifer Lawrence in Don't Look Up

Are you familiar with the scientific phenomenon known as climate change? If not, then you might find Don’t Look Up, the new star-studded political satire from Adam McKay, to be profoundly eye-opening. Doubtless, McKay wishes it to provoke outrage as well as laughter; this has been his shtick ever since The Other Guys’ closing credits featured a flurry of graphics illustrating the mechanics of a Ponzi scheme. It isn’t a critic’s job to predict how an audience will react, but I suspect that most people who possess rudimentary knowledge of global warming (and I, to be clear, am no expert) will greet McKay’s latest effort not with howls of fury but with snorts of derision. I suppose Don’t Look Up is a passion project, in the same way that certain third graders can be passionate when they’re arguing for a snow day.

It feels somewhat mean to criticize a movie that carries such an urgent message, even if the delivery of that message is fairly mean. To be sure, anger is an appropriate response to society’s collective shrug toward its own existential threat, and it’s undeniably maddening that the fact of climate change is still framed as a political issue—a polarizing debate in which #BothSides present meritorious arguments. Yet agitprop tends to be more persuasive when it’s targeted; here, McKay paints with such a broad brush that he sacrifices precision. In addition to attempting to skewer the electoral establishment—embodied here by Meryl Streep as a coldly calculating, vaguely Trumpian president, flanked by an army of flunkies and an Oedipally charged chief of staff (Jonah Hill)—he also lampoons greedy tech profiteers (Mark Rylance plays an awkward genius designed to recall Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk), militaristic jingoism (Ron Perlman pops up as a demented former general), mainstream media (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry play fatuous morning-show anchors), celebrity culture (Ariana Grande and Scott Mescudi suck up some oxygen as vain pop stars), millennial slackerdom (Timothée Chalamet receives a measure of dignity as a skateboarder), and social-media vacuity (fake memes routinely spring up). It’s a lot—the film clocks in at a baggy 145 minutes—and that muchness seems to be an element of McKay’s broader point. If you aren’t part of the solution—that is, if you don’t subscribe exactly to his hazy set of principles, which I guess could be described as Pro-Science—then you’re part of the planet-killing problem. Read More

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