TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  And at that point, you start to figure out that Top of the Lake is as much a fable or cautionary tale as it is a detective story. It’s packed with situations that play like archetypal showdowns between representatives of male and female psychology. As in Campion’s movies, the images here are as palpably female in their textures and implications as Martin Scorsese’s are male; the entire production seems as fecund as the Garden of Eden, and as symbol-laden. Mitcham is a bad daddy par excellence, a long-haired patriarch with macho criminal sons, always twisting the verbal knife to gain advantage, especially when dealing with women. His counterpart is GJ (Holly Hunter, star of The Piano), an American guru with flowing white hair who leads a colony of damaged-but-healing females who’ve taken up refuge in storage containers on land that Mitcham claims was sold out from under him. (That it was sold to women adds insult to injury; the man’s a reflexive misogynist, and each time he enters GJ’s camp, the story seems to shudder.) From the opening scene in which Tui wanders into water and seems inclined to drown herself, you know you’re in the hands of a master storyteller working close to her subconscious.

  —MZS

  14. John Adams (HBO, 2008)

  Based on David McCullough’s biography, this HBO miniseries is the finest dramatization of the life of a founding father of the United States of America: gritty, scrupulously intelligent, wryly amusing, sometimes bawdy, and altogether uninterested in tedious Great Man posturing. Paul Giamatti, who at that stage of his career was known mainly as a comic character actor, proved a perfect if surprising choice to guide audiences through formative events in the nation’s early history, including the Boston Massacre, the Second Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence, the formation of alliances with countries hostile to Great Britain, the Revolutionary War, and the aftermath (which is when the hard part really started because the new nation had to figure out how to protect and pay for itself). This miniseries’ vision of Adams paints him as a passionate, sometimes intemperate and resentful intellectual, but righteous and clever and altogether decent, even when he’s being judgmental. (The scenes of Adams disagreeing with Tom Wilkinson’s earthy, sensually oriented Benjamin Franklin in postwar France are especially memorable. “You are not a man for Paris,” Franklin tells him. “Paris requires a certain amount of indecency.”)

  All seven chapters were shot in and around Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, and in Hungarian locations that could pass for unspoiled North American wilderness. HBO’s “go ’head, burn money” attitude is very much in evidence. The re-creations of colonial and postcolonial life have a nearly tactile realism, especially when depicting less pleasant aspects of that time such as tarring and feathering by vigilantes and the use of “bleeding” as a treatment for smallpox. Director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) keeps the camera at ground level whenever possible, the better to create a “you are there” feeling. As written by Kirk Ellis (a TV-movie and miniseries specialist who adapted Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp for TV and penned the underrated The Beach Boys: An American Family), John Adams looks for the recognizably, at times poignantly human element in every encounter. The spine of its sprawling narrative is the marriage of true minds between John and his wife, Abigail (Laura Linney), his constant companion and most trusted adviser for fifty-four years, proving that when she admonishes him, “You do not need to quote great men to show you are one.”

  —MZS

  15. Hatfields & McCoys (History, 2012)

  This three-part History Channel miniseries, starring Kevin Costner and Bill Paxton as heads of feuding Southern clans, is so grim and despairing that only a masochist or a Western completist would binge-watch the whole thing. The impulsive post–Civil War killing of a McCoy by a Hatfield touches off round after round of reprisals, stretching out over decades, and the slow-motion bloodbath is observed by director Kevin Reynolds (Waterworld) and screenwriter Ted Mann (Deadwood) with incredulity and lament. For every one of the participants, this feud became, in effect, their life’s work, eclipsing their war experience, their domestic roles, and any legitimate business they transacted over the decades.

  And Hatfields & McCoys turns the macho code inside out to show its revolting interior. Some of the most seemingly ridiculous twists are drawn from reality: Matt Barr’s rakish young Johnse Hatfield’s dallies with two McCoy women, Roseanna McCoy (Lindsay Pulsipher) and her cousin Nancy (Jena Malone). This triangle might feel a touch too Romeo and Juliet if Johnse weren’t such an adorable little weasel. The miniseries features sterling work from mostly grime-covered actors, including Costner, whose Devil Anse Hatfield presents as a typical strong-silent type but quickly seems intractable and vicious; Paxton as Randall McCoy, whose wife, Sally (played by Mare Winningham), finds the same grotesque shadings in “stand by your man” as Costner does in “do what a man’s gotta do”; and Tom Berenger as Devil’s uncle, Jim Vance, who reflexively fans the flames of every outrage because if its embers die, his life will have no meaning.

  —MZS

  16. Mildred Pierce (HBO, 2011)

  This Todd Haynes adaptation of James M. Cain’s proto-feminist potboiler stars Kate Winslet as Mildred Pierce, a divorced single mother who splits from her distracted, cheating husband, Bert (Brian F. O’Byrne), takes a grueling job as a waitress, starts selling her delicious homemade pies on the side, works her way into the restaurant business, has a torrid and troubled affair with a penniless former playboy named Monty Beragon (Guy Pearce), and struggles to master her fate, understand herself, and raise her daughters (the eldest of whom, Evan Rachel Wood’s Veda, becomes a brilliant opera singer and a sociopathic, manipulative monster). Strong as Winslet is in Mildred Pierce’s lengthy dialogue scenes, she’s even more effective in silent close-ups, letting conflicting emotions play out on the heroine’s face as she watches, listens, and thinks. Haynes, whose filmography includes such art-house touchstones as Safe, Velvet Goldmine, and Carol, does every actor that favor, favoring action and reaction equally, delivering the opulent costumes, sets, vintage cars, and period music that viewers expect from an HBO historical drama, but with a more intuitive touch than is common to programs funded on this scale. There are no villains (not even the hateful Veda), only blinkered, damaged people. You react to them as you might to valued people in your own life, alternating exasperation and affection.

  The scene in episode 3 where Mildred and Bert eat at her seaside restaurant and hear Veda’s voice coming through the radio is one of the great set pieces of the aughts, TV or film. The shot over Mildred’s and Bert’s shoulders of the radio broadcasting the music; the close-up of Mildred staring at the radio and listening to it with half the frame blocked out by the back of the radio: All have talismanic power. After the scene’s closing profile shot of Mildred staring out at the sea at night, the camera tracks right, and the screen fills up with blackness that expresses the void Veda’s absence created in her mother. There’s a sense that Mildred’s emotions are casting themselves out into the blackness, or onto the ocean, in a cosmic reaching-out.

  —MZS

  17. Andersonville (TNT, 1996)

  Bankrolled by Turner Network honcho and Civil War enthusiast Ted Turner, this two-part miniseries about life in the hellish Confederate Civil War prison camp is one of the most grueling historical dramas ever aired on US television. One part documentary-frank re-creation, one part prison-escape picture, the production has a Kafkaesque feel for the nightmare antilogic of life inside an institution where basic amenities are nonexistent, dignity is a dream, and both inmates and guards are so numbed by deprivation and the dread that the war will never end that they’ve descended to an animalistic level. Forty-five thousand soldiers were imprisoned at Andersonville; more than twelve thousand died there, of starvation, disease, violent crime, and bullets fired by guards at inmates who were only trying to procure food, water, or a jailer’s attention. Directed by John Frankenheimer, a pioneering live-TV drama director who went on to helm such cinema classics as The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Se
conds (1966), Andersonville is a master class in camera placement and movement and the use of percussive editing to build and release tension. It’s Frankenheimer’s assurance behind the camera that makes this harrowing drama fascinating rather than punishing. You don’t just see and hear a place that hadn’t existed for 130 years prior to this miniseries’ production; you can practically smell the gunpowder and sweat and feel the muck beneath your hobnailed boots. The stark black-and-white Civil War photos of Mathew Brady were an inspiration for the cinematography (by Walter Hill’s regular lenser Ric Waite); that affinity comes through, even though the images are in muddy, bloody color.

  —MZS

  18. It (ABC, 1990)

  Clowns are creepy. This is not an opinion. This is scientific fact. Whoever first came up with the idea of using clowns as children’s entertainers was either a fool, a sadist, or a psychologist doing an experiment that continued long after his death.

  More than twenty-five years later, some aspects of It haven’t aged well, particularly the way the climax, due to the limitations of special effects at the time, presents the embodiment of all evil as, essentially, a giant spider creature. But the miniseries (written by Lawrence D. Cohen and Tommy Lee Wallace, and directed by Wallace) is the best of the many Stephen King TV adaptations (over even Salem’s Lot and The Stand) because of the way it brings the book’s primary villain—sewer-dwelling, child-murdering clown Pennywise—to such terrifying life in the form of Tim Curry.

  Tell an adult of a certain age, “They all float,” and just watch them jump back in disturbed memory of Curry’s performance and how effectively King and the filmmakers used Pennywise as a stand-in for so many different nightmares (real and imagined) of childhood.

  —AS

  19. The Winds of War (ABC, 1983)

  Shot on location in the United States, United Kingdom, Italy, Austria, and the former Yugoslavia, and boasting a $35 million budget ($80 million by today’s standards), this seven-part, nearly fifteen-hour ABC miniseries about the early years of World War II was the largest production ever attempted for broadcast TV up through its premiere date in 1983—a roll of the dice so grand that some worried its failure would sink the network. But the production, which was written by Herman Wouk from his same-named best seller and executive-produced and directed by Dan Curtis (Dark Shadows), was such a smash that it inspired networks to wager ever-larger sums on ever-more-immense productions (including 1988’s War and Remembrance, an even longer sequel). The network miniseries arms race continued through the late 1990s, at which point the mass audience splintered and broadcast networks began ceding limited-run prestige projects to cable. The Winds of War, which interweaves subplots about the fortunes of the fictional Henry and Jastrow families with actual historical events and personages (including Adolf Hitler), is significant mainly for its scope and popularity. Much of it has the feeling of having been made, and on a Brobdingnagian scale, not because it urgently needed to exist, but because ABC had enjoyed six comfortable years after Roots and was walking with a swagger.

  The Winds of War was considered not half-bad in its day, though not worth as many hours as ABC gave it. Time has been unkind to its miniaturized re-creations of World War II naval battles (which were unconvincing even in 1983) and its overreliance on documentary clips and footage from other productions (including Tora! Tora! Tora!, which supplied much of the Pearl Harbor attack footage). Its juxtaposition of Jewish suffering in Fascist-dominated Europe against opulent black-tie diplomatic receptions and full-dress military presentations is irksome as well. Many of the scenes involving the Jastrows fleeing the Nazi war machine are tense, despite their Saturday-morning-serial ludicrousness, but the Navy and diplomatic stuff feels obligatory, and some of it lies there gasping for breath. Robert Mitchum’s lead performance as naval officer and FDR adviser Victor “Pug” Henry keeps things watchable, even though he seems too old and bored to play a character famed for his alertness and intuition (he predicts the Nazi invasion of Poland and the German-Russian nonaggression pact before either are announced). Ali MacGraw is terrible as Natalie Jastrow, a steel-spined Jewish woman trying to save her dad, Aaron (John Houseman), and the rest of her family; Jan-Michael Vincent is even worse as Pug’s son Byron, who risks his life for Natalie and her family without ever changing his expression. There should have been a numeric graphic in the corner of the TV totaling the dollars spent per minute; The Winds of War is risible as drama, but as a window into an Atlantis-like era of broadcast network plenty, it’s essential.

  —MZS

  20. Horace and Pete (LouisCK.net, 2016)

  Louis C.K.’s first project after Louie was a slow and quiet (though profane) series of interconnected plays, self-distributed through his website. Set in a Brooklyn bar that had passed through generations of owners named Horace or Pete, and intertwining 2016 social upheavals with the characters’ resistance to change, the program owed more to live TV plays and Norman Lear sitcoms than to any comedies being made at the time. Nobody knew it was a miniseries until the finale cauterized every dangling subplot. The formidable cast included C.K. and Steve Buscemi as the current owners (respectively, a divorced schlub and a man battling mental illness); Edie Falco as their sister, a cancer patient looking to sell the bar; and Alan Alda as Pete’s biological dad, an Archie Bunker type. Ragged, tenderhearted, and insightful, it suggested the way toward America’s (and TV’s) future could be found by studying the past.

  —MZS

  TV-MOVIES

  (Films made directly for television, which rivaled contemporaneous big-screen movies in artistry or scope.—MZS)

  1. Duel (ABC, 1971)

  The start of a great career: Steven Spielberg’s. Dennis Weaver plays David Mann, a motorist who’s targeted for death by a faceless trucker while driving through hilly desert terrain in the American Southwest. As adapted by Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) from a short story originally published in Playboy, and as directed by a then twenty-three-year-old Orson Welles–wannabe with an uncanny grasp of screen geography, the result feels a bit like a dry run for such future Spielberg classics as Jaws and War of the Worlds, wherein plucky individuals scramble to endure or defeat a faceless, implacable force; the vehicular mayhem also prefigures the chase sequences in the Indiana Jones films and in Spielberg’s first theatrical feature, 1974’s road drama The Sugarland Express. Extreme high and low angles emphasize the fearsomeness of the rusty, battered truck, the front grille of which is dotted with license plates that were presumably collected as trophies from the trucker’s previous victims. The sound design amps up the truck’s engine noise to the point where it seems to be roaring and howling like a demon. Almost fifty years after its initial broadcast, this stripped-down, subtly mythic action thriller retains a good deal of its power, even though the perception of it as a nearly wordless film is belied by all the scenes of Mann talking to himself and musing about his predicament in voice-over. Spielberg has said that he rewatches it twice a year “to remember what I did.”

  2. The Positively True Adventures of the (Alleged) Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom (HBO, 1993)

  Directed by Michael Ritchie from a script by playwright and screenwriter Jane Anderson (If These Walls Could Talk), this is a seriocomic (emphasis on serio-) account of a real and bizarre crime, but also a satire on media ethics and the entertainment industry’s insatiable tendency to turn real people’s pain into entertainment. Holly Hunter stars as Wanda Holloway, a Channelview, Texas, mother who contemplated hiring a hit man to kill her daughter’s chief cheerleading rival; Beau Bridges plays her brother-in-law, Terry Harper, whom she approached about setting up the hit. The story is told in the form of a series of interviews, presumably for a documentary; Holloway and other participants are forthright about their catastrophic errors in judgment even as they interrogate the unseen filmmakers who are in the process of dramatizing their story for the very film you’re watching. It’s all expertly handled by Ritchie, who dealt with similar material in the feature films Smile (ab
out behind-the-scenes ego wars at a beauty contest) and The Candidate (starring Robert Redford as a would-be congressman who lets his beliefs be modified and diluted to get elected). The film is self-aware from start to finish, essentially critiquing its participants as well as itself as it goes along, yet it never loses track of the pathetic and tragic aspects of the story, and it never condescends to its small-town characters, even as it concedes the pettiness of their grievances and the stupidity of their mistakes.

  3. The Execution of Private Slovik (NBC, 1974)

  A project sixteen years in the making, this TV-movie started out as a theatrical adaptation of William Bradford Huie’s book about the title character, a World War II Army soldier who became the first US serviceman executed for desertion since the Civil War; Frank Sinatra acquired the rights to the book in 1960 and intended for it to be adapated by blacklisted screenwriter Albert Maltz (Broken Arrow, The Beguiled), but was convinced by his friend, Senator John F. Kennedy, to cancel the project, out of fear that it might be perceived as antimilitary and could dent his hawkish credentials and cost Kennedy the presidency. It finally saw the light of day with Martin Sheen in the title role—one of his finest performances, right on the heels of his work in Terrence Malick’s Badlands. Adapted by Richard Dubelman and directed by Lamont Johnson (The Last American Hero), it’s as close to a perfect character study as network TV has produced, quietly outraged yet somehow resolutely unsentimental, which of course makes its inevitable outcome—Slovik’s death by firing squad, pictured in a painterly long shot in the snowy courtyard of an Army base—all the more upsetting.

  4. The Day After (ABC, 1983)