That’s the puzzle of contradictions one must work through when attempting to unpack the new drama from Max.

“ER,” created by the late Michael Crichton, spent 15 seasons tracking the lives of various physicians (including superstar-in-waiting George Clooney as heartthrob Dr. Doug Ross) traipsing through the emergency room at Chicago’s County General. By contrast, “The Pitt,” from producer John Wells and creator R. Scott Gemmill, spends its 15-episode first season chronicling a single shift at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center in downtown Pittsburgh.

It offers compelling drama, written well and performed by a talented cast — ably anchored by the world-weary Noah Wyle, 30 years removed from his debut as wide-eyed Dr. Carter in the “ER” pilot. While this show’s complicated origin story makes it hard to view entirely separate from the legal logjam that led to its birth (currently the subject of litigation by the Crichton estate), it nonetheless benefits from the comforting familiarity of both premise and star.

Wyle plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch. He’s a compassionate and driven physician tasked with improving efficiency and patient satisfaction in his ER — two goals seemingly at cross-purposes. With Robby overseeing veteran doctors and fresh med students, every hour presents a series of crises at the Pitt (the unflattering nickname given to the emergency room by its workers).

It’s a testament to how familiar and beloved Wyle is, not only as a screen presence more broadly but specifically in this kind of role, that he slips into some very familiar scrubs and carries viewers along without further explanation needed.

There’s unquestionable dissonance from watching Wyle as an ER doc not named John Carter. It feels a little bit like watching Arnold Schwarzenegger play a barbarian not named Conan in 1985’s “Red Sonja.” And while “The Pitt” stands head, shoulders and torso above that execrable camp confection, there’s still some compass-setting required before a string of medical situations — some comical and some calamitous — pull the audience in.

It’s not like hospital dramas are unexplored terrain on the TV landscape, so most of the proceedings have an unavoidable air of familiarity. But perhaps the most significant innovation comes from the fact that as a streaming series, there’s more viscera and nudity than you’ll see in an average episode of “Chicago Med” or “Grey’s Anatomy.”

And while there are aspects to the show that are more episodic, with minor cases flitting in and out of the emergency room, given that this is essentially one season-long story there are several plotlines that play out over several installments, including the plight of an increasingly frustrated patient (Drew Powell) who sits in the waiting room like a pot of water on a hot stovetop. There’s also the conflict between hotshot resident Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) and hotshot intern Dr. Santos (Isa Briones), another pot of water boiling across the season.

Still, this is ultimately a showcase for Wyle, with his character threading through various plotlines (along with some terrific camera work lending it a verité feel). He may not be playing Dr. Carter, but he’s undoubtedly leaning into the accrued affinity that comes from being identified with that character. With a wariness on his face and compassion in his eyes, Robby is a vulnerable and compelling center of the action — just like Carter on “ER” all those decades ago — with hints of a tragic backstory only alluded to initially.

Sadly (if unavoidably), the “ER” legacy is forever intertwined with “The Pitt.” That’s not so much a knock on the latter show as an acknowledgment of the former’s outsized role as a TV trailblazer. All medical dramas afterward will face some comparison with it. While those comparisons are perhaps more front of mind here than usual, this is nonetheless a solid series that underscores the somewhat paradoxical reality that sometimes the emergency room is the most comfortable place for TV viewers.

“The Pitt” premieres Thursday, Jan. 9, at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT on Max.

The post ‘The Pitt’ Review: Noah Wyle Brings Comfort to Max’s Chaotically Fun ER Drama appeared first on TheWrap.

“American Primeval” certainly thinks so. The new six-part Netflix series helmed by “Friday Night” Lights director Peter Berg and written by “The Revenant’s” Mark L. Smith, “American Primeval” revels in its own muck. A fictionalized account of life out west around the 1857 Utah War, which pitted the U.S. Army against Brigham Young’s Mormon militia, “American Primeval” is a dirty but delicate web of intrigue and brutality sparked by a mother and child’s quest to find safety and escape a bounty.

Betty Gilpin and Preston Mota star as that mother and son, Sara and Devin Rowell, and endure countless injustices over the course of the series, from the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which masked Mormons and Paiute auxiliaries killed about 120 Westbound pioneers, to wolf attacks, deathly cold and abuse at the hands of sinister French madmen. That’s not even getting into downright evil bounty hunters, broken bones, bucking horses and all of the pair’s everyday trauma, a mere fraction of which would force most of us modern citizens into a shuddering ball.

That’s not to say they don’t have help. Taylor Kitsch plays Isaac, a white man raised by the Shoshone who’s so emotionally shut down after the death of his own family that he practically communicates in grunts. He begrudgingly ends up helping the Rowells and a mute Shoshone girl, Shawnee Pourier’s Two Moons, with the foursome forming a rather motley crew along their route west.

There’s other drama elsewhere in “American Primeval,” as well, like Shea Whigham’s Jim Bridger attempting to hold things down at his historic fort in Wyoming despite looming threats from Brigham Young (Kim Coates) and his Mormon mercenaries, and the plight of a young Mormon couple, Jacob and Abish Pratt (Dane DeHaan and Saura Lightfoot-Leon), who are separated (and scalped) during the Meadows Massacre and spend the rest of the series trying to find each other. While Jacob is hell-bent on finding his wife, Abish ends up falling in with the Shoshone group that took her, finding common ground with Derek Hinkey’s Red Feather, a fierce warrior, and his mother, Irene Bedard’s Winter Bird. As Abish, Lightfoot-Leon gets to deliver some of the show’s most uncloaked moral messages, speaking out against hatred, fear and killing under the guise of religion.

Much of the on-screen violence of “American Primeval” was created with practical effects, a fact that’s both impressive and somewhat horrific given what viewers end up seeing. Shot over about six months in the New Mexico wilderness, often in intense cold, the show does seem to radiate strife, along with a sort of itchy, dirty woolen feeling. There are no beautiful, sweeping vistas or shots of wildflowers before they’re trampled by oxen.

Berg and Smith’s on-screen vision is all pain with very little relief, making a binge-watch of this series a bit of a masochistic exercise. Knowing that the show employed an enormous amount of help to ensure what it captured was as real as possible, including indigenous cultural consultants and Mormon and military experts, is impressive but almost makes things worse.

There’s no Hollywood sugar-coating these atrocities, and watching “American Primeval” will only serve to make you more aware of how much mud, blood and brutal, overconfident delusion it took to create the country we live in today.

“American Primeval” is now streaming on Netflix.

The post ‘American Primeval’ Review: Netflix’s Violent Western Plays Like a Masochistic Binge appeared first on TheWrap.

The pedigreed eight-part show traded broadcast networks for Prime Video, where it will premiere Thursday. The novelty is that each episode is a bite-sized 30 minutes, with modest character arcs that extend over multiple episodes, and multiple seemingly random crime sequences that propel individual installments.

The result feels like “Cops” with a script. The ride-along series puts the audience largely behind the wheel with Traci Harmon (Troian Bellisario, a nepo baby, daughter of Donald P. who also fathered “NCIS,” “Magnum P.I.” and “Quantum Leap”). She’s a divorced surfer with a chip on her shoulder, a junkie sister and a troubled relationship with her fellows on the force. She’s wound as tight as her bun.

Riding shotgun is her trainee, the handsome newbie Alex Diaz (Brandon Larracuente). The young idealist is eager for the challenge, but he keeps leaping into the danger zone, ignoring the sage advice of his seen-too-much mentor/partner. Bullets will fly — but are they necessary?

The show, created under the Wolf umbrella by Dick’s nepo baby Elliot and co-pilot Tim Walsh, has left behind the big cities of New York and Chicago, for the oceanside Long Beach, Ca. It’s an interesting choice because the city south of Los Angeles is a hotbed of haves and have-nots that have little more in common than drug abuse.

In the mansions by the beach, the privileged sons and daughters of the rich party to the death without a sense of mortality. On the gritty Eastern side of town away from the Pacific, gangs circle with first-hand knowledge of slain brothers-and-sisters in arms, and an intense suspicion of the law.

“E.R.” star Eriq La Salle appears in seven of the eight episodes as the supporting character Sarge, Sergeant Lasman. La Salle also directed the pilot and multiple episodes. His direction is adequate but his character never really pops.

Uniformed officers Harmon and Diaz work together under endlessly unnerving circumstances that, in the cop show tradition, their significant others can’t possibly understand. The ultimate fear: death out of the blue. In the pilot, a policewoman makes a routine traffic stop, finding a parolee behind the wheel, an unresponsive young woman in the passenger seat — and in the backseat a jumpy gangmember who we come to learn is nicknamed Maniac. Faster than you can drive through McDonald’s, he shoots the woman in blue in the carotid. Surprised, she falls, blood pumping out of her neck as a group of locals take phone camera pictures and no one steps up to help as the felon’s car screeches off.

This sense of danger — that any routine traffic stop could end in death — on the sunny streets doesn’t let up. Over multiple episodes, the central partners pursue Maniac, shaking up the hornet’s nest that is the local gang scene and riling the bald crime boss Smokey (Lobo Sebastian). Meanwhile, the officers encounter resistance back at the police station where Harmon remains persona non grata after a past incident where she crossed the thin blue line.

While the female-driven series apparently hopes to break the network model and embrace streaming — all eight episodes can easily be consumed with potato chips in a single evening — it doesn’t break new ground. It’s akin to “Dragnet” — nothing but the facts — or the original “Hawaii Five-0” or “Adam-12.”

The real weakness is the characters’ softness and lack of complexity. Harmon hoards her secrets with a perpetually stiff upper lip, which occasionally winces in laughter. The naïve but athletic Diaz. The cipher that is the Sergeant. And Lori Loughlin also returns to series television as a grimace of a lieutenant following her involvement in the Varsity Blues scandal. They all seem like shades of police officers from television shows past.

With a plethora of original “Law & Orders” airing in an addictive nonstop loop, I remain a sucker for the original series pairings. The new “On Call” characters have plenty of runway to make strong impressions, but they pale in comparison to standouts Jerry Orbach, Jesse L. Martin and Dennis Farina, as well as the indelible characters of Kathryn Erbe, Vincent D’Onofrio, Jeff Goldblum, Chris Noth, Julianne Nicholson, Saffron Burrows and Annabella Sciorra of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”

The writing, too, is intentionally spare, lacking the wit and barbed one-liners of the older one-hour shows. There are memorable sequences: a mob takeover of an intersection that’s challenging to contain, particularly with civilian cell phones turned on the police to monitor their every move; incidents of domestic violence where the police are summoned only to find themselves in the crossfire of the related combatants; back-alley foot chases with echoes of Kathryn Bigelow’s groundbreaking surfer noir “Point Break” and a shootout at a sleazy motel.

These aren’t particularly bad cops, but they’re not as compelling as they need to be to break through in a flooded marketplace. While the Wolf pack named the series “On Call,” don’t feel the obligation to put it on speed dial.

“On Call” premieres Thursday, Jan. 9 on Prime Video.

The post ‘On Call’ Review: Dick Wolf’s Prime Video Police Drama Won’t Reinvent the Genre appeared first on TheWrap.

The new Netflix documentary “Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action” actually alludes to that at one point, but that might be a bit of a stretch.

From its inception in 1991, Jerry Springer’s daytime talk show kept audiences on their feet with outrageous stories that appeared to be ripped from supermarket tabloids. That’s no coincidence: Within the first few minutes of the doc, you find out that the executive producer, Richard Dominick, was a former writer for the Sun and Weekly World News. Moreover, you learn that Springer would likely have never become Springer were it not for Dominick’s vision — for better or worse.

But it didn’t all start out like that. The first 20 minutes of this two-part documentary highlight the old Jerry. The serious Jerry. The Jerry who was once Mayor of Cincinnati and who won multiple regional Emmy awards for his news commentary. It’s surprising to hear that the King of Trash TV was such a buttoned up, reputable journalist and politician then. Then again, Jerry was the most “normal” aspect of his show. He was the voice of reason. So reasonable, in fact, that when his “serious” talk show began tanking in the ratings, he was open to doing literally whatever he could to ensure he would become a success.

From there, the first episode (much like the show itself) dives into what led to the show’s turn into the scandalous daytime chat circus it became, with insight from Dominick as well as other “Springer” insiders like producers Melinda Chait Mele, Annette Grundy, and Tobias Yoshimura. Headlines like “I Refuse to Wear Clothes,” “Diaper Bob,” “I Married A Horse,” and “Klanfrontation!” Snippets of guests revealing shocking surprises in various states of dress. And yes, plenty of fights — the same ones that really put “Jerry Springer” on the same playing field as the Queen of Talk Shows, Oprah. Oh, and they make it clear that Ms. Winfrey was clearly not a “Springer” fan.

Like many recent documentaries about once-beloved shows, this docuseries also sheds some light into bits of behind-the-scenes exploitation. There are revelations into how intensely overworked the producers were, and some of the general fear around EP Dominick. But the series also goes further to showcase the twisted ways in which guests were treated, hyping them up to scream and fight just before going out on stage, and even refusing to fly them back home if they decided they didn’t want to participate in the full episode.

By Episode 2, the series goes headfirst into some of the more impactful catastrophes brought on by Springer, namely the murder of a former guest at the hands of her ex not long after their episode aired on national television. Those of us who watched Springer in real time know that little to no thought was given to the very real people whose lives were affected by going on the show and airing their dirty laundry. To hear from the son of the murdered guest and how it affected his life was an important addition to this documentary, which could have just as easily continued to make a spectacle of Springer guests.

All in all, the only thing missing from this docuseries is hearing from Jerry Springer himself. The man whose name was chanted every weekday for 27 years passed away from pancreatic cancer in April 2023. Unable to speak for himself, it would have been nice to include a few more clips from past interviews to get more of an understanding of his take on the show. That said, there’s rarely an ill word spoken of him throughout both episodes, so maybe it’s not entirely necessary.

“Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action” is clearly made for everyone who chose to spend a few hours now and then watching the worst of humanity bare its soul on national television in the 90s. It was a show that came about at the right time, before everyone had a camera in their pocket ready to record the next big, shocking thing. And while it’s a bit much to blame it for the “Idiocracy” we keep moving toward, it definitely had a significant impact in pushing the culture toward more shock, violence and, well, trash. Can you really blame them for giving the people what they wanted?

“Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action” premieres Tuesday, January 7 on Netflix.

The post ‘Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action’ Review: Netflix Scratches the Surface of America’s Trashiest Talk Show appeared first on TheWrap.

Foremost, the Ben Stiller-backed, 2022 Apple TV+ series was such a brilliantly realized paranoid thriller/sci-fi satire of the work-life balance illusion — recreating its first season magic would be a herculean task under the best circumstances.

Then there were reports that creator Dan Erickson and more experienced co-showrunner Mark Friedman weren’t getting along to such an extent that “House of Cards” veteran Beau Willimon was brought in to smooth out the follow-up’s trajectory. Hollywood strikes notwithstanding, production delays also seemed ominous.

Whatever went down, Season 2 finally premieres Jan. 17. And while there’s more than a bit of wheel-spinning in its first few episodes, saying “Aha, I knew it!” will make you sound like a clueless Outie guessing what goes down on a Lumon Industries severed floor. The new season explores profound ideas about what having one’s consciousness split inside and out of the office means for the individuals who agreed to let a corporation surgically bifurcate their memories — and, as a result, their growingly divergent personalities.

After a few delays and typically obfuscating, “official” exposition, the MicroData Refinement division members find their way back to the carrel quad where they move numbers around computer screens all day.

In the wake of the Innies’ harrowing escape to their Outies’ minds at the end of last season, Adam Scott’s Mark Scout is at various times aware that mysterious wellness counselor Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman) is actually the wife he’s long thought dead. Mark has to cope with the increasingly urgent mission of finding and rescuing her from Lumon’s labyrinth of white hallways (and darker, more claustrophobic ones). Of course, his feelings for coworker Helly (Britt Lower) complicate that.

It’s hard to say whether Scott is at his complex best when trying to work out Mark’s feelings for Helly on the spot or manipulating and arguing among his various selves. Either way, it’s the most powerful portrayal since Bill Hader’s “Barry” of a disoriented soul by an actor who’s also the show’s key comedian.

Lower has an excellent poker face, especially when what’s behind it may be the face of corporate evil (You’ll recall Helly’s Outie was outed at the end of last season as Helena Eagan, scion of the family that owns Lumon). Yet while she can effortlessly make us forget whether we’re watching Helena or Helly, she doesn’t let us lose sight of either’s wants and needs for long. Each version finds herself in situations that require additional masks upon masks. Lower makes 3-D chess-style acting seem like the most natural thing in the world.

We learn a lot more about Dylan’s (Zach Cherry) Outie life and his Innie’s deeper feelings; both are near-unbearably poignant. While he plays a key role in the office politics of Season 2, John Turturro’s Irving really develops out in wintry gray Kier, the company town named after Lumon’s godlike founder. We also learn more about Irving’s office crush Burt, one of Christopher Walken’s tenderest characterizations (who, typically, he manages to make somewhat sinister all the same).

While still menacing in their distinctive, inscrutable ways, we see far more of severed floor supervisors Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and Seth Milchick’s (Tramell Tillman) tensions with their deity-like employers, and what that does to their own senses of themselves.

The impressive list of new hires includes Alia Shawkat, Bob Balaban, Gwendoline Christie, Merritt Wever (as usual, a nexus of emotional intelligence), Robby Benson (his aged face particularly ravaged, which suits the character he plays), Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, James Le Gros and John Noble. And those are just the famous S2 players we’ve not been instructed to keep secret.

Though the latest batch of episodes boasts fairly relentless spoofing of corporate culture (especially with Lumon’s new, post-Innie breakout agenda of concern for employee welfare), the metaphors lean more toward expanding weird lore than satirizing worker abuse. The extent of Kier-worshipping and importance placed on the MacGuffin-sounding “Cold Harbor” initiative this time around can feel like too much of some not so interesting things. Yet just as you fret that this profoundly intelligent show is heading the way of “X-Files,” “Lost” and countless other WTF series that crawl so far into world-building fantasy they lose sight of any point (or resolution), an episode will go deeper rather than just weirder.

Existential connundra related to Innie/Outie individuality — each iteration’s rights to their own lives, personae and relationships — is examined extensively. Several episodes take an abstract, feelings-forward approach; they’re interiors beyond inside out dialectics, if you will, and quite unlike anything the humor- and plot-driven first season addressed.

Location and some fine formal deviations add welcome variety to the Lumon-Kier monotony that, after all, is a defining feature of “Severance.” Gorgeous noir shadows appear in most episodes, which is doubly impressive for a show about overlit workspaces. Facial closeups are favored by Stiller and the other directors this season; they emphasize how the focus is on characters’ personal needs more than their situational reality this time around. There’s a spectacular night-on-the-severed-floor montage that leads to some climactic realizations. Theodore Shapiro’s remains the most bone-rattling score on television.

Still, nothing in Season 2 matches the orchestral cinematic majesty of S1’s closing chapter, “The Way We Are.” There may be something different that’s just as good, though, something more romantic than we’d expect from “Severance.” All four members of the MDR unit get mired in love triangles, even quadrangles, in and out of the office space. Each is heart-wrenching in its unique way.

Some of Erickson, Friedman and Willimon’s most thoughtful calculations have gone into working out the split personalities’ affections. If that’s the kind of job a contentious writers room produces, they’ve got to figure out a way to make that industry policy.

“Severance” Season 2 premieres Friday, Jan. 17 on Apple TV+.

The post ‘Severance’ Season 2 Review: Apple TV+ Drama Exceeds Herculean Expectations After a Long Wait appeared first on TheWrap.

A bomb aboard the plane was responsible for the carnage. The search for answers continues to this day, as American authorities are set to hold a federal trial for the latest suspect in the bombing that created the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the UK. The hunt for justice has left deep divisions between the victims’ families, and one advocate in particular, at the center of this Peacock miniseries, came to represent the knotty and obsessive hunt for the truth.

“How can you, of all people, prepare to be in the same room as him,” a particularly forward prison guard asks Dr. Jim Swire (Colin Firth) in the opening scene when he sits down to talk to Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (Ardalan Esmaili), who served time for the bombing while maintaining his innocence. It was the death of Swire’s daughter Flora in the bombing that led him to become one of the most vocal and oft-controversial figures in the aftermath. Before her murder, Swire was a normal middle-class doctor who loved his family, did house calls, and kept a stiff upper lip.

The destruction across Lockerbie, with debris crushing the town and leaving people’s homes in flames, is shown with brutal impact, as residents stand in shock at the wreckage of what was once their community. It’s a true vision of hell, with ash raining down from the skies and piles of bodies left in the ice rink for lack of more appropriate facilities. Bodies hang from trees. It’s a detailed and technically impressive set-piece that may nonetheless prove too much for those who remember the all-too-recent tragedy. Such is the eternal conundrum when depicting true-life events such as this: how far is too far in the name of combining reality with entertainment? Are scenes of dismembered limbs scored to dramatic strings at risk of turning this pain into something mawkish? The use of news footage from the era to show the accuracy of the production’s recreation only adds to the unease.

In the aftermath, Dr. Swire has no patience for the mandated peace of the mourning period. At a memorial service, he comes close to chewing out a politician whose non-answers infuriate him. While there, he meets Murray Guthrie (Sam Troughton), a local journalist with good intentions but iffy tactics, who serves as a handy expository vehicle for Swire. Guthrie eats chips in his car while listening to Deacon Blue, just so you know he’s really Scottish (perhaps a kilt would have been too much.) He becomes Swire’s right-hand man as well as the mouthpiece for the audience to get some of the trickier details of this very complex case. He’s also a fictional character created solely to fulfil this narrative purpose, which makes Troughton’s performance all the more misguided. He’s acting like the outsider journalist in a shady noir, sneaking into people’s homes to use their phones after scurrying through crime scenes and looking corpses in the eye. In a show that seems so earnest in its hunt for authenticity, often to a fault, this character seems like a mistake. Again, we come up against the intrinsic issues of fictionalizing history, one so recent that its details are still fresh in the minds of millions.

The rather hackneyed subtitle to this drama is “A Search for Truth” not “The Search”, because said truth has never been uncovered. The Lockerbie case is one that remains mired in conspiracy and diplomatic strife, and Dr. Swire’s hunt for answers proved to leave more questions than solutions. Firth, who remains the king of the stoic Englishman on screens big and small, does some of his finest work as a nice normal man pushed to fervor by grief and fury. Dr. Swire, like his work in “A Single Man” and “The King’s Speech”, is a figure who has long grown tired of maintaining a sense of so-called decorum, even if the occasion calls for it. The way he barely holds himself together when he sees his daughter’s body for the first time is heart-wrenching. Typical Firth stuff, then, which is handy since the show often struggles to create a full sense of this fascinating and complicated man. There’s so much history to cover, so much pain amid dense details, that it feels as though even our protagonist struggles to find his footing.

And there is a lot to get into, from Dr. Swire taking a flight with a fake bomb to prove the lax security at airports to fears of a cover-up to the convening of victims’ families groups where Dr. Swire becomes a spokesperson. A lot of information is conveyed as quickly as possible, usually through unnatural-sounding dialogue that frequently feels like readings of the Wikipedia page. Dr. Swire’s wife becomes resigned to the role of sad spouse as the endless battle for answers takes its toll on his family. The most fascinating scenes come when Dr. Swire finds himself at odds with other families who believe that the authorities got the right man when they arrested al-Megrahi, a decision that he would publicly condemn.

The series does capture the frustrating cycle of non-answers that continues to plague the case, exacerbated by the shroud of secrecy with tendrils that climb all the way to the top of the power pyramid. In Britain, many critics have compared the show to another recent miniseries about a miscarriage of justice, “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office.” That show delved into a scandal involving one of the country’s most beloved institutions and how a computer error led to hundreds of Post Office employees being accused of crimes they didn’t commit. Like Dr. Swire, Mr. Alan Bates was a steadfast soldier for the truth, and his efforts led to major change. Unlike Swire, however, there was an obvious villain for Bates to focus on. Swire and his fellow advocates remain in a Kafka-esque spiral of bureaucracy, redacted documents, and unresolved trauma. It is in this quandary where “Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” is able to shine amid the muddle. The pain of not knowing is vastly more agonizing than what closure can bring.

It’s not that “Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” is bad. Much of it is strikingly put together and Firth’s performance buoys those moments of emotion with skill and empathy. You can tell that the creative team, including Scottish playwright David Harrower and director Otto Bathurst, care deeply about doing this well. But there’s so much to cover in so little time, and even the deftest workers can be smothered by the tangled realities of making gripping TV out of the deaths of 270 people.

When the show cuts to the devastating news footage of the actual event, one can’t help but wonder if a documentary would have made more sense for telling this still-important story.

“Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” premieres Thursday, Jan. 2, on Peacock.

The post ‘Lockerbie: A Search for Truth’ Review: Peacock Series Is Overwhelmed by Britain’s Conspiracy-Heavy Tragedy appeared first on TheWrap.

To Smith’s credit, he doesn’t dismiss his subject as an outright kook even as Johnson goes through the rigorous amount of pills, tests, procedures and other routines in his quest to slow and reverse the aging process. There’s a genuine curiosity at work even as Smith intersperses the movie with voices of Johnson’s critics who observe that this wealthy man using his immense resources towards the benefit of himself and those around him feels both insular and self-serving. Smith also explores what would drive an individual to this level of obsession surrounding their health. How can we say this is a healthy individual if they’re willing to risk their health with risky experiments?

Unfortunately, Smith hits a snag from the outset by never questioning or seeking to define the terms set by Johnson and the anti-aging movement. Johnson, various doctors, and scientists in the anti-aging movement mention “biological age,” but that’s never adequately defined. When people talk about how quitting smoking can add years to your life, that’s a folk shorthand, not science. It would be like studying the effects of digesting apples and if they repel medical professionals on a daily basis. However, people in “Don’t Die” treat the human lifespan as something one can acquire or diminish through their actions like they’re the people with the digital arm counters in the sci-fi movie “In Time.” Quitting smoking and picking up exercise will probably add to your longevity, but there’s no way of knowing precisely how much, especially as every person is different.

The movie also stresses how Johnson’s body is “optimized,” but optimized for what? Smith never interrogates the tech-based language Johnson uses or the dangers of viewing human physiology not as a diverse range, but as hardware working at peak performance. This kind of language is also confusing because people pursue different goals in life. Michael Phelps had to eat a certain number of calories and swim a certain number of hours every day to become an optimal Olympic swimmer. But as others have observed, genetics yielded Phelps the “perfect body for swimming.” Why should we assume that what “works” for Johnson (assuming it’s even working) would be of benefit to anyone else?

This leads to the other major problem with Johnson’s project. He says he’s at the cutting edge of anti-aging science, but he’s a study of one. Although one doctor points out that all the experimentation funded by Johnson is only on himself and therefore far less useful than funding a controlled study, the movie is largely content to accept its subject’s premise that what he’s doing is medically rigorous and for the good of mankind. The film can never fully accept the fairly obvious truth that this is a sad, lonely rich guy forming a new obsession over his health and taking medical risks with his body. Instead, it wants to show that while Johnson may be controversial and perhaps even emotionally damaged, he is also at the forefront of a worthwhile health movement.

Smith can never square that circle because the health claims here only seem backed up by Johnson, his team and people who want more funding and support for anti-aging science. We are being sold something here, and what we’re being sold doesn’t even make a lot of sense. The movie acknowledges how few people have the time or funds to emulate Johnson’s “Blueprint” health regimen. Even if we did, why would we?

When the film ends with people surrounding Johnson and wearing his “Don’t Die” shirts as they go for a hike, I couldn’t help but wonder why Smith played the moment as a triumphant one. The film and Johnson are still resting on the lazy claims that we’re miserable because we’re eating junk food and not sleeping enough. But for Johnson and his ilk, the solution isn’t to fund healthier options in food deserts or promote teleworking so that people don’t have to get up early for tiresome commutes. It’s certainly not to combat climate change because you can’t exercise your way out of floodwaters taking your home. The “victory,” such that it exists, is that a lonely individual feels less lonely because he’s surrounded himself with people who share his fear of morality.

“Don’t Die” may want to be empathetic towards Johnson, but it overshoots its mark. The film lends far too much weight to his claims and takes advantage of an audience that may not go to the same lengths as Johnson but would be willing to accept his premise of extreme diet and exercise as a way to happiness. Should we eat better and exercise more? Sure, but there’s no need to couch these ideas in the trappings of quack science. If anything, “Don’t Die” may work better as a cautionary tale of what happens when you give your entire identity, thinking, and online persona to playing an avatar of fitness. It’s a shame that Smith seems to see such radical actions as mostly harmless.

“Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever” is now streaming on Netflix.

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Celebrated author Harlan Coben is known in the literary world for writing mystery novels with tantalizing characters and premises that challenge readers’ notions of reality. His books have been adapted for the small screen in recent years, mostly through Netflix, many of which have starred actor Richard Armitage in some capacity. His latest Netflix adaptation of which Coben executive produces, “Missing You,” follows a similar formula in a five-episode limited series that strives for quality but comes up short in the mystery department.

“Missing You” stars British actress Rosalind Eleazar as Detective Kat Donovan, a hard-nosed investigator with serious emotional baggage. Having lost her father to a gruesome murder years ago, Kat is determined to live out his legacy by throwing herself into police work. She’s focused on solving multiple cases at the same time, resulting in respect from colleagues and a department that still reveres her father’s work as a fellow police officer.

Desiring to move on with her personal life, Kat downloads a dating app and instantly connects with local single men. One of those matches, surprisingly, is Kat’s ex-boyfriend Josh (Ashley Walters). The kicker? Kat’s ex suspiciously disappeared from her life over a decade ago, leaving no trace of his whereabouts.

As her past begins to materialize into the present once again, Kat finds herself at a crossroads between her personal struggles and trying to impress her boss (Armitage). She confronts her father’s killer as he lies dying in prison, only to expose more puzzling elements to an ongoing saga. A murder that was thought to have been solved years ago may have been perpetrated by someone else.

But who could have actually killed her father? Why would her boyfriend ghost her for over 10 years? Is everyone involved in a massive cover-up? Who can she trust? And why is a creepy, uptight dog breeder (Steve Pemberton) surfacing from the fray with the key to solving all her riddles?

The answers to these questions, and more, come to light in “Missing You,” hardly ever in a satisfying manner. Harlan Coben’s latest television adaptation is a mess of subplots that focus on several disappearances simultaneously, while Kat discovers that the many men in her life constantly betray her. She’s on a crusade to uncover the truth about her father’s possible corrupt intentions and her ex-boyfriend’s potential involvement, all while investigating multiple cases involving other missing people.

Simply put, there are an absurd number of “disappearances” to keep track of, yet they might all somehow be related to one another.

“Missing You,” much like Coben’s other Netflix ventures “The Stranger” and “Safe,” involves convoluted storytelling that leaves the lead character with very little to work with in their pursuit for the truth. There always seems to be a final twist in the very last episode of these types of shows, and “Missing You” is no different. The twist-ending attempts to wrap everything up in a neat bow, but the gift is never as rewarding as the journey to unwrap it.

Rosalind Eleazar does a fantastic job with the material she’s given, providing enough space for Kat’s anguish and trips down memory lane in order to convey a troubled woman on the verge of opening Pandora’s crime-ridden box. The series understands the limitations of telling an absorbing story in five episodes, never filling it with fluff but rather getting straight to the point. This structure comes across as fearless in its approach to keeping the premise going quickly.
Still, some issues arise, like when Kat and Josh match on the dating app instantly after she downloads it — a truly remarkable turn of events that leads her to pursue the truths kept hidden from her.

Quick flashbacks of Kat and Josh to the same karaoke scene set to the tune of John Waite’s “Missing You” are no substitute for getting to the nitty gritty of their past love affair. The show, adapted from the 2014 novel of the same name, never lives up to the promise that this relationship was worth fighting for. In uncovering the truth about Josh’s whereabouts and her father’s murder, secrets are revealed to Kat in surprising, yet often forgettable ways, largely due to a lack of villains with concrete motives and a final twist ending that one could see coming from a mile away.

“Missing You” premieres Wednesday, Jan. 1, on Netflix.

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Perhaps that’s just one of the many reasons — along with the well-documented fatigue he endured making it the first go around — Hwang held out before announcing he was ready to move forward with a second offering. And it was well worth the three-year wait.

“Squid Game” Season 2 arrives more brutal, haunting, effective — and yes, in its twisted way — entertaining than ever. The premiere picks up in the final moments of the first season, with Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) preparing to re-enter the games to confront the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) and shut them down for good. Two years quickly pass as Seong steals himself away inside an abandoned motel, pouring in his resources from winning the game to create a vast network to hunt down Gong Yoo’s Salesman and find a way back, hell-bent on stopping another cycle. Elsewhere, Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) nurses his wounds after being fished out of the water near the island where the games occurred after being shot by his brother last season. It doesn’t take long for the two men’s paths to cross, as they hatch a plan to take down the Front Man once and for all.

Once Seong finds himself back in the game, a familiar sense of dread comes to the surface. As with last time, there is a mix of memorable supporting characters: a rapper named Thanos (easily a favorite in the bunch and bound to be a standout, played by Choi Seung-hyun aka Korean music star T.O.P., complete with purple hair and Infinity Stone-colored nails), crypto influencer Lee Myung-gi (Im Si-wan) and his ex-girlfriend Kim Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri), former marine Dae-ho (Kang Ha-neul), a woman in the midst of transitioning Cho Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon), a mother (Kang Ae-shim) and her burnout son (Yang Dong-geun), Seong’s friend Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan), and plenty of others all with their own reasons for wanting the prize money. Combine these archetypes alongside a redux of Red Light-Green Light, and “Squid Game” threatens to rely too much on its established formula.

But what’s old now becomes violently new as Hwang weaponizes Seong’s (and the audience’s) expectations of what the game might be to radically reinvent itself and “Squid Game” in the process. Season 2 often calls back — either spiritually or directly — to iconic moments or character beats from last time, but through a funhouse mirror that warps and distorts them into something more horrifically memorable. Hwang doesn’t stop at going bigger and bolder either, deciding to go deeper into the logistics of the games themselves, courtesy of a new character, No-eul, played by Park Gyu-young. Instead of losing the intrigue around how the sausage is made, Hwang allows for more mystery to unfold. The savviest decision is the more active role the Front Man takes, allowing audiences to get to know the man behind the mask.

Despite a shorter episode order — seven this time instead of nine — Hwang allows for plenty of space around the proceedings, with his direction and writing (he’s on double duty for both tasks again this time) as strong as ever. What becomes quietly devastating is how willing the participants seem to be this time around, especially after realizing what’s at stake. The world has become a harsher place since the last games, and the players involved are willing to do whatever it takes to get to the prize money, despite Seong’s protests and attempts to play hero. The games are hauntingly photographed, allowing for tension to build and build, exploding with a propulsion that makes Season 2 even more watchable than last time.

The only part that slows things down is Hwang’s search for where the games occur. It’s not as dynamic as everything else. It’s very clearly a building block to a more substantial plot for the upcoming third and final season, and therefore, a little too early on how it will all resolve.

Lee Jung-jae is tasked with selling quite the transformation for Seong this season, moving closer in line to a full-on action hero than the stumbling and bumbling oaf he was in the season prior. It’s an extremely believable performance, becoming more empathic based on the audience’s pre-existing relationship. Every time he warns the new cadre of players about the dangers to come, we can feel the weight of his survivor’s guilt hanging over his every decision. Lee Byung-hun’s take on the Front Man this season will be a real standout, with his shifting role in the games marking one of the season’s best developments. Hwang gets a lot of mileage out of the pre-existing character relationships, most notably Yang and Kang’s mother/son duo, who are a consistent source of laughs across these continued dour times. Just like Jung Ho-yeon’s Kang Sae-byeok served as the show’s beating heart last season, so does Park as Cho, whose transgender journey is handled in a lovely and affecting way. And that’s to say nothing of Thanos, who joins the pantheon of television bad guys in short order, yet something about him remains endlessly appealing despite it. After last season’s cast of characters, it was going to be a tall order to make a new and compelling cast, and yet, Hwang makes it look effortless.

Sequels are always a difficult proposition. How do you appease fans of the previous iteration without it being a carbon copy of what’s come before? How do you evolve without losing the soul of what made it a hit in the first place? Can the show still have something meaningful to say? These questions, and many others, are ones that the series addresses head-on, resulting in the rare sequel that’s just as much a worthy successor to what’s come before.

The popularity and expectations around “Squid Game” may no longer be an unknown quantity. But that doesn’t mean the show can’t still find bold new ways to surprise.

“Squid Game” Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.

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One of these enduring images is Count Orlock, played with otherworldly death and menace by Max Schreck in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent classic “Nosferatu.” Unlike Bela Lugosi, Gary Oldman and most of the other headlining motion picture vampires, Orlock was not an alluring sexual creature. He was an overgrown rat, emaciated and sunken, lurking in the shadows until he, too, became a shadow. He was nightmare writ large, a wraith haunting a reel of celluloid. Perhaps cinema’s most horrifying creation.

So when you remake “Nosferatu,” as both Werner Herzog and now Robert Eggers have, you’re not just retelling the story — which is now and always was a rehash of “Dracula” so shameless that the Bram Stoker’s estate successfully sued Murnau, and almost every copy of the film was destroyed. You are instead invoking a demon. Herzog’s excellent retelling cast Klaus Kinski as the beast, a weird outsider infecting Germany with his appetites and plague rats. He was Orlock, but he was also Kinski, and that was freaky enough, thank you very much.

Eggers has unleashed a mutated strain of this terror in his “Nosferatu” remake. This Count Orlock is a gruesome monstrosity, gnawed on and gnarled, as repulsive as movie monsters get. But he is now also that sexual creature, a hypermasculine 1970s porn star, as virile as he is virulent. He doesn’t seduce women with the elegant sophistication of Lugosi or the underrated Frank Langella; he oozes testosterone from his festering, ancient wounds. He’s a threat to mankind, no matter how evil he is, and he is absolutely going to sleep with your wife.

The wife in question is Ellen Hutter, played by Lily-Rose Depp. She’s been tormented by erotic visions of Orlock since she was a very young girl, which only subsided when she married a nice, safe, sexually adequate young man named Thomas, played by Nicholas Hoult. When he’s called away to the Carpathian Mountains on a business trip, to sell property to and escort Orlock back to Germany, he leaves Ellen alone and vulnerable. Her visions resume, her sanity is cracked, and her wedded friends Anna (Emma Corrin) and Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) are helpless to protect her.

If you’ve seen one “Dracula,” you’ve got the gist of them all, so you can tell where much of “Nosferatu” is going even if you didn’t see the one with a rat monster in it. The hapless husband is tormented in Orlock’s castle, and nearly killed by the beast. Orlock travels to Germany, bringing countless plague rats with him, and attempts to seduce his victim’s sexually deprived wife over to sensual, overwhelming darkness. An eccentric professor, here named Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), is the only person of science who believes in superstitions, and holds the key to understanding the monster, even if he cannot defeat him.

Robert Eggers’ films all have ancient qualities to them. “The Witch” is a time machine to colonial New England, when religious zealotry made evil manifest. “The Lighthouse” isn’t as old a tale, but it evokes an eldritch Lovecraftian quality that makes it seem like a half-remembered, half-whispered horror classic. “The Northman” finds the original version of “Hamlet” to be a viking epic, a legend of operatic swords and sorcery. All of them find humanity on the brink — of society as well as our own sanity.

With “Nosferatu,” Eggers spends much of the film in an urban cityscape, a black, white and grey cesspool of fecal matter thrown from second-story windows. To describe Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography as haunted does the film little justice. This “Nosferatu” dances on the line between German Expressionism and modern visual extremism. Everything in Eggers’ “Nosferatu” is huge, overwhelming and deeply uncomfortable — and even when it’s modern, it feels divorced from modernity.

The creature, played by Bill Skarsgård under heavy makeup, speaks with a reverberating thrum that evokes Tuvan-Mongolian throat-singing. His voice isn’t coming from somewhere in the room, you can feel it in your bones. His performance is a force of nature, not in the hacky film criticism cliché sort of way, but actually emerging from the earth. Depp matches him point for point; her scenes of spiritual possession are physically exhausting, for us and presumably her, and her temptation is viscerally uncontrollable. Between “Nosferatu” and (through no fault of her own) the unfortunately terrible HBO series “The Idol,” Depp has proven herself to be as game a performer as any in recent memory. She throws herself into her roles, quite literally, letting her torments run amok on camera. She strides up the precipice of camp and stops right before plummeting. It’s a monumental turn.

Oddly, it’s Hoult who feels out of place. For years now, Hoult has positioned himself as the dashingly handsome Peter Lorre of his generation, eager to dive into oddball characters, enlivening any film lucky enough to have him. As Thomas Hutter, he plays the everyman, an adequate partner whose comfort is preferable, arguably, to Orlock’s chaos, earning our pity even though we totally get why Ellen would prefer the shambling corpse. Hoult is too eclectic a character actor for a role that demands milquetoastiness, and he always feels uncomfortably restrained, like he’s ready to do much more but hasn’t got his permission slip signed.

Quibbles, nothing but quibbles. Eggers may not have rewritten the book of “Nosferatu,” and much of the film plays more like an update than a wholly new take, but he does justice to this material. And he does more than justice to Orlock: Eggers and Skarsgård give him new (un)life, empowering him in ways that make all the rest of us feel powerless. It’s a grim, gorgeous fever dream, and while the original is the version that will forever stick in our subconscious, Eggers’ film is looming right behind it, bolstering its legacy and adding a few horrifying details of its own.

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