A Journey To The Streaming Universe Part Two
I Don't Take Streaming Technology For Granted. Also, Some personal recommendations from HULU, Roku, and Netflix
As I detailed in Part One, I can’t emphasize enough what a minor miracle it is to have a reliable streaming service with relatively few outages. Ironically, after escaping physical Winters which forced confinement, COVID then reared its ugly head and forced confinement again.
Here are some shows I have enjoyed in the “binge-watching” category that helped me to escape.
This series takes place as a hybrid fictional/historical drama in Los Angeles at the time of the advent of the Crack Cocaine epidemic. Damson Idris plays Franklin Saint, a young man who is financially struggling, working at odd jobs to help support himself and his mother Cissy, played by Michael Hyatt. As the episodes progress, we see Franklin, a straight-laced and intelligent scholar, loyal to his mother, drawn through financial desperation into his Uncle’s marijuana distribution network, and an uneasy relationship with his estranged father. Franklin soon is pulled by the lure of big money and temptation into larger and more dangerous criminal arenas, and Franklin and his Uncle, played by Amin Joseph, soon find themselves dealing with the C.I.A., who are seeking distributors in order to profit from cocaine sales to finance the illegal war in Nicaragua.
This is edge of your seat, well scripted and superbly acted drama, and the level of performance is as good as it gets.
I feel like decades had passed since I saw Michael Keaton in any major movie or television production, perhaps the last time being a starring role as Batman. In “Dopesick” Keaton, older, wiser, and empathetic, in an understated but powerful performance, plays a small-town doctor in a Virginia mining town at the beginning of the opioid epidemic. Catalyzed by the greed and excess of Purdue Pharmaceuticals Sackler family, “Dopesick” is a fictionalized story dramatizing Perdue deceptively marketing an extremely addictive and deadly drug, OxyContin, as non-addictive. All the characters are fictional composites of people the real-life crisis actually affected. Great acting across the board and maybe one of Keaton’s best performances ever.
I discovered this show by pure accident, and after seeing good reviews I was curious. It has become one of my favorites, a sort of quirky, delightful, documentary-style sitcom. The series stars Pamela Adlon (Best known, speaking of quirky, as the voice of Bobby Hill on the animated series ”King Of The Hill”) as a fictionalized version of herself, actress Sam Fox. The stories don’t necessarily have an arc, it’s just life happening to Sam, facing life’s challenges and realities head-on, while supporting her mother and three daughters. The cinematography is outstanding, unlike any series I have seen, and the musical score will have you running to Spotify to see the eclectic artists and songs Adlon handpicks to highlight the moments. Adlon is laugh-out-loud funny, and her “fictional self” comes off as completely natural. Apparently, the stories are based on her real-life, no surprise.
Amanda Seyfried leads a cast in the true story of a hyper-intelligent, but morally bankrupt and slightly sociopathic college dropout, who has an idea to revolutionize medical technology that could change the face of medicine. The only problem is that it is scientifically and practically impossible to implement.
Starting out as a socially inept misfit, and rejected by her peers and College professors, she follows personal mentors like “fellow” dropouts Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (and er…YODA) as inspiration to drop out of a promising College career herself, and pursue her ambition.
She soon develops the confidence to draw in financial support from some of the richest corporations and individuals in the world, including Walgreens Henry Kissinger, and George Schultz. It’s a great swindle story of the 2000s.
OK. Boomer alert. You caught me. But hear me out. This is one of the most popular series in the entire history of television, and to this day, is still aired across major broadcast platforms. The first episodes were aired in 1957, the year I was born, so it’s 64 years in the running. But like Classical music, well-written situation comedy resonates over time. The characters, the stories, the moral lessons are the same. When I first encountered this show as a kid, it would be in random episodes. The references to characters or situations from previous episodes made no sense out of context. So watching The Beaver episodes in sequence, as they originally aired was a minor revelation. There are far more references to the contemporary culture of the time that I missed (Tony Curtis, President Eisenhower, Spartacus, The Russians to name a few) and Ken Osmond deserves a lifetime achievement award for his classic comic portrayal of Eddie Haskell. Not that ALL the cast including Frank Bank and Richard Deacon weren’t brilliant and funny as well. Give it a try.
With the exception of Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant 2001: A Space Odyssey, “DARK” remains my second most favorite Sc-Fi excursion of all time. Like “Odyssey” it is impossibly complex and difficult to explain. Suffice to say that the title is an understatement. This German-produced film weaves a dense narrative of characters who, through time travel, interact with past, present, and future selves after the discovery of a mysterious cave underneath a nuclear plant . The movie is complex enough that Netflix created an interactive website without spoilers so you can have a scorecard, or “Who’s Who”. If you really love the themes of Science Fiction and time travel and don’t miss this.
(Watch This Space for more suggestions down the road.)