Cult members, serial bigamists, and motorcycle trips with old friends

There's a lot of crazy shit on your TV right now

It’s Friday, September 25! Let’s have a free-for-all!

I think I finally figured out what’s been bothering me about the frantic rush to get us back into movie theaters in the US.

I get the emotional side of wanting to go back. I get the impact it’s having on the industry and I am well aware of how many theaters could end up out of business after this. I get how scary it is for studios and how this is going to have a huge ripple effect for the next decade in what gets made and how it gets made and how we end up seeing it.

But what I don’t get is how anyone could feel like they’re not absolutely awash in options for things to watch right now. I’m sure there are things you’d like to see. I’m sure there are things you are waiting for or that you feel particularly excited about. That’s true for me, too.

But do we actually need anything to come out right now?

Nope, because there is still a small avalanche of media released almost every day of the week, and if I can’t keep up with everything I’m interested in, I can’t imagine how anyone else can, either.

I don’t know how I feel about that unending ocean of media. Clearly, I love the things I love, and I think about media constantly, and I am working on making media of my own for you to consume, so I’m a giant hypocrite if I say there should be less of it…

… but it kind of feels like there should be less of it, right? Right now, our pop culture is voracious. There’s so much of it, all of it screaming at you, demanding your attention, and there’s a feeling sometimes that because it’s all so fragmented, part of the disconnect we’re feeling as people is that we aren’t all sharing things in a communal way anymore. I hate when a show drops eight episodes in one day because the two options are (A) watch them all immediately just to be able to write about them at the moment they are “hot,” or (B) sit out the conversation because my pace is not the same pace as anyone else.

I’m digging The Boys and Raised By Wolves right now, but I’m behind in both of them. My girlfriend and I are closing in on the very end of season five of Schitt’s Creek right now, and we didn’t start watching because of the Emmy nominations, but simply because I finally felt like I might be interested, and the timing turned out to be just right for us. We have lost the motivation to watch for pleasure and exchanged it for a sense of pressing obligation, and that can’t be right.

I’ve been watching the gospel of Ted Lasso start to spread over the last three or four weeks, and I can’t help but think it would be happening more rapidly if Ted Lasso had an “airdate,” a time when people could all be watching it and talking about it together. Instead, because of the way streaming services drop things, there’s a sort of slow trickle that happens over several days. I think word of mouth is working for the show, and can still work for things, but I think the blockbuster mentality, that instant explosion of everyone everywhere instantly being on the same page about something, may be a casualty of this pandemic, and I’m not sure I mind. Hits are going to have to be judged by a different standard now, as are flops.

Contemplating the collapse of every single industry I work in isn’t the best way to get myself motivated to be productive. The good news is that I’m enjoying that writing project I mentioned in a recent newsletter. I’m about 1/3 of the way into a new script now, and I actually like it. It’s a creepy little thing, and I hope I still enjoy it this much when I’m done with it. I actually think I’ll finish, which isn’t something that has happened with many screenplays here at Casa De McWeeny recently. If nothing else, it’s turned out to be a pretty terrific way to warm up old muscles, and I suspect this won’t be my last screenplay after all.

Meanwhile, the world rolls on.

Both Fantastic Fest and Beyond Fest are underway. Fantastic Fest has embraced a fully-digital identity this year, while Beyond Fest is doing an all drive-in edition. I applaud both approaches. I love that the Overlook Film Festival is doing their version of things by collaborating with a bunch of regional horror festivals on NightStream. SXSW just sent out a press release about how they’re going to be doing a virtual edition next spring, and it’s good to see them planning for how to rebound after they were one of the first events to make the wrenching decision to pull the plug this year.

It’s never going to feel the same, a virtual festival, but last night, I watched Teddy, the opening night movie, as well as a big chunk of 100 Best Kills: Decapattack! and then wrapped things up with Possessor, the Brandon Cronenberg film that played both Fantastic Fest and Beyond Fest. For the Fantastic Fest titles, I made sure to watch the pre-show package they put together. I’ll be honest… some of my favorite memories from any Fantastic Fest involve sitting in that theater watching the pre-show collage of weirdness from around the world, getting ready for the movie about to start. It was a very bittersweet feeling, watching it on my own couch in the middle of the night, and I’m deeply grateful for that sensation right now.

If you’re even remotely interested in the Fantastic Fest experience this year, I want to encourage you STRRRRONGLY to RSVP for their Secret Screening, which is a big fat slice of delightful.

It’s tricky knowing what to recommend to people these days because it’s hard to know where anyone is emotionally, what they’re dealing with during all of this. Something that would be soothing or fun to one person might be nails on a chalkboard for another. That’s why I’ve always maintained the position that I cannot tell you what you will or won’t like. All I can do as a critic is try to describe something, set it in a context, and give you my reaction to it. You have to decide if that thing sounds interesting or worthwhile to you.

I’ve read plenty of good reviews for things I have no intention of ever watching or listening to or reading. I’ve read reviews for live shows I didn’t attend, for entire genres of things I don’t care about, simply because I enjoyed the read or because I was curious. Criticism is not just meant to serve as a Cliffs Note companion for something, and it’s not a consumer report that is designed to tell you conclusively what you’ll think or feel.

I will give almost anything a try, but I find I am increasingly unlikely to hang around for long if I’m not getting anything out of a film or a series or a book. For everything you see listed on the weekly media report I publish, there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t get listed because it didn’t get finished. My girlfriend and I tried The Americans recently and it didn’t really stick. I thought it reminded me of the same exact rhythm I got from watching Ozark, but I liked Ozark more and I had already finished Ozark, so I wasn’t sure I wanted to dip right back in for more of that same dynamic. Married couple. Impossible situation. Lots of lies and betrayals. The law closing in from all sides. I didn’t even dislike what I saw of The Americans. I just wasn’t in the mood for it right now.

My girlfriend likes documentaries, so I recently started showing her one of the great documentary projects of all time. So far, she’s seen 7 Up, 7 Plus Seven, and 21 Up, and she’s definitely enjoying them. It’s been a while since I’ve seen any of them, and I haven’t seen the latest one yet, so it’s a treat for me to revisit the full series. If you haven’t seen them, it’s a series of documentaries made every seven years since 1964. The filmmakers picked just over a dozen English schoolkids to interview, chosen from across a wide spectrum of lifestyles and family backgrounds. Those kids are in their 60s today, and not all of them are still involved with the films, but enough of them have returned, film after film, that it has become one of the great film experiments, yielding rich human results.

We’ve watched a lot of documentary series together, and if you give me a well-produced show like Chef’s Table BBQ (the episode on Tootsie Tomanetz and Snow’s BBQ is gorgeous storytelling and next-level food porn), I’m pretty easy to entertain. I’m not as sold on the nonstop parade of suffering and horror that the true-crime genre seems to have produced. There’s a sameness to a lot of it, and I find the cruelty hard to take as entertainment. I don’t judge anyone who finds a different value in it than I do, but it’s largely not my bag. There are, of course, exceptions, and there are two documentary series right now that I’ve been enjoying quite a bit, even if they are about deeply difficult subject matter.

I’m not surprised I ended up enjoying Love Fraud on Showtime. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady have been making strong, smart, human documentaries for over a decade now. I love Jesus Camp and 12th & Delaware, and I thought their tribute to Norman Lear was just gorgeous. They made a four-part documentary series about Richard Scott Smith, a serial con artist who married tons of women and who stole money from them and manipulated them. The series is focused on the women who have been left in Smith’s wake who have, slowly, started to come together as a community. They’re trying to find him since he’s a fugitive from the law, and they use a blog as a sort of rallying point. Each episode brings the filmmakers and Smith’s victims closer to him, and the structure of the show allows you to see the human scale of the damage he leaves behind in his wake. I think if the show was just a list of damage done, I wouldn’t have much use for it. What makes it fascinating is the focus on the women and their righteous anger and the way they use that anger.

The show only runs four one-hour episodes, and each one feels like a radically different piece of the story. Instead of just relying on further outrageous detail to keep us hooked, the structure is far more focused on the notion of whether or not there can be justice when you’re dealing with someone like Smith. He’s this unknown quantity for three full episodes, which allows us to get to know the women as well as the various agents they ask for help. I particularly love Carla, the chain-smoking bounty hunter. It’s only in that final episode that you’re going to finally get to come face to face with the target of this hunt, and how you feel about this show will largely depend on how you feel about the way Ewing and Grady treat Smith in this moment. I think they’re very smart. They let him talk, and the more he talks, the deeper the hole he digs for himself.

There’s also something crafty about the way the structure hides a bitter pill right at the end. The show manages to make you feel both discouraged about the way a scumbag like this can constantly keep moving forward, manipulating people and the system without any consequences, then hopeful because it looks like you’re seeing some actual justice unfold. Love Fraud doesn’t fully land its thesis until the last scene of the last episode, and it’s clear that this is ultimately a piece about how impossible it is to stop someone like Smith. People like him exist to ride the system’s flaws, and they have figured out exactly what they can get away with. It is infuriating, and I suspect there are plenty of people like him out there. Ewing and Grady know how deeply the system is broken, and as much as they’d like to end their show with a triumphant gotcha, that’s not the ending people get in life.

At least, not always. It’s very comforting to know that Keith Raniere and the people who helped him perpetuate the NXIVM cult are behind bars. I know that at the start of HBO’s new documentary series, The Vow, so there’s no suspense to the series for me, but that doesn’t seem to be the point. Instead, this show’s structure is much more focused on showing you not only what the cult was like but why and how people ended up involved with it and how they stayed involved with it. By building the show around Sarah Edmondson and her husband Tippy, Mark Vicente and his wife Bonnie Piesse, and Catherine Oxenberg, the series makes a very strong case that it is not the people you’d think who fall prey to these things.

We all like to think we couldn’t get fooled by a process like this, an organization like this, a belief system like this. It makes us feel good from the outside to judge these people, and I was guilty of that at the start of the series. Episode by episode, though, most of them are revealed to be well-meaning people who genuinely thought they were doing something that not just good for them but good for other people. Much of the methodology of what Raniere did through his organization is basically just the same bag of tricks that Scientology employs, and maybe it’s because I’ve read enough about how they indoctrinate people that it seems clear what the machinery of NXIVM was, but there’s a reason it works. When people want to improve themselves, they are vulnerable, and most of the people who hand themselves over to these groups do so because they trust that other people are the same way they are, genuinely motivated, sincere in their efforts to do good.

The Vow does an excellent job of taking you step-by-step through the way these people woke up to what was happening. You see how each person had a different boiling point, a different thing that finally made them realize they were being manipulated and used. It’s taking its time telling this story, and as a result, they’re not victims and villains. It’s a step by step collapse of a community that was built around this false idea, around this petty little bullshit artist.

Guys like Raniere are not terribly different than guys like Richard Scott Smith. They’re just better at it. It makes me wonder how much is a native gift for manipulation and how much of it is learned behavior. Raniere seems to have been highly organized, and I don’t think you create a “multi-level marketing company” like NXIVM without some very specific intent. He studied Scientology, Amway, and neuro-linguistic programming, and when you see all of the footage that the makers of The Vow had access to, it’s clear that Raniere basically just glued those things together into his own particular culty Push-Me-Pull-You. Smith seems more like an animal, doing what he does out of instinct. The techniques are crude versions of the same ones Raniere uses, which explains why Smith isn’t successful enough to create a cult or keep his scams rolling for very long. Raniere built his kingdom of bullshit to last, and if all he’d really wanted was money, he could have probably kept NXIVM rolling forever. At heart, they are both liars who use love as a tool rather than actually feeling it, building these false bonds as a compulsion.

I’m curious to see how they wrap up The Vow. It’s still unfolding, a new episode every Sunday night, and it’s much longer than Love Fraud. It feels like it needs that kind of breadth, though. This is a larger story and a genuinely horrible one. Somehow, this series avoids feeling like a litany of horrors, though, and is instead a very human portrait of something that can be hard to understand even though it plays out as a sad and ugly cycle, again and again and again.

And finally, we are taking some real solace from the arrival of Long Way Up, the new series with Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman. I thoroughly enjoyed both Long Way Round and Long Way Down, the previous two series about their motorcycle trips, and I had no idea there was a third one in the works. The first was 2004, the second was 2007, and then… nothing. For a long time.

They address that in the first episode here, and they set up some pretty interesting stakes for the trip. McGregor and Boorman want to make the trip using electric vehicles, and when they start the conversation, no such motorcycle exists. There are also serious questions about charging stations and the feasibility of making the trip they’re talking about from the southern tip of Argentina all the way to Los Angeles. By the end of the first episode, some of those questions have been addressed, but not all of them, and it’s still not clear exactly what’s going to happen.

The real draw of the series for me is seeing two old friends try to repair a distance that has grown between them. There was no plan for them to take this long to make a third series, but both of them ended up getting busy in different ways. As they were starting to talk about doing a third series, Boorman has a fairly serious motorcycle accident, has to go through rehab, then has another. It’s a daunting start to any journey, and there’s a sense in the first episode that they’re getting used to one another again as friends. I can relate to that. The older I get, the harder it is to make time to see the people that are important to me. They’ve got families, I’ve got my family, we all work crazy hours, and geography can be a real problem. That doesn’t mean I care less about them, or that they’re not important to me. It’s just the way things work, and time can slip away so easily.

I think I’m generally fascinated by projects that play with time. I love Linklater’s Before trilogy and his film Boyhood, and as I mentioned, my girlfriend and I are neck-deep in Michael Apted’s Up series. Although it wasn’t designed that way, Long Way Up is arriving a full 16 years after that first trip, and there’s a whole different weight to it than there were for the earlier editions. Apple TV+ will be dropping new episodes for the next several weeks, and I look forward to seeing how close they get to their goal by the end of the series.

AND FINALLY….

The most exciting thing about the news that James Gunn is going to do a prequel series about Peacemaker, John Cena’s character from The Suicide Squad, is that Gunn is set to write every episode himself.

I don’t automatically think that’s the way shows should be done, but I am excited because it sounds like Gunn came up with this idea organically, out of genuine enthusiasm for the characters he’s been playing with for the last year and a half or so. Gunn’s got plenty of options right now, and he doesn’t have to do a television spinoff to a film he’s still finishing. But clearly he and John Cena had a good experience and they’re eager to do something else with the character. Gunn’s been very clear that audiences shouldn’t read into the time frame of the series, and that you shouldn’t be sure you know who will or won’t survive the film.

Superhero movies feel largely safe and corporate, and considering the budgets on them, that makes sense. Now that the entire economy of movies is about to change for the next few years, I’m not sure you’ll see them greenlighting quite as many giant $250-million-plus films. They’re going to have to be more selective, and my guess is that you’re going to see superhero television get more daring and adventurous as a result. Watchmen’s Emmy win was a huge validation of a big swing that Damon Lindelof took, and The Boys is making really smart choices in its second season, not only subverting the genre but making some pointed social commentary at the same time. The Umbrella Academy, Doom Patrol, Harley Quinn, and of course the upcoming WandaVision, which released a truly bonkers trailer this week…

… they all look like they’re determined to do things we wouldn’t see in movies, and they’re doing it really well. I’m having a great time with these TV shows precisely because they are free to try almost anything. They don’t all work all the time, but I love the feeling that anything goes right now. I hope Gunn’s movie is a blast, and I have faith in him. But more than that? I hope the show is an unbridled hoot.

So, after all of that, here’s the Friday Free-For-All question:

What’s your favorite superhero show on the small screen so far?

It can be something as high-falutin’ as Lindelof’s Watchmen or as ridiculous as Misfits of Science. There are no wrong answers here… but there may be ridiculous costumes.

As always, you do not have to discuss the question. That’s just a suggestion, a starting point. The Free-For-All is exactly that… a place for you guys to talk about anything. My one rule is that you’ve got to be decent to each other. Beyond that, I want to know what’s on your mind as we head into the weekend.

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Image courtesy of HBO Max
Image courtesy of Baxter Films
Image courtesy of Showtime
Image courtesy of HBO
Image courtesy of Apple TV+
Image courtesy of Warner Bros