This light comedy series deserves its reputation as enjoyable. The six-season show, which aired from 2015 through this spring, costars Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, who both also co-produce the program.
The premise of an extremely wealthy family losing their wealth and going to live in a small rural town, is silly. Schitt’s Creek essentially reverses the premise of the popular CBS comedy The Beverly Hillbillies, by replacing that show’s iconic grandmother character with O’Hara’s eccentric wife and mother and two adult kids as unlikely to launch as Elly Mae and Jethro. You can get a sense of Schitt’s Creek from the name of one of its main characters, who also happens to be the town’s mayor, Roland Schitt (Chris Elliott). I think I laughed out loud during almost every episode of the entire series.
With an affected, gay son (Dan Levy) and a dim, shallow daughter (Annie Murphy), the married couple played by Levy and O’Hara anchor the series. O’Hara steals every scene as a vain actress. Eugene Levy plays it straight. These comedians, whose enduring careers trace back together to films and Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe and television program, provide hilarious material, bits and performances. Levy’s real life son and daughter have a hand in both production and regularly starring roles.
Standout episodes encompass later season story arcs involving O’Hara‘s character appearing in a direct-to-video horror sequel and the Levy character trying to launch a new business venture. Emily Hampshire as aimless Stevie, Jenn Robertson as perky Jocelyn, Karen Robinson as hardened Ronnie, Dustin Milligan as wholesome Ted and Noah Reid as entrepreneurial Patrick round out the cast of townies.
Capitalism is Schitt’s Creek’s central plot springboard. It’s what powers the series, which has the sign of the dollar in the title. Each character requires capitalism to mine humor and make progress. For example, the husband and father makes a long, slow and steady comeback from being a former video store businessman thrust into impoverishment to mentoring an associate who studies, learns from and mirrors his money-making skills.
Schitt’s Creek’s climax comes, too, with a capitalistic venture. An apothecary, born of the son’s desire to break free from the pack, sets forth a new vision of his own making, rejuvenating the whole town and becoming a catalyst for his romantic breakthrough. In fact, the romantic subplot involving the son, poignantly and memorably rendered with a recurring cover of Tina Turner‘s “Simply the Best”, yields the upward arc toward the finale.
The actress playing the daughter, Annie Murphy, is very good. She provides Schitt’s Creek’s best dramatic acting. Each of the performances is excellent. As the completely ridiculous mother, O’Hara caps everything with dry wit and a touch of madness. From her pronunciations and incongruous vocabulary to her blinding, glittering wardrobe of feathers and glitz, O’Hara’s neurotic wife and mother character elicits the most laughs.
Each character strives to make money doing work she or he loves. This is the heart and soul of Schitt’s Creek. It’s what distinguishes and differentiates the show from today’s chronic contempt for capitalism and pervasive, predominant comedies infused with absurdism, anti-heroism and cynical vulgarity.
In this sense, Schitt’s Creek — silly as it is — is one of a small number of television comedies during the past 70 years that makes audiences laugh without sniveling at the universe, civilization and the best of humanity.
Schitt’s Creek belongs in the same general category as Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show,, Leave it to Beaver, the Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The Jeffersons, My Three Sons, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Golden Girls, Frasier, and Modern Family in depicting the American family as a joyful and enterprising source for fostering the happy, romantic and idealistic — and distinctly American — life.
The first season of the CW’s Dynasty is salacious. It is also surprisingly sharp, even surpassing the original 1981-1989 ABC series in the caliber of its writing. Several key original characters, created by Richard and Esther Shapiro, are re-conceived. Several original costume motifs, plot lines and themes appear in this version, too. But the show’s first season (season two debuts on October 12) is its own combination of brisk, biting and usually interesting melodrama.
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The first major switch is from the original’s Colorado-based Denver Carrington business empire to the South’s Atlanta-based Carrington Atlantic. This allows for an engaging twist and the second major change from the old to the new Dynasty: Blake Carrington’s rival family the Colbys (and other characters such as the chauffeur) are black. Other flipping includes Sammy Jo (Heather Locklear in the original), a trailer trash tramp in the Eighties, as Sammy Jo the gay South American hustler.
Both characters bear familial connection to the second Mrs. Blake Carrington, Krystle (Linda Evans) who’s now Cristal (Nathalie Kelley). There’s a clever tie-in to almost every original character. This includes Matthew and Claudia Blaisdell, the middle class oil rig couple, butler Joseph and his mentally unstable daughter Kirby, hunky driver Michael Culhane and both Fallon and Alexis Carrington, formerly brunettes and now blondes who are each more diabolical.
But they’re bad in a more realistic way. All the Carrington mayhem, scheming and manipulation unfolds through the lens of plausible betrayal, family and business. The larger than life mythology remains. Steven Carrington’s still gay in the new Dynasty, though he’s less the strong, silent type that Al Corley portrayed and more like a modern version of Oscar Wilde with left-leaning politics. Also look for Ted Dinard.
The plot follows its own course, with some thematic and specific rebooting for fans of the original and plenty of sexual, interracial, intercultural points. With more socially and politically pointed, sometimes astute, commentary and snappy, often realistic lines and consistent characterization, this new Dynasty is worth checking out for “escapist” type entertainment, nothing more.
Production values include stunningly, beautifully shot scenes. I especially like that the show begins many episodes with rich, elegant details of the inner workings of the Carrington home, which adds a degree of authenticity to the more ridiculous plots.
The cast is generally outstanding, even Nicollette Sheridan as Alexis (not appearing until later episodes), playing the character with more humor than the iconic Joan Collins portrayal. Veteran actor Grant Show (Swingtown, Melrose Place) is excellent as Blake Carrington. Show makes the industrialist more human and believable in one season than John Forsythe did during the entire original series’ run.
Kelley’s Cristal is more convincing as the second wife than as the executive type but she’s fine. Rafael de la Fuente as Sammy Jo adds camp. Elizabeth Gillies as Fallon, a dominant character in the first season, carries quite a plot load and mostly pulls it off. James Mackay as Steven is also spot on. Sam Adegoke as Jeff Colby brings his own flair and stands opposite of John James’ original benevolence, Alan Dale as Joseph makes the butler a full-fledged character with distinction and Robert Christopher Riley as Michael steals every scene.
Having made it past the midpoint of FX’s nine-episode American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, directed by Netflix’s new multimillion dollar man, Glee creator Ryan Murphy, I have no reason to think it’s going to improve and every reason to think it’s going to get worse. This miniseries, based on a book by a writer for Vanity Fair and denounced by the late fashion designer’s family as fully fictional, confuses, distorts and detracts from itself.
And that’s going on its own terms. Its terms, by the way, contrary to its title, have very little to do with one of the world’s most fascinating modern fashion figures, the late Gianni Versace, and more centrally to do with his assassin, gay poseur and gigolo Andrew Cunanan. After five episodes, it’s clear that this is a major part of the problem with The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which began with a taunting recreation of the Miami assassination on an epic, operatic scale.
What could have been a probing, insightful, or simply engrossing deep dive into the gay scene breaks apart into a thousand tiny, petty pieces signifying nothing except a morbid fixation on blood, death and horror. If you don’t know or have forgotten, Cunanan’s 1990s killing spree touches upon gay subculture in multiple potential arcs, ranging from the gay community’s ageism with its youth fetish to its uniquely blank sanction of indiscriminate sex without regard for the consequences. Whenever this series starts to half-raise an issue worthy of dramatization as it relates to Cunanan’s horrifying (and I mean horrifying as in gruesome and grisly) crimes, it bails and goes for quick, cheap shots.
Darren Criss (Glee) portrays Andrew Cunanan, a player in San Diego’s gay scene who became a serial killer more like spree killers Bonnie and Clyde or the Clutter murderers than like Ted Bundy, John Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer, whose murders were numerous, premeditated and planned over time. Criss is a decent actor from what I’ve seen, though, here, his role is reduced to wide-eyed facial expressions, giggles and stunned silences to convey the character’s breach with reality. The Assassination of Gianni Versace unfolds in a backward timeline, unfortunately, costing the show any real sense of what happened and why because it doggedly stays focused on what happened at each killing point — Minneapolis, Chicago, the Carolinas, Miami — rather than why. So, Criss never gets an opportunity to dramatize Cunanan’s interior thoughts, motives and trigger points.
This may come later, but, by now, Cunanan’s background, psychology and motive should be well on the way to clarity in the series’ theme. They’re not. Instead, the portrayal repeats the same crazed look, followed by kinky sex (usually, merely the suggestion of sex) and cold-blooded outbursts resulting in murder and often, later, a few giggles, songs and frolicking about the room. Anyone who followed Cunanan’s 1997 killing spree knows how this ends and, those, like me, who followed it closely may already know or be able to suppose what moved and motivated Andrew Cunanan to seek out intelligent, creative gay men, envy them to the point of grafting himself onto them and all the bloody, ugly rest. But, again, The Assassination of Gianni Versace jolts with only the most shocking scenes and pre-scenes, leaving what made these men return Cunanan’s interests aside. Something must’ve drawn Lee Miglin, a top Chicago architect, father and husband, bravely portrayed by Mike Farrell, to Cunanan. The Assassination of Gianni Versace never shows why.
The same goes for Jeffrey Trail (Finn Wittrock) an ex-Navy officer and David Madson (Cody Fern). Murphy’s show logs character studies about each man and murder victim, but never connects the victim to the handsome, exotic and smoothly fraudulent Cunanan, who must have been more alluring and enticing than is portrayed here. Instead, each victim is sort of explained (thus far in the series) to oversimplification. Trail’s a military man who is tormented by his sexual orientation to the point of suicide and becomes vulnerable prey. Madson, as depicted here, loves his father (a good turn by John Lacy) but should have come out sooner. Miglin is a closeted gay architect who’s proud of his productiveness — he shows Cunanan a sketch of his skyscraper — but he’s a religious man who acts out his forbidden desires. Versace, played by Edgar Ramirez who does what he can with the part, gets even less characterization. Versace’s lover (an unconvincing Ricky Martin with little to say or do) has a complicated, non-monogamous relationship with Versace, which, again, might be a good flashpoint for dramatizing how gays are marginalized and act out accordingly, but any evidence of complication is cut out.
Versace’s enigmatic sister, Donatella, is played by miscast Penelope Cruz, whose accent is difficult to understand. The actress is too glamorous in the part, missing an opportunity to portray why Donatella became even more interesting in the wake of her brother’s homefront assassination.
Rough gay trade dominates the show without getting an appropriate tie-in, too, leading the audience with the impression that American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, like the stereotype of gays as shallow, petty and frivolous or flamboyant, exists to shock and titillate. For example, restraints, toys and explicit scenes are deployed without development.
Dialogue is painfully inadequate. Cunanan’s lines with victim characters ring most false. Miglin, Trail and Madson look at him and talk to him as if he’s escaped from a mental health clinic and that’s before they realize he’s going to murder them. This leaves the question of how he gained such access and power completely unanswered, let alone properly, interestingly dramatized. The disjointed series plays like a choppy but moody horror movie, tossing plot points across its ominously scored scenes, assuming the audience knows what Cunanan’s thinking, photographing everything with a greenish, artificially muted tint to enhance the surrealism, which only enhances the distortion, and taking the killer’s perspective.
A scene of Andrew Cunanan eating a bowl of what looks like Kellogg’s Froot Loops (get it?) adds nothing to the plot. That it probably never happened supports the Versace family’s statements renouncing this uneven, insignificant show as purely and entirely fictitious and worse for sensationalizing mass death. Netflix, which recently inked a big deal with The Assassination of Gianni Versace‘s creator and director, should take note that Hollywood legend Olivia De Havilland, the 100-year-old actress portrayed without her consent or permission in Ryan Murphy’s FX show Feud and suing to restore her good name and reputation, similarly dissents.
So, it’s not that The Assassination of Gianni Versace, barring any unforeseen turnaround in its remaining four episodes, does not dramatize the truth about the murder of a fashion legend (though I highly doubt it). It’s not even that it doesn’t try (though it doesn’t). It’s a bunch of slick scenes quickly stitched together to maximize titillation while faking that it has a meaning and primarily for the sake of the assassin, not the men or the man the assassin downed, which glorifies murder with horror (and badly). The real horror is how these innocent men fell prey to this monster and, perhaps, what made and makes Cunanan evil and depraved.
But depicting this would have required a story. What’s so unfortunate about American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace is that it fails to properly portray the relationship between the criminal and his victims, so it never becomes a crime story.
Nathan Lane (The Birdcage, Modern Family) is the main reason to watch Douglas Carter Beane’s Tony Award-nominated play The Nance, produced by Lincoln Center Theater, in the version airing this Friday night (9-11 pm ET, Oct. 10, check local listings) for the PBS series Live from Lincoln Center.
Lane is as expressive and entertaining as ever when the material permits as flamboyant homosexual Chauncey Miles, a headline nance (a theater term for a parody of a gay man and shortened version of “nancy boy” which was code for homosexual) during New York City’s 1930s burlesque era. Alternating composer Glen Kelly’s songs with sketches and monologues involving a younger man with whom Lane’s character becomes romantically partnered, the 2-hour televised play is, in turns, historically intriguing, enjoyable and maudlin. The depiction of this type of closeted gay performer’s life and work – the nance was typically portrayed by a heterosexual man – who is inherently suppressed and practically forced into dark, shadowy promiscuity is bound to become sobering and The Nance does.
No problem there, though the somber moments stop the show and highlight the play’s weak transitions and naturalistic theme, which amounts to a sad but interesting slice of gay life in Depression-era Manhattan. The NanceStarring Nathan Lane, part of the PBS Arts Fall Festival, is likely to enlighten and entertain, especially with such a talented actor in the demanding title role, as it showcases tacky routines that brought laughter to burlesque houses downtown while Mayor Fiorello La Guardia pledged to clean up the city in anticipation of the World’s Fair by pushing people like the nance (who is, incidentally, a Republican), off stage. Police brutality and other topical issues come to the forefront as half-naked dames and various show people stake a claim and make an exit. But The Nance, driven by Lane and a heartbreaking performance by Jonny Orsini as the man who tries to love him, leaves the audience feeling less empathetic than it should.
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The premise of an extremely wealthy family losing their wealth and going to live in a small rural town, is silly. Schitt’s Creek essentially reverses the premise of the popular CBS comedy The Beverly Hillbillies, by replacing that show’s iconic grandmother character with O’Hara’s eccentric wife and mother and two adult kids as unlikely to launch as Elly Mae and Jethro. You can get a sense of Schitt’s Creek from the name of one of its main characters, who also happens to be the town’s mayor, Roland Schitt (Chris Elliott). I think I laughed out loud during almost every episode of the entire series.
And that’s going on its own terms. Its terms, by the way, contrary to its title, have very little to do with one of the world’s most fascinating modern fashion figures, the late Gianni Versace, and more centrally to do with his assassin, gay poseur and gigolo Andrew Cunanan. After five episodes, it’s clear that this is a major part of the problem with The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which began with a taunting recreation of the Miami assassination on an epic, operatic scale.
Nathan Lane (The Birdcage, Modern Family) is the main reason to watch Douglas Carter Beane’s Tony Award-nominated play The Nance, produced by Lincoln Center Theater, in the version airing this Friday night (9-11 pm ET, Oct. 10, check local listings) for the PBS series Live from Lincoln Center.