Gary SteelA regular column in which GARY STEEL sifts through the mountain of available streaming TV and brings your attention to great new and old shows as well as those to avoid. Prime slices this month include The Penguin, A Man On The Inside and The Antisocial Network.
A Man On The Inside (Netflix) 7/10
I’ve never been much of a Ted Danson fan and that perennial sitcom favourite Cheers means little to me, but he’s brilliant in A Man On The Inside, a new 8-part comedy series that has your guard down within minutes. Danson plays Charles, a 75-year-old retired college professor and recent widower who is hired by a detective agency to find out who’s stealing things in a posh retirement home. And of course, to carry out the investigation secretly, he has to move into Pacific View, the San Francisco retirement facility.
It’s all basically an excuse for an extended rumination on getting older, losing loved ones and mourning them, continuing to make connections when all seems hopeless, and nurturing relationships generally, and it’s really great. It’s not that the dialogue is razor sharp (although there are some good lines), it’s more that everyone in the cast feels natural, and the kindness and humanity inevitably shine through, along with the humour. Especially good are Mary Ellis as Charles’ daughter and Stephanie Beatriz as Didi, the retirement home’s managing director, although the rest of the ensemble cast is terrific too. Fresh, and it’ll lighten up your day/night.
The Antisocial Network: Memes To Mayhem (Netflix) 7/10
Normally, I’d avoid documentaries about nerds on computers like the plague. Who wants to see re-enactments of idiots staring into screens and pretending to clack away on grimy keyboards in dank basements? But I’m glad I got suckered into watching The Antisocial Network, which starts by explaining the history of the humble meme, which astonishingly, unleashes a virulent pox on the internet. I had no idea, but the meme trend began with the anonymous internet image board 4chan (which copied a Japanese idea) and what started with a seemingly harmless bunch of fun-loving dweebs eliciting laughs ultimately spread to the deadly disinformation we’re having to endure now and the rise of noxious far-right political figures like Trump.
Who would have guessed? The film – featuring interviews with some of the original protagonists along with footage of the events at which they came together on the physical plain – explains how the internet friends ended up in a kind of war, as some of them became politically activated in a genuine way while others were determinedly sexist and politically ignorant. While some of them were prosecuted and served time for hacking into “important” databases, the other faction discovered how to win friends and influence people by spreading lies. I’ve often wondered (with an increasingly furrowed brow) just how the internet and especially social media it was so easily manipulated into being a dangerous and unreliable place, and The Antisocial Network reveals some important clues.
Barbie (Neon) 2/10
I successfully avoided this dire confection on the big screen but weakened when it hit my favourite streaming service, more fool me! I’m all for withering satire but this abortion is a big fail for several obvious reasons. Firstly, it’s not possible to write a genuine satire with real bite when the production in question is endorsed by Mattel, Barbie’s manufacturer. Secondly, a film has to know its audience and it isn’t at all clear which demographic or age group the film is targeting. This is definitely not for kids, so who is it for? Women who have grown up with Barbie and have a mixture of affection and disdain for the most horribly stereotypical doll?
There’s another flaw and it’s a biggie: they forgot to write a story. The plot, as such, sees Ken and Barbie entering the real world after an existential crisis, and of course, they discover it’s a whole lot more complicated than life as a doll. Ryan Gosling is excellent as Ken and former Neighbours star Margot Robbie isn’t bad as Barbie, but there’s little to grab hold of here and to top things off, the intentionally fake backgrounds compound the sense of artificiality that pervade the enterprise. Yes, there are a few cheap laughs, but they come at a price: boredom and irritation.
Inside Out 2 (Disney+) 5/10
Supposedly the biggest animated film of all time (how did that happen in only a matter of months) Inside Out 2 is a sequel to the 2015 Inside Out, which “follows the inner workings of the mind of Riley, a young girl who adapts to her family’s relocation as five personified emotions administer her thoughts and actions.” (Isn’t Wiki wonderful?) In the new film, we’re still in Riley’s mind (she’s 13 now) but this time, she’s got some new emotions to deal with.
In essence, half the time we’re with Riley as she experiences life (the action revolving around her attendance of a three-day ice-hockey camp) and the other half we’re inside her head experiencing her emotions as a kind of feelings factory. And of course, being a teen, she’s suddenly full of new emotions like anxiety, envy, ennui, embarrassment, along with the likes of fear, anger and disgust. But unfortunately, despite some stellar voice talent including Kyle McLaughlin, Diane Lane and even Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, the movie is one long talk-fest. The 6 and 10-year-old liked it okay but I fell asleep. Like way too many American animated movies, the writers just don’t know when to shut the fuck up.
Into The Fire: The Lost Daughter (Netflix) 5/10
I’m a sucker for crime documentaries, as they’re so much more compelling than their fictional counterparts. The two-part Into The Fire: The Lost Daughter (2024) had great reviews and a certain aggregator site gave it a rating of 92 per cent, but I’ve got some quibbles. Admittedly, the raw material is great. As a teenager in 1989, Cathy Terkanian gave up her daughter for adoption. Twenty-one years later the police ask her for a DNA sample as they’re trying to identify the body of a young woman. It’s a dead-end but she goes on the hunt anyway and discovers that her daughter had run away at the age of 14 and joined the legions of the missing.
Into The Fire is a detailed look into her determined search for her daughter and it reveals many fascinating and bizarre details, the big shock being the adoptive girl’s dad’s criminal history. There’s a lot to recommend it, but I found the constant emphasis on Terkanian as some kind of elderly woman warrior very tiring. I get that she went through hell several times – firstly having to adopt her daughter; secondly, having to hunt down her killer – but the documentary would have been made more endurable had it focused on the story and not constantly promoted Terkanian.
The Lie: The Murder Of Grace Millane (Netflix) 5/10
Personally, I got so tired of reading about poor Grace Millane after her murder that I tuned out. It seemed to me that the coverage this young British backpacker received was out of proportion, considering the scant coverage given to the ongoing violence against women in NZ homes. There’s hardly any Kiwi content on Netflix, and the idea of watching a 104-minute documentary that told her story without the sensationalism of the news reports of the time made sense. Unfortunately, the best thing about The Lie: The Murder Of Grace Millane is the beautiful but darkly unnerving drone footage above the Waitakere bush where her remains were eventually found stuffed into a suitcase.
As a documentary, it feels amateurish and relies too much on CCTV footage and pointless views of the city. Some of that footage is admittedly chilling, but the extended police interviews with Grace’s murderer Jake Kempson are ultimately quite boring and could have done with some judicious editing. The revelation in those interviews is the ease with which Kempson lies over and over and over again. Perhaps the biggest flaw is that the film fails to tell Kempson’s story. I know the current trend is to concentrate on the victim in order to give the perpetrator no further oxygen, but it would have helped the viewer to at least know his background. The Lie is an awful story and it’s impossible not to feel devastated at the reality of Grace’s life being cut short in such a meaningless fashion, and the emotional devastation felt by her family. She deserved better than this slightly hashed documentary.
The Penguin (Neon) 7/10
Possibly not since that groundbreaking HBO series The Sopranos has TV given us such a simultaneously evil yet strangely charismatic character. Reprising his role from The Batman (2022) film, Colin Farrell stars as The Penguin. Not that you’d recognise him, given the prosthetics necessary to transform a well-loved, handsome actor into a character whose unsavoury visage is baked into and haunts your visual synapses from the first scene onwards. I’m not overly enamoured with endless comic book spinoffs but The Penguin is something else. While the visual style of the show occasionally betrays its origins it’s possible to completely forget the Batman connection, as at heart it’s just a really dark crime drama.
Cristin Milioti (How I Met Your Mother) is sensational as Sofia, the spurned daughter of the Falcone crime dynasty, who has just returned to civilian life after years in a brutal psychiatric ward, having been wrongly convicted of a spate of grisly murders. She sets about dealing to the family that stitched her up and ends up going head to head with The Penguin, her arch-enemy, leading to some spectacular carnage. Its eight episodes are never lacking in surprise value and the violence is frequently shocking, so those of a sensitive disposition should beware. Easily one of the best series of 2024, the downside for me is that by the end The Penguin isn’t even an anti-hero but proves himself to be completely beyond redemption.
The Trials Of Gabrielle Fernandez (Netflix) 8/10
If you’re up for watching something really depressing and deeply shocking during the summer holidays, be my guest. The Trials Of Gabrielle Fernandez (2020) is a 6-episode documentary series examining the case of an 8-year-old boy who was, over the course of many months, slowly tortured and beaten to death by his stepdad and mum in Palmdale, California. What this extraordinary series reveals is that many “professionals” in the employ of child services as well as those at the boy’s school knew he was being abused but did nothing. After he died, it was discovered that the child was made to live in a locked box in his mother’s bedroom and seldom fed. His autopsy found that his stomach contained only cat litter.
Inevitably, it follows the trial itself closely, and there’s chilling footage of both the boy’s bizarre and scary mother and his unflinchingly macho security guard stepdad, who allegedly started beating Gabrielle because he thought he was gay. I’m not a big fan of the Netflix tendency to lengthen documentaries past any semblance of reason, but it’s justified in the case of The Trials Of Gabrielle Fernandez, which delves into the corrupt culture of child services in California; a system that had been left unchecked with management and staff who were essentially untouchable. It asks the same seemingly unanswerable question that New Zealanders do every time yet another child is murdered by their whanau: How the fuck did this happen, again? Recommended, but not for everyone. It left me in tears.
The Umbrella Academy (Netflix) 7/10
Billed as a superhero comedy-drama, I would challenge the word “comedy” and replace it with “flashes of dark humour” and add “time-traveling”, because the whole story hinges on going backwards and forwards on various timelines in a seemingly endless quest to save the world from destruction. The Umbrella Academy consists of a disparate and dysfunctional family of adopted siblings, all of whom have superpowers of one sort or another, manipulated by the possibly evil (or even alien?) and definitely stuck-up stepdad, Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore). It’s a show that takes several episodes to get into and at times is entertaining, enthralling and even shocking. But that must be balanced against distracting lapses and plot twists that, annoyingly, sometimes don’t go anywhere useful.
The quality is well maintained over its four seasons, although the last is a giant let-down and I’d recommend finishing with it at the end of Season 3. Any flaws (and personally, I’m pretty much over time travel shows) are easily swept away by superb characterisation, great acting performances and hilarious lines. Especially good are Tom Hopper (Game Of Thrones) as the brawny and likably naive Luther, and Robert Sheehan as Klaus, the drug fiend who communes with ghosts. The key character, however, is Number 5 (Aidan Gallagher) who plays a time-jumping perpetual teen who is much older than he looks. Pity about Vanya/Viktor (Elliot Page), a nuclear-powered sibling who gender-transitions (in real life and in the show) and as the series goes on, looks more and more like the hormone therapy is making them/him ill.
#UNTRUTH: The Psychology Of Trumpism (DocPlay) 8/10
Yeah, for sure, we’re all sick and tired of seeing and hearing about Trump and in the wake of the recent elections it’s tempting to burrow into a hole in the ground and just pretend it’s not happening. But it is, and #UNTRUTH: The Psychology Of Trumpism, like the earlier #Unfit: The Psychology Of Donald Trump, is required viewing for anyone who wants to understand what and why this thoroughly awful individual was twice voted into power. While #Unfit examined Trump’s so-called “malignant narcissism” in a convincing documentary featuring interviews with expert psychologists and former collaborators, balancing his alleged personality disorder against his vile actions, #Untruth looks at the rise of Trump supporters, examining the dissatisfaction in society with the status quo and explaining how Trump engineered his ascendancy through social media disinformation.
#Untruth doesn’t hold together quite as well as its predecessor but everyone should see it, as it paints a frightening picture of what we’re in for over the next four years and ponders whether democracy as such will still be in place after Trump’s organised demolition job on what is looking like a very vulnerable political system. These two documentaries should be free to view and because they’re a minor player in the TV streaming sphere won’t get the audience they deserve. Check out DocPlay now, if only to see two of the scariest films this side of the original Halloween.
Wondla (Apple+) 7/10
A sci-fi/fantasy series for small humans and big humans who still nourish a sense of wonder, Wondla is an almost too-brief 7-episode animated series that brings a bit of big-screen magic to TV-land. Eva is a teen raised by robots in an underground bunker, who suddenly must deal with the scary outside world when her home is attacked; a story that, with variations, has become something of a trope in sci-fi. It turns out that she’s on a planet called Orbona and that the surface of the planet is inhabited by strange creatures, some of which are threatening while others prove to be allies.
The twist is that it’s an amazing and colourful environment with strange flora and fauna and absolutely no other humans. Her new friends (and companions during her adventures) include an alien called Rovender and a giant tardigrade (normally microscopic creatures) called Otto. Produced by Canadian company Skydance Animation, it’s an adaptation of the book trilogy by Tony DiTerlizzi. While perhaps a minor entry in the grand scheme of things, it kept our kids enthralled for a few hours.
The Best & Worst Streaming TV is a regular column in which Gary Steel assesses the worth – or otherwise – of the vast trove available to stream. Unlike other media, our policy is to dig deep and go further than just Netflix or what’s new this week.
