Stretch and the Family Four

Well, Christmas is fast approaching and perhaps, like me, you’re not really celebrating the holiday, but you still want a dose of all the good stuff from the best of Christmas movies without the trappings of the holiday?  Well, here’s a good alternative for any, celebrating or not, to watch on their time off.  And it’s even one that’s good for the whole family.  Way back in August I did a Lone Wolf and Stub about The Fantastic Four: First Steps.  If you’re not familiar with that particular series in my posts, it’s my absolutely spoiler-free, no context reaction series on movies I see in the theater.  These posts here are generally light on spoilers, but I do explain the premises of the subject matter—well, you know the drill by now.

So this holiday season, since I already found one Christmas movie I really enjoyed and didn’t think I should push my luck, I decided to revisit First Steps for a full post and found that it’s actually kind of a great non-Christmas Christmas movie.

You probably know the story of the Fantastic Four, but if you don’t, I’ll nutshell it for you.  They’re astronauts who go into space and are bombarded by cosmic rays, giving each of them unique superpowers through the altering of their DNA.  We open on Reed having a very normal moment of looking for something in the medicine cabinet and not being able to find it.  I get that, nothing is ever where I think it’s going to be.  But, unbeknownst him, his wife Sue is finding out that she’s pregnant.  Ben Grimm intuits it immediately and the family shares a nice moment as Johnny gets seriously excited to become an uncle.

This is a big deal for them, that goes without saying; having a child is a life-changing experience for all involved and when your life involves dressing up in a bright blue sweater and fighting the forces of evil, it’s a different prospect altogether.  But it’s a bigger deal because not only have they been trying for a long time, they are also the first superpowered people in the world to get pregnant.  So they’re breaking some new ground.  As such, Reed is more worried than your average soon-to-be father.  He has no idea how their altered DNA will affect a child or how Sue will be affected by her pregnancy.  Johnny pushes Reed to go back into space, but he’s preoccupied, understandably.  Reed is afraid because even this clean looking retrofuturistic world they live in is a dangerous and frightening place, so he focuses on his very specific kind of baby-proofing.  But this is interrupted when a shiny woman on a surfboard flies in from space in dramatic fashion and heralds the end of Earth and the coming of Galactus.

And that introduces the main conflict of the story.  Johnny is impulsive and chases after her, going to such a high altitude that he burns out his oxygen trying to catch her.  It’s a short sequence, but it’s a pretty cool scene and it leads Johnny to want further understanding of The Herald, as they call her (you and I will probably know her better as Silver Surfer).  Having your entire planet marked for death by someone who is going to turn it into an all-you-can-eat buffet is a pretty rough circumstance to get your wish, but Reed decides they’re going back into space to meet Galactus on his terms and try to find a solution.  Little note here, their ship is called the Excelsior, and I love that.  I love seeing these little things that keep Stan Lee alive and present in these films.  Anyway, Galactus offers them a trade—give them their baby, whom he claims has the power to quell his endless hunger and he will spare their planet.  Now, if Captain America wouldn’t trade Vision’s life for the Infinity Stones, what are the chances that Reed and Sue Richards are going to give him their child?  There’s more than a little Star Wars feeling to these scenes, in the way they use the score and how the action plays out in space, and even though Star Wars isn’t exactly in a great place right now (especially with regards to the fandom), I mean this in the best way.  This is a very fun movie, but I don’t mean to say it’s frivolous, but this space sequence really gives you that intergalactic adventurer feeling that previous iterations on this foursome completely lacked (among other things).

Surprisingly, though, when they return to Earth, they reveal that they refused to trade their baby, Franklin, for the planet’s safety and this idyllic retrofuture shows it dark underbelly as they turn on their heroes.  This isn’t the dark, dusty post-apocalyptic retrofuture we’re used to seeing in properties like Fallout (coverage coming soon on that show).  No, it’s glitzy and bright and seems plucked right out of Walt Disney’s dome back in 1955.  But we’re all just animals when faced with extinction and it takes a lot to overcome that primal fear.

In fact, it’s always easy to do the cold math when you’re not the one who has to give anything up.  Everyone is happy with sacrifice until it’s their turn, then all of a sudden it’s a different story.  I suppose that’s the difference between a hero and a regular person.  A hero, like our four here, are willing to make the sacrifice, but not to sacrifice others.  And they are definitely willing to sacrifice, but not their child.  I’d go ahead and guess not any child.  It may be a bold stance to say that good people aren’t cool with child murders these days, but I’m willing to say it.

There were a lot of things I expected when I watched this movie and one of those things was great acting.  I know there were some murmurs about Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us, The Mandalorian) being a little overexposed at the moment, but when he’s that good, I don’t care.  He might not have disappearing into Reed exactly, but he was completely believable as the father-to-be.  He’s incredible in this movie, so vulnerable and brave.  Real bravery—not fearlessness, not bravado, not false machismo.  Being afraid to do the right thing and still doing it anyway.  Real bravery is something the world needs a hell of a lot more of these days and I’m happy to see it, even if only in a movie.  Pascal brings so much humanity to the role; he doesn’t feel like a character, he feels like a person.  Just a person that looks and sounds like Pedro Pascal with gray temples.  Reed is the portrait of a tortured man, and refreshingly, he’s not tortured by the weight of his own brilliance, like so many MCU heroes are (looking at you Tony Stark and Stephen Strange).  Rather, he’s haunted by a failure, his failure, to ensure that their last space mission was successfully completed.  Sure, they all came back alive, but they were forever changed in ways they are only beginning to understand.  Of course he’s afraid.  He feels as if he makes a mistake, if he’s not perfect, then everything that follows is his responsibility.  Reed is a man who feels the weight of the world and does everything he can to humbly carry it on his shoulders.

And the best part?  His performance isn’t even the best in this movie.  If you don’t know who Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear) is yet, you really should.  First Steps marks his MCU return after the criminally underrated The Punisher and this time he’s a big rock guy, aka Ben Grimm, aka The Thing and he brings his certified brand of warm-hearted tough guy to him.  I love to see that archetype of character, the B.A. Baracus, as I like to call it.  If there’s one character archetype that always gets me on their side, it’s the gentle giant and Thing gets to show that in spades as he delights school kids with his antics in the street (and as a bonus, he gets to meet Natasha Lyonne, a dream come true if I’ve ever seen one).  But the two real stars of the show are Vanessa Kirby (Mission: Impossible series, The Crown) as Sue Richards née Storm and Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things, A Quiet Place: Day One) as Johnny Storm/Human Torch.  You see Vanessa Kirby’s name on the team sheet and you know you’re in for at least a 9 out of 10 on the pitch.  She’s so good and has been captivating on screen any time I’ve seen her and this is no different.  Kirby absolutely shone as Sue, the heart and soul of the team, but also a lot more than that.  She’s also the tooth and nail of the team, easily the fiercest one when it comes to not just keeping her family together, but also protecting the innocent.  When The Herald comes for her child, there is no hesitation, there is no equivocation.  There is nothing more important to her than protecting her family and she will stop at nothing to do so.  Both Sue and Kirby are the linchpins of this film.

The real surprise here, though, was Joseph Quinn.  I’m not all that familiar with Johnny Storm as a character (I don’t even like playing him in Marvel Rivals), so my only experiences have been with Chris Evans and Michael B. Jordan in the awful Fant4stic film.  But I had not expected to see a Human Torch with so much humility, kindness, and caring.  He’s just so genuinely good-natured and desperately wants to be a hero.  He was great as Eddie on Stranger Things, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I found him to be the most moving character in a movie full of characters I absolutely adored.  Julia Garner (Ozark, Weapons) is a very talented actress as well and despite the fact her role as The Herald/Silver Surfer lacked the meat of the titular characters’, she played it with a quiet, compassionate desperation that is hard to pull off when you’re CGI’d and chromed.  I can only imagine how well she’d do if we could see her face and hear her unmodulated voice.  And yet, it was still a compelling performance.

At the core of this movie is the importance of connection and understanding.  Yes, you can insert a Fast and Furious meme every time someone says “family”, but it’s about so much more than the nuclear (or cosmically irradiated) family.  There are some aspects of First Steps that remind me of the cow translation scene from Arrival.  If you don’t know that reference, watch Arrival, it’s one of the best science fiction movies I’ve ever seen.  Communication is so key and at the same time incredibly difficult.  Even when two people know and speak the same language, it’s so hard for them to communicate effectively with each other.  I mean, just take one quick look at Reddit if you think I’m overstating my case.  But when people understand each other, they can accomplish new things.  In reality, there are no aliens (yes, yes, I know the law of large numbers); the only people we’ve got on the planet are each other.  As awful a prospect as that may seem, we either find a way to get along and maybe accomplish some things together or we can all die clawing at each other’s throats.  And that’s the decision the people of the world in First Steps have to make as well.

“We must support each other and dare to hope,” a news report says.  What a turn of phrase there.  I was reminded recently the importance of hope in the face of what feels like hopeless times.  It’s those who hold on to hope who have the chance to make a difference.  If you give up, if you concede, if you become a societal recluse doing your best ostrich impression, then you are giving up that opportunity and resigning yourself to your fate.  It’s not just our family in blue sweaters that needs to dare to hope, it’s every damn person on the planet.  And they have to support each other too.

There is a profound futility to their fight, like those who fight against death itself, but it is that fight that can never be relented.  There is real fear, real desperation, and real courage on display here.  How they managed to make such an emotionally impactful film out of such an ostensibly goofy property, I’ll never know.  And I know the Fantastic Four has lots of very devoted fans, but on the surface it’s about a superpowered Brady Bunch with a robot housekeeper (shoutout to H.E.R.B.I.E. though, that little robot has Wall-E charm in spades, I need a Funko Pop of it immediately) in a somewhat campy future where Paul Walter Hauser (Cobra Kai, The Naked Gun) is the leader of a race of subterranean mole people and he has a crush on Sue.  It’s objectively kind of corny, but it works so well because they play it straight up and down.  It isn’t winking, it isn’t trying to be too cool for the setting, it leans into it and creates something that feels wonderfully alive.  This is the kind of superhero movie I want to see more of.  They think things through, they approach problems in a way that makes sense for the characters. 

So many times, we get super-genius superheroes whose sole contribution to resolving the main conflict is how hard they punch.  Not compassion, not empathy, not intelligence, but brute force.  I mean, Tony Stark fancied himself the smartest man on the planet and his solution to the world’s problems was basically a wearable gun.  Which is fine, I like Iron Man.  But for the most part, his smarts went to creating weapons.  Not here, not in this movie; it’s not bigger explosions that they’re trying to make.  And not only that, the characters feel different from some of the relative carbon copies we were getting before.  No character is snarky or snippy and the comedic moments in the film come from plot-derived jokes and not just drag-and-drop quips.  First Steps, Superman, and Thunderbolts* are really showing the way forward for superhero movies.  Tell good stories with good characters and it won’t matter if they’re a store clerk or they can set themselves on fire and fly; you’ll have a good movie.  And that’s exactly what First Steps is. It’s great, actually. And at just 1 hour and 56 minutes, this PG-13 film that’s streaming on Disney+ is sure to be a hit this holiday season or whenever.

To those of you celebrating Christmas, I wish you a safe and happy one, that you give and receive good gifts, that you get to spend your time with good people, and that you are generous with the things you can’t buy, like your time, caring, and kindness.  Because if there’s anything I’ve learned from watching all these Christmas movies, it’s that the things fade away; the socks will wear through, the electronics will get replaced by newer models, gift cards will be depleted, but the time we spend with each other and the memories we make are irreplaceable.  And on a personal note, this year of blogging has been a real treat.  I truly enjoy bringing these films and TV shows to you every week and I’ve been lucky to see some real growth on this blog over the past year.  Things will be changing in 2026, I’m sure, but what won’t change is my dedication to deeper analysis, finding hidden gems, and helping you navigate the sea of media out there.  Thank you readers, old and new, for lending me your time.

Beauty and the Feast

Well, readers, it’s that time of year again.  I know that I said in the past that Halloween was the last fun holiday of the year and that I’m a huge Grinch.  But with just about a week to go until Christmas and the bulk of the last six months of Christmas music behind us, in a year when I promised myself I wasn’t going to do any holiday coverage, like last year’s excellent unknown gem 8-Bit Christmas, I’ve found another Christmas movie worth bringing to you.

You already know that I love a good slice of life film.  It’s wonderful to be dropped in a moment of time and experience it with the characters without having to sit down and watch hours of origin story and background lore and world building.  You hit play and for the next two hours or so, there’s a different world that you get to be a part of.  So I was curious about Feast of the Seven Fishes, a 2019 Christmas romantic comedy that snuck under everyone’s radar, despite the 88% RT score and 88% audience score.  At least the small number of people who watched it overwhelmingly liked it, so, for you, dear readers, I donned my Grinch hat once again and jumped in (I assume, canonically, that Santa stole the Grinch’s hat, I’ve still never seen that movie).

Feast of the Seven Fishes stars Skyler Gisondo (Superman, Psych) as Tony Oliverio Jr., the college aged son of an Italian-American family somewhere outside of Pittsburgh (filmed in West Virginia), who is gearing up for the big holiday.  He works for his family’s store and is set to take it over eventually, despite the fact that he’s a talented artist who has been accepted to art school; an acceptance that he’s kept a secret.  Enter Beth, private school girl turned Ivy Leaguer home for the holidays and in a fight with her my-dad-owns-a-dealership, country club boyfriend Prentice (I mean, the guy looks like he’s about to sing Constance Fry at any moment; I can picture the hush money payouts now).  This guy isn’t the CEO of Red Flag, Inc; he’s his entitled son.  You see, Prentice decided that Christmas with his girlfriend’s family is a much less enticing way to spend winter break than skiing with his friends.  So they’re in a fight and Beth’s mom is on his side because it’s 1983 and she values her daughter’s ability to get a rich husband more than anything else she brings to the table as, you know, a person with interests and likes and qualities of her own.  Suffice it to say the 80s were not the enlightened time we live in now [please note the sarcasm] and authentically, it shows through in the film.  While I understand why writer-director Robert Tinnell presented the movie this way, it can be grating to hear objectification, slut-shaming, and homophobic slurs, even in the context of that being wrong.  It is, no doubt, a fair reflection of the attitudes of the time, and it is called out in the film, but I felt the need to address it.  Because while I personally don’t feel that this detracted from the movie, you may feel differently and decide to skip Feast because of this and I would understand.

Beth is played by Madison Iseman (Jumanji, Annabelle Comes Home) and she brings great charm to her character who could otherwise come across as a bit snobby, which is a worry for Tony’s cousin Angelo, who sets him up with Beth through her friend Sarah.  Sarah and Angelo have a thing going on, so instead of making Beth an uncomfortable third wheel, Tony tags along to be the uncomfortable, albeit less wobbly, fourth wheel.  The evening has its ups and downs, but for the most part they hit it off and Beth manages to get an invite to the Feast of the Seven Fishes.

Now, if like me, your introduction to the Feast was that one episode of The Bear, the Feast is an Italian Christmas Eve tradition in which seven kinds of seafood, not all strictly fish, are had in a big family dinner (fun fact, actress Addison Timlin was married to Jeremy Allen White during this film, which pre-dates that episode).  I grew up in a pretty heavily Italian area, so how this escaped my knowledge, I’ll never understand; but the food they lovingly put together is very familiar to me (especially the calamari, I love that stuff).  The movie explains the Feast very quickly, which is both useful and economized, which I always appreciate.  Beth, unlike Tony and his cousin, is not an Italian-American Catholic, so that’s a nice narrative way for us to learn about the Feast without an infographic or conveniently timed news report.  At the Oliverio house, the Feast is not just an all day affair, but days of painstaking preparation ahead of time.  The baccalà needs to be soaked for days, changing the water often.  Some fishes get boiled, some get fried, some get turned into soup, some get eaten raw.  People come and go, they eat, they help, they drink, they fight, they snip, they snap.  They argue with each other, they criticize each other; it’s all well-meaning back and forth where if you’re family, that’s fair game.  But if anyone else said it, they’d have trouble on their hands.  Kids sneak wine when the adults aren’t looking.  They eat too much, they drink too much, they reminisce maybe a little too much.  Back on their date, Tony and Beth talk about the meaning of Christmas and how it’s changed, they talk about music (thankfully not just Christmas music), they talk about all sorts of little, silly things you talk about in your early 20s.  It’s all so real and convincing.  These characters are so lived-in, just like Blue Jay. 

I’ve never been to a Feast myself, but I’ve been a part of similar traditions and it’s just an incredible experience.  I grew up in a small family with two sets of competing traditions and a younger generation that didn’t really appreciate either.  So this kind of large gathering was fairly rare for me; but based on the ones I have experienced, everything about the Feast in Feast rings true.  And this cast really sells it, full of people I’d never seen as well as hey-I-think-I’ve-seen-that-guy-befores like Joe Pantoliano and Paul Ben-Victor.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought they were family.  It’s funny, because on the surface of it, this big family gathering in a smallish house with people competing to be heard over each other should be overwhelming in the way Silver Linings Playbook could be overwhelming.  But it’s not.  Somehow the warmth of it all, the genuineness of this family dynamic and their feelings for each other tamp down the experience and make you feel like you’re there in the living room with them.  But not in the kitchen.  I’m a pretty good cook myself, but I wouldn’t last five minutes in that kitchen when they really get going.   

There’s something really special about this movie when it can evoke nostalgia from me.  I watched this and felt nostalgic for a time before I was alive (barely, but still), a place I’ve never been, with traditions I know nothing about, and a holiday that I actively dislike.  If that isn’t a bit of movie magic, I don’t know what is.  Yes, it helps that Skyler Gisondo’s Tony is incredibly likable as the sort of emotionally open tough guy who doesn’t mind if he gets beat up as long as he was getting beat up for the right reason.  He genuinely cares about people and it gives him this quality that makes him an excellent protagonist.  As you get to know him, you want everything to work out for him, you want him to go to art school and to form a meaningful relationship with someone.  Perhaps Gisondo is very specific shortcut for me because I watched the kid grow up playing Young Shawn in Psych, so he started with a leg up, and he was Jimmy Olsen in Superman.  But Beth is equally charming and she has some of the meatier dramatic parts and themes of the film.  The characters are two sides of a coin; despite the different upbringings—culturally and economically—they’re both trapped by family expectations.  Their families couldn’t be more different.  Tony’s is large, warm, boisterous, and Italian.  Now, I might remind you that in the 1980s, Italian wasn’t seen the same way it is now.  Italians were othered and prejudiced against.  I mean, as recently as the sitcom Wings in the 90s, Italian-Americans weren’t fully accepted (whether they are now or not, I can’t say because I don’t know and, frankly, I don’t even know what fully accepted means or looks like in this climate).  Look at who the weird foreigner was in that very successful primetime TV series: Antonio, the Italian immigrant (played by Tony Shalhoub, but we can unpack that another time).  A lot of that not only comes through in the film, but it shapes it.  The Italian-American community in this town makes the Feast the biggest thing of the year; it’s bigger than Christmas itself.  It makes you wonder if that’s not a reaction to being othered and shunned by the majority of people around them, like Beth’s mother.

I think that’s one of the things that’s so interesting about Feast.  It’s a multifaceted movie that takes on a lot more than I had expected when I thought I was settling in for a cute Christmastime rom-com.  A lot of Christmas movies feel exactly the same; they tend to fall into a handful of archetypes.  You have the “But it’s Christmas!” movies where something happens that requires Christmas to be saved.  Then there’s the more modern accidental Christmas movie, where people who are trying to opt-out of the Christmas tradition get dragged in and usually learn a lesson about togetherness or whatever. And finally you have the Bad Santa-style anti-Christmas movie, which, admittedly, I do enjoy at times.  But to watch a Christmas movie that has so much more depth to its storytelling was truly unexpected.  Xenophobia and racism are addressed.  The amplified loneliness of being excluded at a time when people put so much importance on being with friends and family is addressed as well; and I’m not just talking lip service, there’s an entire subplot dedicated around people being left out.  And in the midst of this strongly held, painstaking ritual (which Tony goes out of his way to mention that the religious significance of the Feast itself doesn’t really factor into the way his family celebrates), there’s a less than quiet story about generational expectations and personal agency.

Both Tony and Beth are being crushed under the weight of what their families want from them, but under very different circumstances.  Tony comes from an immigrant family; it’s unclear how many generations have been in the US, but even though both WW2 and the Great Depression are mentioned, it’s clear that Italian culture still has a very strong presence in their lives and that American culture—whatever that may be—hasn’t been fully integrated into their community either.  And we can debate melting pot v. mixed salad all day long (I offer a third theory, which I call cake, where people of different backgrounds all mix in the same bowl and eventually, with the help of a little heat and some stern words from Paul Hollywood, something new is baked), but as the well-read town mechanic Juke says, their town is a community with one foot in the US and one foot still in Italy. 

Emigrating is no small decision; you do it because you are hoping for something more and if you end up having a family, you want something more for them too.  We’ve been down this road with Encanto and Everything, Everywhere recently.  Back in 2022, I said “[a]ll too often, parents forget that their children are people too, with their own hopes and dreams for their own lives, with their own journeys to travel” and that remains true.  In purely Encanto terms, Tony is Mirabel, a family member who is breaking with the family’s preordained plans by wanting to go to art school instead of staying and taking over the family business and Beth is Isabela, forced by her mother to be perfect so she can have the life her mother wants her to have.  Private school in the city instead public or Catholic schools in the area like where Tony and Cousin Angelo went.  Ivy League for undergrad.  And the expectation that all that money spent and all that education learned will land Beth with a husband who has the same qualifications so she can stay home and raise his kids while he does whatever the hell he wants instead of doing what she wants to do (of course it should go without saying that being a stay-at-home parent is as valid a choice as any other; it’s not having the choice to be that or something else that I, the film, and Beth object to).  Beth’s mother denies her agency, Tony is too afraid to express his, preemptively crushing his own dreams by assuming he’ll be denied the opportunity.  Their courtship is cute and fraught with some slightly unrealistic obstacles, but also some very realistic turns, so the movie delivers on that front as well.  But it’s so much more than just a romance and it’s so much more than just a Christmas movie.

At 1 hour, 39 minutes, it knows how to spend its time well and none of the scenes drag or feel unnecessary once you reach the end of the film.  There were some moments where I was with a group of characters and wanted to be with a different set, but by the time the credits rolled, all those moments fell into place and they made sense in the narrative and meta-narrative of the story.  There’s some language (as well as the aforementioned usage of slurs) and mature themes, so I would avoid watching this as the family Christmas movie if you have little kids; it might not be appropriate for them.  Normally I’d just point to the movie’s rating, but it seems like this is unrated.  It’s streaming on both Prime and YouTube and it was marked as 18+ and TV-14, so your mileage may vary.  The Parents’ Guide on IMDB may be of some help to you if you’re considering watching it with kids.  But Feast of the Seven Fishes is most definitely worth a watch.  This movie is not just deeply funny, which it is, making me laugh out loud several times, it’s also narratively rich, giving this moment in time a so fully realized portrait in film.  It’s an incredibly successful movie that managed to get to me on an emotional level despite taking on more than I imagined it could.  And as much praise as I’ve heaped on this movie, here’s the thing that I found most remarkable.  Feast has a shocking universality about it that I had never expected for a Christmas movie.  Nothing about about the culture is opaque enough to turn you away, the Christmas of it all is not alienating to people who don’t celebrate, and it feels like a real family that’s getting together for what could be any get-together where family, friends, and neighbors are all welcome to come and go and spend time enriching each other’s lives. It really is a beautiful film.  It made me yearn to be included on a night like the Feast, where everyone, family or not, is family that night.

The Task of Amontillado

Is HBO back?  Now, I know what you’re saying, HBO has always done well at the Emmys and other award show, then I’ll say yes, that’s true, but I think a great deal of brand bias led some HBO series to be overrated and rewarded over shows that were better. But, let’s not forget, despite all those Emmys, HBO has been in trouble lately.  Pop in a CEO who doesn’t really seem to know what he’s doing and appears to be anti-streaming in midst of the streaming zeitgeist (for better or worse, but least the binge model is slowly going away), drop the recognizable HBO branding from HBO Max, leaving it with the confusingly meaningless and generic Max branding.  When I hear “max”, I think immediately of TJ Maxx, Max from Stranger Things, Montana Max from Tiny Toons, or the max fill line on a cup of noodles.  The idea of it being an HBO streaming service is the last thing on my mind.  But now that the HBO is literally back in HBO Max, HBO’s programming is working its way into my good graces once again (although I still haven’t forgiven them for taking Infinity Train off).

As with last week’s The Chair Company, I’m here to talk to you again about a recently wrapped HBO series.  This time it’s Task, the follow-up to the lauded Mare of Easttown (which I didn’t care for—it’s hard for me to empathize with a dirty cop who plants drugs on family members and gets people who rely on her killed because of her lack of regard for good judgment and/or procedure).  And much like Breaking Bad birthed Better Call Saul, Task steps up in every way and absolutely blew me away from the very first episode.  I tore through this series in a way normally reserved for comedies or other light shows that are easy to consume in large quantities.  Task is anything but light.  It is seven, one hourish episodes of human darkness, deep misfortune, and gritty, irrevocable violence.  But it’s also one of the most touching and beautiful shows I’ve had the pleasure of viewing for some time.  Let’s get into it.

Task follows FBI agent Tom Brandis, played by the always excellent Mark Ruffalo (Collateral, The Avengers).  He’s currently doing the job fair circuit and is out of the field because of a family incident that left one member dead and another in prison.  But when his boss Kathleen McGinty, played by Martha Plimpton (Raising Hope, The Goonies) calls him back in to deal with a new crew in the area, he’s assigned to head up a task force of state and local police to deal with a very dangerous situation.  Turns out there’s been a trio of Halloween masked home invaders hitting up trap houses of area gangs.  One in particular, the biker gang called the Dark Hearts, has been hit the most, and is out for blood as a result.  Tom has to bring this crew’s reign of terror to an end to stem the tide of escalating gang violence.

Leading the crew is Robbie Prendergrast, which isn’t a typo, it really has that many Rs in it, played by Tom Pelphrey (Ozark), whom I’d only seen before in Iron Fist.  And if you have seen Iron Fist, you’d be in your rights to assume Pelphrey is going to be the weak link in this cast because, well, Iron Fist was pretty dismal, but as far as I can tell, Pelphrey puts in a career performance here.  Robbie is an immediately likable character and while he and Tom are not diametrically opposed characters, they play incredible foils to each other, both juggling a different set of problems.  Robbie’s brother Billy is missing in the way that means dead, but his body will never be found, so Robbie’s moved his family into Billy’s old house.  Ostensibly to take care of his young adult niece Maeve, Billy’s daughter, but more often than not it seems like she’s the one taking care of him and his two kids.  Maeve is played by Emilia Jones, and if you don’t know her name yet, you should.  She played Kinsey Locke in Locke & Key (the ending of that series wasn’t her fault, I’m sure, but she was great), she starred in the Oscar-winning CODA, and she’s just delivered an incredible performance here in Task.  While the main focus of the series remains on Robbie and Tom, Maeve quietly, but not too quietly, is the heart and soul of a show that has heart and soul to spare.  I have a feeling there will be Emmy talk over this show and while Ruffalo and Pelphrey especially deserve the buzz, I don’t want Jones to be left out.  She delivers a powerhouse performance in a linchpin role to the show.  She ties the entire narrative together and goes toe to toe with these seasoned actors and never once looks out of place.

The Dark Hearts are a particularly vicious group, keeping themselves on top of the suburban and rural areas outside of Philadelphia.  Yes, just like Mare of Easttown, Task brings you to the area near my fair city and with it, those accents.  Now, I don’t hear those DelCo accents too often since I rarely leave the concrete comforts of the city, but the ones in the show were pretty authentic when they showed up.  Sure, there are plenty of slip-ups and times when they’re just completely gone, but for the most part it’s convincing enough.  Accent work is fascinating to me; often it seems the best actors at doing these very specific American accents are English, Irish, or Australian, as is a large chunk of this cast.  In some cases, a DelCo accent will become full on Irish, but it’s forgivable enough and if they had never attempted such a specific local accent, I wouldn’t have given any thought to accents at all.  Still, I appreciate the effort at authenticity.  There’s a locally comical scene right at the beginning of the show when Tom is talking to his daughter and mentions scrapple, Acme, and water ice in basically one breath.  I’m surprised they didn’t find a way to work in cheesesteaks, hoagies, and free Dunkin after an Eagles win.  We are definitely in the Philly area, even if we aren’t in a Wawa.  But I digress.  The Dark Hearts self-police, so to speak, by killing problem members.  It’s an extreme solution, but local chapter leader Jayson Wilkes, played by Sam Keeley (The Siege of Jadotville), isn’t too worried about his position.  Not until Robbie, Cliff, and Peaches (best nickname) stumble upon a trap house with way too much product and something else that wasn’t supposed to be there and they take it all.  And leave some bodies behind in the process.  What follows is a race against time—Robbie put a ticking clock on his whole family, his crew, and even Jayson.  And through all this, Tom has to put an end to it, with the assistance of a team cobbled together from the people their departments were happy to give up.  Talk about an uphill battle.

As the walls start to close in on Robbie brick by brick, the stakes ramp up; people start dying and more and more the show feels like it’s barreling to a Shakespearean tragedy.  Of course I won’t spoil any details for you, but as I’ve said before, sticking the landing is as important or even more important than the rest of the show.  A bad ending can color your view of the entire journey you took to get there, right, Game of Thrones?  Luckily, Task has one of the most emotionally satisfying payoffs of a series in recent memory.  There are Episode 1 details I haven’t even mentioned so far because, again, you deserve to be as engrossed in this show as I was.  You deserve to feel every twist and turn and the weight of every decision and the catharsis of a well earned and well written ending.  But what I do want to talk about, however, are some of the things that elevate this from basic cop show into top tier crime drama and what I think is the spiritual successor to the first season of True Detective, which might be the best single season of television I’ve ever seen.  Task doesn’t quite reach that, but it hits heights I never expected.  It starts tense and builds more as it goes on, coming to a frenzied conclusion that left me on the edge of my seat for entire episodes.  It is, and I hate to say this again, masterfully crafted.  The pacing, which can seem a little baffling at first, ends up being perfect by the end.  There’s nothing here that doesn’t work.

One of the most interesting things about this show is that despite the relatively bleak subject matter, it approaches so many situations with warmth and compassion.  The Philadelphia area doesn’t get a lot of big shows set here and when we do, it’s often, well, not exactly a hoot.  The aforementioned Mare of Easttown, the really good Long Bright River (which I need to rewatch and then share with you), and even, in some ways, It’s Always Sunny are all kind of bleak shows with the rare flash of hope shining through.  Task, however, approaches everything with a measured hand.  The characters are thoughtful, deliberate, sometimes to the point of inaction, but they seem to really consider things in a real way as they are presented with different challenges.  And it makes the moments that they act on impulse or let their emotions get the better all the more impactful and genuine.  The characters have such depth to them and even the smallest of minor characters is written with complexity and care to feel like a real person.  No one is just a stock character.  There’s the strong one, there’s the dumb one, there’s the smart one, etc.  Not in Task.  They’ve got their moments, their character arcs, their troubles as well.  This is a deeply character driven show, despite having a full and rewarding plot, and those characters are what makes this show so special.  A good crime plot can easily turn into just another cop show.  But Tom’s manner, due to the tragedy that occurred in his family, is so different from what you’d expect.  He’s a tad bit downtrodden, he’s out of shape, he drinks himself to sleep and shocks himself awake with ice water every morning, but it has him considering things carefully and intelligently (for the most part).  And a good antagonist makes your show even better.  And this show has a great antagonist in Jayson and the Dark Hearts. 

Not Robbie.  No, I can’t quite call him that.  He’s not a villain, no, despite the fact he would do some villainous things.  What I thought was going to be a cat-and-mouse game between Tom and Robbie turned out to be a story of dual and dueling protagonists.  Thanks in part to the strength of Pelphrey’s immense performance, almost immediately you start to root for Robbie.  And you don’t want to see the two of them pitted against each other, even though their paths are destined to cross and blood is destined to stain the soil on which they stand, but you can’t help but want them both to win.  It sets you up for the best worst feeling of incredible tension as the show crescendoes to the end.  It sucks to know going into a confrontation between two characters you have come to love that the only narratively satisfying ending isn’t the two of them becoming best friends and opening a B&B together where they solve mysteries in their small town in between perfecting the ideal breakfast buffet.  I cannot really overstate Pelphrey’s performance here, I really don’t think I can even do it justice.  And Emilia Jones; her performance as Maeve, a 20 year old adult suddenly orphaned and thrust into the role of adoptive mother to her niece and nephew while Robbie lives in what is her house is unbelievable.  Maeve delivers a lot of the emotional punch in this show, which is saying something because so many of the characters are vying for the heartstrings as well.

Family is a big part of the show, including adoption.  Tom and his wife were foster parents who adopted two children and now his family has been torn apart, leaving them grasping desperately at the tattered fabric that once kept them together.  Maeve, on the other hand, didn’t have a choice in becoming an adoptive parent, and she doesn’t really have the tools to deal with that.  She, like Tom, is grieving, and unlike like Tom, has decades less life experience to help deal with it.  But she’s stuck with it and struggles with her duty, another big theme in the show.  Faith and duty play important roles in Task, with Tom being a former priest who then went into the FBI, Maeve’s duty to the family she didn’t want, and Robbie’s duty to Maeve and his own kids.  Task wants you to sit and think about our duty to ourselves and to each other.  And the writing here really pushes that.  Faith is important, but not faith in a system or a god or a religion or badge.  It’s faith in something else, something even more amorphous and disappointing than religion—faith in yourself and the people around you.  And let’s not forget the big F, the hardest F word to say, forgiveness. 

So many of these characters are grieving at the start of the show.  Tom and his family are in mourning, Robbie misses his brother, Maeve misses her father.  And there’s no coming back for them; the people they miss are graveyard dead and there is no resolution to that.  The show asks us to question where to draw the line of forgiveness and measure the consequences of where you draw it.  Tom’s old job was to forgive.  Robbie was never a man of faith and forgiveness is a much harder pill to swallow for him.  And what’s even harder than forgiving the people who wronged us (if they deserve it, I’m not one of those forgive and forget types myself) is forgiving ourselves.  There is no grief that exists without the regret of what could have been different.  Forgiving yourself for not having done things differently is really, really hard.  Linear time is the cruelest mechanic of our reality.  Task explores this really deeply and very well.  I know I’ve said before that I have a hard time connecting with shows where cops are the protagonists, but I think one of the things that makes Task compelling is that it doesn’t feel like a cop show.  Yeah, he’s a fed, but you know what I mean.  It feels like a fully realized action crime drama that just happens to have the FBI and drug dealing biker gangs in it.

With Task, HBO is officially on a roll.  The strength of this show makes it the best crime TV HBO has done since True Detective season one (season three was pretty good, but two and four…).  The Chair Company is a low or high stakes absurdist suburban conspiracy show that I can’t stop talking about.  Peacemaker had a second season that completely turned me around on the series and made me a believer in the Gunnmosphere.  Creature Commandos, the animated spin-off of Peacemaker, is excellent as well.  Beyond just HBO, so many cable networks and streamers are bringing excellent shows out with serious star power and I’m all for it; bring on the next golden age of television.  And this show is a worthy installment in that next golden age.  Task is a deeply rewarding, richly told narrative with some of the best character work you’re likely to see and that makes it a must watch.  The entire series (or perhaps first season, should it continue anthology-style like True Detective) is available to stream on HBO Max.

The Chaircase

I just watched the season finale of The Chair Company and I think I’m more confused by what I’ve seen than anything else I’ve ever seen.  But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  It all starts out very simple.  Ron Trosper is on the up.  He recently got promoted at work and he’s heading up a huge project, the design and construction of a new luxury shopping mall.  And after giving a rousing speech at one of those corporate hype up meetings office workers are often subjected to, he goes to sit back down in his chair.  And it breaks.  He falls to the floor, a little embarrassed, but very much none the worse for wear.  He even makes a little self-deprecating joke as he gets up and they move on.

It’s an embarrassing little moment of course, one I’m sure many of us have had.  I, for one, remember once getting off the bus on the way to a final exam in undergrad and wiping out as soon as I put my foot on the icy curb.  I got up, I made a little joke, and I limped to my exam.  That was the end of it.  Well, I did limp for a few days after that and I had come a day early for the exam, misreading the schedule, but overall, it was just a blip.  For any other person, it’s a bad day at work at the most.  These things happen, but life goes on.

Not for Ron Trosper, though.  For Ron, his chair breaking is the start of a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a chair company that does not exist.

Ron is played by creator and writer of the show Tim Robinson (Friendship, I Think You Should Leave), and while I don’t think I’ve always gelled with his comedic styling, I can’t imagine this role working with anyone else.  There is a level of commitment that it takes to play a character like Ron so well that can only come from the mind of the person who created him.  That’s my theory, anyway.  Because I don’t think there was a single moment in the series that I could point to where it felt like Tim Robinson was acting.  And that speaks both to the strength of his performance and the strength of the writing.

This is a hard one to talk about because I feel like trying to relay the story to you much further would not only rob you of experiencing it yourself, but also, it would feel a bit like I’m lying to you by pretending I understood everything I just witnessed over the 8 episode season of The Chair Company.  This was by far the wildest, weirdest, strangest, and most confounding show that I can remember watching.  This is the kind of thing that maybe I really appreciate because of the amount of media I consume, it gets harder and harder for things to stand out.  So when something does, I really become engrossed in it.  Even if I don’t strictly like it right away, I tend to stick with it because I enjoy being immersed in the fringes of creativity when we’re often in a sea of same feeling shows and movies.  Much like Pluribus, The Chair Company is unpredictable from scene to scene and I love it for that.  Every time I think I know where something is going, it takes me in a completely different direction.  And not just opposite to what I thought would happen, no, some wildly unforeseen option that keeps me completely on my toes.   

Nothing about this show is pretty.  Everything is unpleasant.  The people are unpleasant, the way they communicate is unpleasant, the abnormal amount of screaming is unpleasant—you get the idea.  Even the drab Ohio suburb that could exist in any place across the United States feels like it drains the color out of your life when you see it (Ohio is really having a moment; Columbus and its surrounding cities here and Toledo in The Paper).  I scarcely believe what I’m about to say about what is ostensibly a comedy, but it’s gritty.  People get into fights and it’s ungainly and that makes sense.  Why would Ron, who works in real estate development and has never shown any proclivity towards any sort of martial art, be an accomplished fighter?  His punches are floppy, his form is unbalanced, and he spits and drools in feral rage.  And when things start to get out of hand, no one is averse to just yelling loudly and nonsensically until the altercation simply stops.  It feels so uncomfortably realistic, but I also have to imagine that’s the point.

Of course, the people you meet along the way through this chair conspiracy rabbit hole are just as important as the plot itself because it’s the characters that sell this simultaneously mundane and fantastical premise.  Ron’s wife Barb, played by Lake Bell (Childrens Hospital, Bless This Mess), has quit her job to spearhead a new startup, which is a time-intensive project, so she has her nose to the grindstone as Ron spirals.  Ron’s son Seth, played by relative newcomer Will Price, is struggling with his own teenage dilemmas and, frankly, it’s not a child’s job to keep tabs on their parents anyway.  So a lot of this goes unnoticed except by the always excellent Sophia Lillis (Dungeons & Dragons, It), who plays Ron’s older daughter Natalie.  In the midst of planning her wedding to her girlfriend Tara, Natalie is pretty much the only one who starts to see that Ron is unraveling as he gets deeper into the conspiracy about the chair company.  Her role smaller than I expected for an actress of her caliber, but I get the feeling we’re going get more of her as the show continues.  Along the way, he meets Mike, played by journeyman Joseph Tudisco (he was definitely in one episode of a network show you might have seen), an unstable strongman who acts as a private eye and becomes Ron’s only confidant and ally in his hunt.  And then there’s Jeff Levjman, played by the always reliable Lou Diamond Phillips, who seems to pop up in shows like this more often now, later in his career (some memorable appearances for me include Psych, Search Party, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine).  Jeff is Ron’s obscenely wealthy, self-obsessed boss and CEO.  His role in the show grows as the season goes on and I’m so, so excited to see how it changes.

Like I said, this show is a little hard to explain.  Even Lake Bell struggled to explain the series to her own mother, sort of settling on a version of “it’s about a guy who sits on a chair that breaks and he tries to find out why it broke”.  And I think this is where much of the brilliance of the show lies.  Tim Robinson exhibits this mastery of the mundane being taken to the absolute breaking point of absurdity.  On the surface, it feels a lot like cringe comedy, especially as you see him at a family dinner at a restaurant arguing with the waitress about the continued existence of malls and how almost anything can be a mall, including that restaurant.  But what starts feeling like a dated cringe bit turns into a wildly escalating scenario that snowballs out of control almost every time.  Robinson subjects the audience to high levels of absurdity in almost every corner of the show—little things like the custodian at his office being highly protective of his wheelbarrow or a clerk at a shirt store pulling out all the stops to get people to sign up for their membership program.  I can’t wholeheartedly tell you that all this works because I’m not entirely sure it does, but it grabbed me in a way that really surprised me.

The conspiracy starts out as a pretty normal kind of thing in the facade-focused world in which we live.  He wants to reach out to the company that makes the chairs, Tecca, and lodge a formal complaint and get an apology over what happened to him.  But he gets the customer service runaround, even more so than normal, when he reaches out to Tecca, finding them to be incredibly circuitous and secretive.  I’ve had some bad customer service experiences in my time, including four hours on the phone over a TV installation that never happened, so it’s really relatable.  At first.  Before the spiral.  Oh, but the spiral.  The spiral is this show.  As he peers through the looking glass into the world of Tecca, we as the audience get to question so many things.  Has Ron stumbled upon a vast conspiracy?  Is something going on with the chair company?  Is he in danger?  Is his family in danger?  Or has he just gone down the Charlie Day cork board route and is blowing everything out of proportion?  Are the people staring at him menacingly really staring at him menacingly?  Or are they just having a bad day?  Are those people talking about Ron and tracking his every move?  Or are they just having a quiet chat?  Not only does the show string you along this journey of Ron’s as he goes through layer after artichoke layer through shell companies and whispers and lies, but it also puts you in Ron’s mindset.  The show itself is part of the conspiracy, I’ve stopped trusting what I see.  Are the reveals really reveals?  Are they happening?  Is Ron completely misreading everything?  Are we watching the show through the lens of an unreliable narrator?  I just don’t know.  And the show doesn’t want you to know.  And that’s what I find so captivating about The Chair Company.

Still, as much as I liked the first season of this show, it’s hard to recommend.  I would wager that if you’re a fan of Tim Robinson, you’ll like it a lot.  I haven’t seen that much of his work other than a few sketches here and there, and while it’s been a little hit or miss for me (as sketch comedy tends to be), this feels like a very Tim Robinson experience.  If you’re into that, you’re probably going to love it.  But as someone fairly lukewarm to Robinson, I found myself reaching for the remote every time I got the little notification on my phone that a new episode was available and watching it immediately.  So it very well could have wider appeal than just Tim Robinson fans.  I think the hardest part of this show is how you decide to engage with it.  As you know, I’m a huge whodunnit fan and I’m from the era of Lost conspiracy theories and the subsequent bevy of JJ Abrams-like mystery box shows that followed, so I’m always looking for a mystery to solve.   But I think the best way to experience this show is far more hands-off.  Let Ron do the detective work for you and just sit back and enjoy the spectacle of a relatively normal man thrust into what could be the highest stakes or lowest stakes thing in his life. 

It’s weird and unpleasant and strange and oddly wonderful.  There are some nice moments throughout the series, especially towards the end of the first season, where you get to see glimpses of Ron as a good father and good husband.  And while they seem a bit abrupt compared to the other moments of the show, they manage to not feel unearned; rather they seem a bit like a parting in the storm clouds of Ron’s fervor and they can be quite touching if you let your guard down for the rare genuine moments in the show.  Which can be hard to do because the show really puts you on edge.  As I said, it’s billed as a comedy, but it’s also called a thriller.  The blend of comedy and horror mechanics, often leveraging the score to put real tension and a sense of dread in some scenes.  It’s unsettling at times.  Because the nature of the show is so amorphous, it leaves you feeling that truly terrible things are on the table because you just don’t know where it’s going to go.  Again, the throughline here is unpleasantness and The Chair Company is as unpleasant as it is engaging and entrancing.  The entire first season is out on HBO Max now and it’s already been renewed for a second season, thank goodness.