Gone Girl, HBO Go-It-Alone, Transparent, Black-ish, and Twin Peaks redux.
Elgin and Paul chat about
- Gone Girl, directed by David Fincher and starring Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck. We discuss how social expectations about women and men, as well as the audience’s genre and narrative expectations, are played with by the filmmakers, including screenwriter Gillian Flynn who wrote the novel on which the film is based.
- We briefly cover the announcement of “HBO Go-It-Alone” and its implications for Amazon, Netflix, and, of course, cable.
- Jill Soloway’s Transparent, an Amazon Originals series starring Jeffrey Tambor, Gaby Hoffmann, Amy Landecker, Jay Duplass, and Judith Light. We revisit the LA dramedy that chronicles the transitions of a Jewish family, the Pfeffermans, including that of the father who comes out to his adult children as transgender late in life. Are the nine episodes of the first season better than what we expected based on just the pilot?
- Black-ish, another show based in LA but this one about an upper-middle-class African-American family, starring Anthony Anderson and Laurence Fishburne. Is this show a twenty-first-century update of The Cosby Show? Does this sitcom do anything unexpected as it takes on social issues (big and small) facing upwardly mobile blacks? Can a network sitcom sensitively explore such issues while still being funny and entertaining?
- We react to the recent announcement of Showtime bringing back David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. What are the potential pitfalls for this now highly anticipated comeback of the ’90s cult classic? What are some shows that have come back successfully – and the ones that haven’t done so well the second time around?
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