Paul Levinson's Blog: Levinson at Large, page 125

Unsolved Mysteries is Back: With No Host?

My wife and I caught the first episode of the revived Unsolved Mysteries on Netflix. It was good enough, and we're going to watch the other episodes, but ... the show had no host!

Now, I know that Robert Stack, the original host, died in 2003.  (His niece was a student of mine when I taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University in late 1970s, but I of course knew of Stack and admired his work from well before that, when he played Eliot Ness in The Untouchables.)  My wife reminded me that Dennis Farina was host when Unsolved Mysteries returned, the first time, in 2008, for a five-year run.  Farina was no Stack, but he was ok, and the show worked well with him.
So what's going on with the Netflix reboot?  According to Bianca Rodriguez's July 1 article in Marie Claire , Unsolved Mystery producer Shawn Levy deliberately chose not to have a host, or at very least, is defending that absence, commenting that "In Robert's absence, we are letting the spirit and the strength of the stories carry the narrative. Above all, our aspiration was to make a new chapter worthy of his memory and of iconic contribution to this iconic series." I don't believe that for a second!  A more plausible explanation is that (a) the show couldn't find a suitable host, (b) the show didn't want to shell out the money for a new host, or (c) both of the above.
Which is unfortunate, even if Levy's explanation is bona-fide.   Because, as good as the mysteries are, they deserve a host, if not with the perfectly sonorous of voice of Stack, at least with a voice.  The host's commentary set up every scene, and tied the loose ends together - or explained when those ends couldn't be tied.
Well, at least the Unsolved Mysteries theme song is still there. I'd sing it to you if you were here.  It makes me want to drive back up to Dutre's, like we once did.   Don't know what that is?  That's part of the mystery.

See also The New Unsolved Mysteries: A Proper Review



 
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Into the Dark: The Current Occupant: Proof of Sanity Hard to Come By

I saw "The Current Occupant" late last night, the current 90-minute offering on Hulu's Into the Dark monthly anthology series.  In a word: outstanding!  A narrative that I'd say is up there with the best of The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, Amazing Stories, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and the other science fiction and mystery anthology series in whose steps Into the Dark follows so vividly in this episode.
The series is billed as "horror".   Other than "The Current Occupant," I've seen only one other episode, "The Body," the debut episode that aired for Halloween in 2018.  (Each episode is keyed to a holiday - "The Current Occupant" to July 4).  I thought "The Body" was excellent, too, and I may review it, and some or all of the other episodes, if I get a chance to watch them.  No, I'll definitely watch them, and post reviews here.   But I saw "The Body" right before "The Current Occupant" last night, because I wanted to get a sense of the series.  And my sense is, although it's indeed horror, it's a little closer to Alfred Hitchcock Presents than The Twilight Zone, meaning its horror is closer to mystery than science fiction, but it has a Black Mirror-ish science fictional flavor nonetheless.
Now the story of "The Current Occupant" couldn't be more current.  It revolves around the question, repeatedly put to the lead character, a patient in a mental institution who believes he is President of the United States, and is being kept in the institution for political reasons:  if you find yourself in a mental institution, and believe you are President of the United States, being held in the institution against your will, is it more likely that (a) you are indeed the President or (b) you're not and you're a person suffering from the encompassing delusion that you are the President.   Most of us, observing from the outside, of course would choose "b" - the lead character is suffering from a delusion - but this after all is a horror story, not quite our reality on our side of the screen, and the story is so tightly drawn (kudos to writer Alston Ramsay, and director Julius Ramsay) with sequences that support both answers, and so well acted (by Barry Watson as "President" or President, and by everyone else in the cast), that it's very tough to say how this story will end.  Which is the hallmark of a great story, and one of the reasons I said this episode is outstanding.
I won't tell you how it ends, because I don't want to spoil the tension and the fun, except to say that there's a final shot on the screen that's so exquisitely ambiguous it will make you feel like you and we are all current occupants in a mental institution, which, come to think of it, maybe we are.   
And somehow, Marshall McLuhan's quip that the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions seems relevant here, too.
 
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Dirty John Season 2: Betty: Truth Stranger than Fiction but Not Quite as Compelling

My wife and I just finished binging Dirty John Season 2: Betty on the USA Network.  It was a powerful season, brilliantly acted by Amanda Peet in the title role, but not as good as the first season.

The first season told the story of John Meehan (hence Dirty John), who actually was a character far more familiar to television drama than Betty Broderick.  John is a sweet-talking con-man killer, who ensnares Debra, superbly played by Connie Britton, who has delivered masterful performances in at least two other television series, Friday Night Lights and Nashville.  Britton on the screen, as well as Eric Bana as John, as well as the mounting, almost excruciating tension of whether Debra will realize what John is, and escape with her life, was an irresistible combination.

The acting was equally strong in the second season.  I already mentioned Peet as Betty, and Christian Slater was equally effective as her husband Dan.  But the story of Betty, a woman so devoted to Dan that, when he leaves her to be with and eventually marry Linda, Betty eventually kills them, is bizarre more than frightening, a study of a woman scorned becoming a woman insane, to the point of acting against her own self-interests, since by killing Dan and Linda, she loses any chance to be with her four kids whom she very much loves. 

I know that this a true story, with the typical docudrama  proviso that a few characters and scenes have been changed.  And they say the truth can be stranger than fiction, which is true enough.  But that doesn't mean such stranger truth can make for as gripping a story as an outright fiction, or, in this case of the second season of Dirty John, as gripping a story as the stranger truth of the first season.

But the second season was enjoyable and nonetheless worth viewing, if only for the sterling performances of the leads, especially Amanda Peet.

See also: Dirty John 1.1: Hunter and Hunted ... Dirty John 1.2: Motives and Plans ... Dirty John 1.4: The Forgiveness Gene ... Dirty John 1.5: John's Family ... Dirty John 1.6: Getting Wise ... Dirty John Season One Finale: Truth Stranger than Fiction

 
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Media Determinism

Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 129, in which I give you a little primer about "media determinism," the bedrock of just about all media studies.

Further listening:  Politics and Media in History and Voice Mail from Marshall McLuhan, 1978

Further reading: The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution and McLuhan in an Age of Social Media

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a taste of Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time

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Hightown 1.8: Up and Down and Up

Hightown's season one wrapped up tonight (episode 1.8).  A short but powerful season, all set to fire on all kind of cylinders in season two.

[Spoilers follow]
The gist of the plot is that Jackie's up, Ray's down, but the real kicker is Frankie's up, too.   The man responsible in one way or another for all the killings is not only unscathed but of prison.   Not only that, he's back with Renee.  Not that she loves him.  But she's accepted that she has to be with him.
Why?  Because she didn't like being listed as an "expense" by Ray?  She still loves Ray, or close to that, deep inside.  Her reaction when Ray tells her he loves her says it all.  But with Frankie back in bed with her, literally, there's not much she can do about it.  Not now.
It was good to she Jackie, finally, on top of things, and riding into a new life.   It will fall to her to do what she can to stop Frankie next season, at least at the beginning of the season.  There won't be much that Ray can do in his position as bouncer or muscle at some bar.   All because he had sex with Renee.  We and he and she know it was not just lust, but because he loved her.   But the police and DA above him don't know about that, and wouldn't care about it even if they did.
I thought Osito went down a little too easily tonight.  I still like him as the best bad character in this series.  But I guess Osito down was necessary for Jackie's fortunes to rise, and I'm certainly glad about that.  (Those two girls on that bus to the Cape at the end, taking over that part of the business, will make good villains next season.) And I'll say one more time that Monica Raymund was really outstanding as Jackie.   She came into her own an actress, vastly better than the emotionally handcuffed part she was given as Dawson in Chicago Fire.
So ... the wife and  I still didn't get up to the Cape this year.  Maybe in the Fall.   Definitely next summer.  But at least we had Hightown.
See also Hightown 1.1: Top-Notch Saltwater and Characters ... Hightown 1.2: Sludge and Sun ... Hightown 1.3: Dirty Laundry ... Hightown 1.4: Banging on the Hood ... Hightown 1.5-6: Turning Point and the Real True ... Hightown 1.7: Two Things


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Reckoning: Reckon It's Great

My wife and I just binged Reckoning, an outstanding psychological thriller about a serial killer and the detective bent on nabbing him that's been on Netflix since May.   The ten episodes are each little masterpieces in themselves, and there's more than enough room for a second season, which I'd put at the top of any list to watch.

Aden Young from Rectify plays Detective Mike Serrato.   In fact, Sertato is so much like Daniel Holden from Rectify that I could easily believe it's same character, a little older and a little less tormented.   Whether that's a limitation of the actor or not, I don't care.  Young does such a memorably effective job in both roles.

Serrato, as I said, is a little less tormented.  But not much.  He's vexed to the point of his own sanity about not catching this serial killer, played, also to perfection, by Sam Trammell from True Blood.  And indeed Trammell's Leo Doyle is the most difficult kind of serial killer to catch.  He doesn't want to be a serial killer.  He's constantly fighting his basest instinct.  He wants to let his victim go - he wants to save them, from himself - and sometimes he does.

The wives of these two men are complex characters, too - not just throwaway players, as wives of cops and killers often are in these kinds of stories.  Simone Kessell does a great job as Paige, a psychologist who can't rid her husband of his demons, as intelligent and empathetic and tough as she is.  And Laura Gordon is excellent as Leo's wife, but I can't tell you more about her story without giving a little too much away.

How good is Reckoning?  Even the kids are standouts, especially Pax (Leo's son) and Sam (Mike's younger daughter), well played by Ed Oxenbould and Milly Alcock.  And I'll also throw in a plaudit for Gloria Garayua as Cyd Ramos who is Mike's partner, and, like everyone else, gives more than you usually get from detective partners in these tales.  There in fact is not an off note in the acting, plot, or dialogue.   Back to what I said at the beginning - bring on a second season.




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The Five: May Be The Best

So my wife and I binged Harlan Coben's The Five the past few nights on Netflix.  It's a 10-episode series by way of Sky One in the U.K. from 2016, and somehow we missed it.  Better late than never - a lot better - because The Five may be the best of the four Coben narratives we've now seen on the screen.

I'm not such an expert in the mystery genre that I can tell you how many of the tropes The Five rolls out were seen in that series for the first time.  I can tell you they were done really well.  This ranges from teenagers in the forest with a younger kid who gets lost and was he killed or kidnapped - this has been done now so many times you can pin up a list of TV and cinematic mysteries, throw a dart at it, and you're likely to hit one - to the old cop, well into senility, whose memory may hold the key to the whole mystery (acted so well in the latest season of True Detective by Mahershala Ali).
And The Five has all sorts of other cool Coben hallmarks, including mysteries neatly solved at the end (a suspect vanishes after going into a building with no other egress, moments before the cops arrive) to self-contained brilliant little vignettes (an investigator breaks into a house, finds a kettle boiling, turns it off - but the owner soon returns to turn it off himself, and finds it not whistling, but the investigator still gets away with it).  
But the heart and soul of the story is what the vanishing of the little boy does to the four teenagers, who are adults for most of the series.  Further, one is the little boy's older brother, another is now a police detective, and there's another guy and a girl/woman in the group, and lots of love as well as tension in the air.  Add to this a murderous pedophile - another Coben speciality - who takes credit for the disappearance of the little boy, and you have a series which is so riveting that you'll wish there was a second season, even though there couldn't be.

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Hanna 2: High Intellect and Octane Espionage

Hanna 2 starts a little slow, with a few too many episodes devoted to Hanna getting back to The Meadows and re-uniting with/saving Clara.  But once it gets over that, this second season delivers a story with far more punch and complexity than the first season, especially the complexity part.

The essence of the narrative is the power of the brainwashing that takes place in this facility.  It's so strong that it works completely on all the young women, with the exception of Hanna and Clara (well played, again, by Esme Creed-Miles and Yasmin Monet Prince) .  The question, until the last few episodes, which are pure twists and turns on adrenalin, is how far gone the two of them are.  
Mireille Enos is back as Marissa, and her loyalty to Hanna is clear throughout.  Dermot Mulroney is new in the story as Carmichael, and he makes a suitably single-minded and recalcitrant villain.   So, too, is the soft-spoken Anthony Welsh as Carmichael's prime and gently lethal assistant Leo.  But my favorite new character (well, almost new, she was in two episodes in the first season) is Áine Rose Daly as Sandy.  There are few combinations bound to be as effective as a pretty face and an evil mind in these espionage kind of tales, and Sandy is an excellent rendition of that role.
The sector of the spy drama genre devoted to creating a cadre of super young agents is well worn, but Hanna 2 does a good job of keeping it new and surprising.  Part of its secret is in the details, as in the "face and trigger" method of conducting a smooth assassination.   Part of it is the way it masterfully uses digital text to convey affection that the cadre knows in their hearts is a lie, but they find so difficult to resist.  But the part of the narrative that will be most responsible for keeping you glued to the screen until you've watched every episode is the implacable intelligence of the villains, keeping you and the heroes on the edge until the very end.



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Justice in America: The View from the Jury

Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 128, in which I tell you what happened more than seven years ago, when I served as foreperson on a jury in Westchester County, NY, where an African-American male was charged with the felony of assaulting a police officer.  I published a blog post about this right after the trial was over back then, but didn't get a chance to provide the account in a podcast.  I thought, given the murder of George Floyd and the continuing protests about police mistreatment of African-Americans, the time was long since overdue.

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