What to Watch This Week

A Mystery About Mysteries, A Charming Aussie Show You May Have Missed, Three Streaming Gems: First Films Are Crime Films Edition, and A Man Setting the Universe on Fire With a Recorder

Dear Reader -

As you may have gleaned if you have read these pages for any length of time, I believe truly and deeply in art. It is not simply a refuge from the grinding machinery of the world, but one of the best ways we have of understanding that machinery, as well as of changing it. But it must also be said that life in the arts is no picnic. In addition to maintaining this space and my freelance writing work, I'm in the the process of editing a short film I recently shot with a number of wonderful collaborators, and am gearing up to shoot a feature film next year. All of which is to say that I'm running at full capacity…and also, like most artistic folk I know, chronically broke. If you have $5 a month to spare for a subscription, and enjoy what you read here, I could certainly use the money – every little bit helps. Many thanks.

Tyler

The Staircase

I found it to be a bit of a slow TV week. Neil Gaiman has never really been my bag, so if you want any thoughts on the Netflix show The Sandman, you're probably better off going somewhere else. I did give A League of Their Own a look, but found that it neither held my interest nor stirred in me any desire to explain why I found it so terrifically flat; so, again, if you want to know whether you'll enjoy it or not, I'd seek the advice of someone who isn't me.

However, I would like to tell you that you should go watch The Staircase – an 8-episode true crime/courtroom drama/mystery of the human soul show on HBO Max – if you happened to miss it this spring. There are perhaps some points in the later episodes where things slow down a bit, but other than that this is adult television at its finest.

The story is at once devastatingly simple and fascinatingly intricate. A real-life man named Michael Peterson was accused of killing his wife by bludgeoning her and throwing her down the stairs in 2001. He and his legal team maintained his innocence and claimed that the forensics clearly showed that she had been drinking and had fallen down the stairs accidentally while he was nowhere in the vicinity. A French filmmaker became fascinated with the case and released a documentary about it in 2004. And now along comes director Antonio Campos to make a show for HBO about Michael Peterson (Colin Firth) his wife Kathleen (Toni Collette), and also the French filmmakers who are making the documentary about them.

Out of this tangled web comes a show that is absolutely compelling. On the technical side, the show is very, very good – the opening sequence of the first episode is an absolute masterclass in both tension and enticing the viewer to sit down for the whole series – it handles the complicated task of juggling multiple timelines and points of view nicely, and the plotting is impeccable.

Beyond this, there's the acting. Collette is, as is typical for her, wonderful, and the other supporting actors (including Michael Stuhlbarg, Juliette Binoche, and Parker Posey) are great as well. But Firth is extraordinary. He is given, in Michael Peterson, a character at once charismatic and duplicitous, charming and domineering, who is purely and earnestly trustworthy in one moment and in the next reveals layers of calculation, hidden rage, and perhaps even instability that seem to have no end. And Firth rises to the challenge and then some.

There are a number of strange and stunning plot twists in the show, from theories about what might have happened to revelations about Peterson's character, and Firth's performance anchors them all. And in some sense, what the show is "about" – if we may speak in such reductive terms – is exactly the mystery we confront when we come into contact with people like him, the mystery of relationships, the mystery of mysteries themselves. How much can we ever truly know about things that happened when no one was looking? How much can we ever truly know about other people? And how much can we, and should we, continue to trust someone when it becomes clear that they themselves have a complicated relationship with the truth? This is television that is worth your time. Available on HBO Max.

A Charming Aussie Show You May Have Missed: Five Bedrooms

Here's the setup: five people, most of them strangers, and all at different moments in theirs lives, decide to buy a house together. The advantage? None of them can afford to buy a house on their own, so this way they get some equity, instead of just paying rent. The disadvantage? They have to share their new home with four people they don't know.

Throwing a group of wildly different people together is a tried and true narrative structure, employed by things as otherwise various as Lost, 12 Angry Men, 10 Little Indians, and most zombie movies. When it works, it's because of the recognizable human qualities of the characters, the way their quirks, strengths, weaknesses, and annoying tendencies fit together or don't fit together, making the combative sparks fly or the romance happen.

Five Bedrooms, an Australian show now approaching its fourth season, pulls this off with delightful, heartfelt, and comedic aplomb. It's perhaps several shades lighter than something like This is Us, but has a similar ability to draw us into the lives of its protagonists: a real estate agent trying to recover from a love affair with a married man, a high-powered lawyer struggling with financial issues, a down-on-his luck carpenter, a gay man who hasn't yet come out to his traditional mom, and a woman in her fifties who has just left her husband. The acting is quite good (as is frighteningly typical of shows made outside of America), the stories it tells about these people are compelling, and it manages to tug at the heartstrings without sacrificing our sense that these are real, complex human beings or turning them into either punchlines or morality tales.

If you're looking for an engaging, lovable show that mixes in elements of comedy and drama and features a nearly perfect run time – most episodes are around 45 minutes – this one is definitely worth a look. Available on Peacock, where the first season is free to non-subscribers.

Three Streaming Gems: First Films Are Crime Films Edition

Blood Simple (Coen Brothers, 1985)

How about a weekend in which you watch some fine directors' first films, all of which happen to be about crime? Sounds like a good idea to me. You might think about starting with Ethan and Joel Coen's debut, which was a smashing one. Blood Simple is a hardboiled crime flick that starts out with one of the best-loved tropes of the genre: a guy hires someone to kill his wife and her lover. And then the plot gets twisty and things get messy. The construction of all this is great, but what really stands out here is the strong visual and tonal feel of it, somehow lowdown greasy and visually poetic at the same time; the whole thing has an kind of aura that announces the presence of some new heavyweights. Features the film debut of Frances McDormand. A must see if you never have. Available on HBO Max.

Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson, 1996)

Wes Anderson is a complicated director who inspires complicated responses. I know more than one person who feels as though somewhere along the line he feel into a spiky pit of his own indulgences, and several others who are ready to defend to the death every film he makes. Fortunately, none of those debates really have anything to do with his first film, Bottle Rocket. It's gentle and comedic, a straight-ahead '90s indy film about some rather goofy young men who get involved in a shambles of a heist that goes predictably wrong. The writing and characterizations are great, and there's virtually no fantastically-ornate set design; it's also the film debut of Owen and Luke Wilson. This one's a delight. (Available on HBO Max. And I know it might seem like I'm shilling for them, but they just have a lot of good stuff available.)

Brick (2005, Rian Johnson)

Johnson has had a fascinating career, which now includes Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and Knives Out (not to mention the Knives Out sequel, which is due out soon). I tend to think he's a bit of a victim of his moment, and that had he been of the generation of the '70s or the '90s, his reach might have been longer and his grasp stronger. In any case, his first film, Brick, is absolutely stunning. It's a noir detective story about the disappearance of a girl, and it's set in a contemporary high school, but the kids talk in an extraordinary patois ripped from detective novels of the 1930s and '40s. That's a really ballsy attempt for someone with no features to their name, and Johnson is up to the task in every way. Superb movie. Available on Starz, or Hulu with a Starz upgrade.

Bonus Recommendation: A Man Setting The Universe On Fire With A Recorder!

There are a few things I think I can claim to have achieved some level of excellence at in my life. Musicianship is not on that list.

My high school band, Flamboyant Ambidextrous Rex, reached its apex when we were on stage at a friend's party, jamming out one of the four songs we knew, when a drunken fellow grabbed the mic and started yelling, repeatedly, apparently hearing some kind of harmonics of destruction in our "groove" that no one else could, "We will kick a lot of ass!" For a moment we were dark grunge overlords. But it was a brief moment. And of the ratio denoting my ability to play jazz guitar against the amount of time I spent practicing – when I had some cloudy intuition that I might venture into the arts but had not yet discovered writing or film – the less said the better.

But what I know now is that I should have stuck with the recorder. It's a simple instrument, which suits my talents in that area. As is the case with many kids, it was the first instrument I ever played, and had I stuck with it I suspect I could probably by now rip off a wicked version of "Hot Cross Buns," replete with fancy trills and extended solos, as a party trick.

Having said that, I should also say that never in my life could I – or perhaps most of us – approach what Maurice Steger accomplishes in the ten-minute clip below. The tune is Vivaldi's Concerto in C Major, RV 443, which he wrote for the flautino, or soprano recorder. Vivaldi probably wrote it, I've learned, for the Ospedale della Pieta in Venice, a girls' orphanage with a well-respected musical ensemble, for which he apparently wrote a good deal of music. There is perhaps a trace of that history in this concerto – for one can imagine it appealing to orphans with its rhapsodic opening, rather mournful middle movement, and the brief sunny triumph of the third movement that closes it out – but it's not the history that drives me to share it with you.

Instead, it's Steger's Jimi Hendrix-like performance. He takes the opening three minutes at a blistering place, and is just enough of a showman to let you know that he's aware of the show he's putting on. But he earns the fireworks through the deeply emotional playing in the second movement; this is not showing off, in other words, but a soulful expression of delight in human artistic possibility. And did I mention that when he really gets that recorder going, ethereal fire seems to spout from it? This is some badass musicianship.

Give it a listen. It'll make your day better. I promise.