It’s Amazon’s third annual pilot season, and their release of a whole slew of single episodes of shows they’re considering has turned into something of an event. Just as streaming services and on-demand platforms like Amazon are taking TV and changing it in great ways, for the past three years Amazon has taken all the shows they’re considering, slapped them online, and let the people vote for what stays and what goes. It’s sort of like market testing writ large.
Their first pilot season yielded Amazon’s first original drama, the so-so political potboiler Alpha House, which debuted earlier this year. The second batch this winter featured 10 shows, four of which will be turned into series, including the excellent Transparent, whose first season will air later in September.
Amazon’s three new comedies and two new dramas are now available for your judgment. They’re very hit or miss (unless you’re looking to see breasts or adults smoking pot, three of which have both, and a fourth has just the breasts). Let’s take a look from best to worst.
The Cosmopolitans
This show from director Whit Stillman (Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco) about Americans living in Paris is a bit like a macaroon. On the outside it’s sweet and gorgeous and bright, but when you bite inside it, it’s surprisingly hollow. However, just like I don’t want to eat one macaroon but want to binge on a whole box, I feel like the best way to watch this series would be to curl up on the sofa and watch about 10 episodes in a row, transporting yourself to the chatty world of jet-set France.
Adam Brody stars as a mild-mannered guy tooling about with a bunch of sophisticates in that most romantic city. Chloë Sevigny plays a slightly bitchy but winsome fashion magazine editor who Brody is sure to fall in love with. The pilot consists of the group going to a party, having various conversations and telling stories, and then going home. That’s really it. The humor is sly and so slight you’ll barely know its there, but the universe is one that will leave you wanting more. When it comes to TV pilots, that’s the most important feeling of all.
Red Oaks
Produced by Steven Soderbergh, this is essentially Caddyshack: the TV show. David (Craig Roberts) takes the summer of 1985 off from NYU to work as the assistant pro at the New Jersey country club in his hometown. He has to choose between his ditzy blonde girlfriend, the aerobics instructor, or the soulful brunette who is also the president of the club’s daughter. This is so formulaic you almost know what is going to happen before it does, but it’s also a good time full of TV veterans at their best, like Richard Kind and Jennifer Grey as David’s parents, and Paul Reiser, continuing his renaissance with this and FX’s wonderful Married. Actually, this show would be a whole lot more interesting if it was only about the dumpy stoner valet Wheeler (Oliver Cooper) who convinces the gorgeous lifeguard Vicki (Alexandra Turshen) he might be worth going out with. That would be a lot less derivative and just as much hokey fun.
Really?
The best thing about this comedy about the indignities of married life is that Sarah Chalke (Scrubs) is married to a brown guy – creator and director Jay Chandrasekhar. For some reason, any sitcom with a mixed-race couple always seems pretty cool to me. However, everything else about this is so old you probably saw it in another sitcom already. Jay really wants oral sex from his wife but only gets it on his birthday. Sarah wears ear plugs, an eye mask, and a mouth guard to bed, and it’s really not sexy. Blah blah blah. Things take a dark turn when the show introduces several other married couples, including Selma Blair, who has an alcoholic husband she can’t stand. (Why does Hollywood keep wasting Selma Blair’s considerable talents?) If you want a truly funny take on modern married life, check out FX’s Married, which I just plugged above. Really, it’s that good. No, Really? isn’t good. Married is. You know what I meant.
Hand of God
Wow. Amazon really missed the mark with the dramas this time around. Here, Ron Perlman stars as a judge who is found naked and speaking in tongues in a public fountain. He apparently was on a spiritual journey where he was saved by a charismatic minister, and now thinks God is talking to him through the voice of his comatose son. Perlman, playing the gooey-centered tough guy he’s so good at, and his no-nonsense judge are just one of the stock elements of what now passes for an “edgy cable drama.” Drug use? Check. Hookers? Check. Cursing? Check. Male and female nudity? Check. Main character who murders bad people for all the right reasons? Check. Rape subplot? Check. Former actor from The Wire? Check. Lady MacBeth wife? Check. Characters having a conversation while taking a dump? Oh yes, check.
This show goes almost baroque with the darkness, heaping on more and more until its almost campy but really just eye-rollingly overdone. At one point, he actually utters the line: “It’s like my dick stays hard all the time, but I don’t need pussy … I need justice.” The best thing about this is Dana Delany playing the judge’s wife. Not only does she look fantastic, but she schools everyone else on how to turn bad material into acting gold.
Hysteria
Poor, poor Mena Suvari. It seems like things are just never going to work out for her. In Hysteria she plays a neurologist and psychiatrist who returns to her hometown of Austin when a group of cheerleaders become stricken with a mystery ailment where they convulse uncontrollably. Then it turns out this illness can be contagious for people who see it happen, including on a viral video.
It’s like The Ring, except people don’t have the good sense to die after they watch the video of a cheerleader spasming on the floor. This thing is really just a mess. It’s sort of like what would happen if you let a goth-loving teen with ADD write a horror movie about cyberbullying after drinking six Red Bulls, taking an Ambien, and being reminded them who Mena Suvari is.
