I knew nothing about Weird City other than the fact it was premiering, which is partly because it is from YouTube Originals. Usually, if I’m in that situation, I bop between thinking I’ll look at IMDB for a basic description first or alternatively, preferring to be surprised. Tonight I went for surprise, and well, yep, it was a surprise.
The show’s premise is somewhat allegorical satire, set in the future, where the Haves and the Have Nots are separated by a border. Episode 1 deals with a young guy who grew up as a Have Not, his mother got rich, he’s now a Have, and struggling with dating because all the Haves follow a regimen of mandated dating, casual sex and then assigned marriages, leaving unassigned people floundering a bit. A matchmaking site that guarantees the use of science to find “the one” for everyone hooks him up with his “the one”, except his match is a dude but he’s not gay. They intend to blow off the date, but end up hanging out and really getting along, like they are in fact each other’s “one” except for the whole not being gay thing. Long story short, they’re not gay, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but they end up following the science, it’s a match made in heaven, and 1 year later they’re married and completely happy until the company comes back, says “oops” they weren’t a match (since they wanted women) and their two real matches are still available. They’re not interested, since they’re happy, but the company lawyers insist. Instant unassignment. It goes on a little longer, and I won’t spoil things, but it’s a decent ending.
The whole Ep is done a bit in soft satire, or allegory as I said, like Erewhon by Samuel Butler, except dumbed down for easy consumption. The great part is that while there is a hint of fish out of water juxtaposition, everyone stays in complete character. They don’t know that it’s really weird, just seems normal to them. Lightly touched, almost like a really long SNL skit not played for giggles. And it more or less works.
The problem is that anthology series are challenging. Twilight Zone had a hook; this one doesn’t really. Future City isn’t really very meaty. And while the actors in the first episode do a great job — Dylan O’Brien and Ed O’Neill — they’re not in Episode 2. Their story is done. No hook, and no recurring characters? Not sure there’s enough there to recommend it. Or to think it will get renewed.
I added a note to my “upcoming shows” for one called Wayne, not sure when, and the only thing I knew about it was that it was on YouTube Originals and it was some sort of Dirty Harry show. I figured it wouldn’t go anywhere, and not that there’s a business model to predict, but I would have said CANCELLATION.
Now that I have watched the first episode, I am even more confused. First of all, Dirty Harry it ain’t. The main star is a 16-year-old kid whose life is basically going down the tubes. His father is dying (and dies in Ep1), he is violent but not much of a fighter, and most of the stuff he does makes no sense. He rides all across town to throw a rock through a Rent-All business’ window (tied to his father’s cancer) and then gets the shit beat out of him by the owner. So he stands up and throws a second rock through a window. You don’t know why he did it, and it is only alluded to later. The landlord is complaining about the back rent. His principal is complaining about his absences, and then expels him when he attacks a bully in the hallway with a trumpet. He wants to sell some stuff to get some cash, but he has nothing to sell. He meets a girl, kinda weird, selling cookies door-to-door and when he goes to visit her, her family beats the shit out of him. All of this in the first 30 minutes or so of the show. It is just plain weird. Second, the show has nothing to do with “stand and fight”, he’s running with the girl down to Florida. He’s on an epic quest to get a car back from some dick who stole it from his dad. Based on the preview for EP2, there are lots of adventures along the way.
I don’t know if the show is supposed to be some dark Reservoir Dogs kind of show. Or Ferris Bueller’s Day Of Attacking People. Or a Thelma and Louise meets Romeo and Juliet premise. He kind of snaps at the 45 minute mark, and it is the start of the show being interesting.
Mark McKenna plays Wayne, and if you ignore the first 15 minutes where he hardly says anything, or the first 30 where he barely does anything but stare at people, he’s okay. Not exceptional, just kind of a presence, but okay. Not much of a credit history for previous work. By contrast, Ciara Bravo shines as Del (short for Delilah, but she denies it). She seems really raw in the episode, almost desperate, and kind of familiar. I had to check her out on IMDB to place her as Gracie in the show Second Chances from a few seasons ago where she was one of the under-used highlights (the grand-daughter of the guy with the second chance).
The rest of the characters range from dumb to dumber, and while Wayne is leaving Boston, it seems most of the people are going to follow him on his journey. I didn’t get a feel for any of them, but most seem like caricatures more than characters.
Definitely a weird show, and it took almost 45 minutes to have any idea what it is about. Not enough for me to keep watching, but it wasn’t horrendous. As I said, I have no idea what the business model is behind the show, but I’m going to go with CANCELLATION.
When I heard about Turn Up Charlie, I have to confess it sounded like some form of Charles in Charge or Who’s the Boss? Basically, a down-to-earth DJ turning into a nanny for a celebrity family. Maybe even a bit of Fresh Prince thrown in there. CANCELLATION written all over it, in my view.
Except the DJ is played by the creator of the show, and it is, wait for it…Idris Elba. WTF? On that basis alone, I would have to up the prediction to RENEWED. Luther, Avengers, Dark Tower, The Wire, take your pick of shows where he had definite presence. Here he is a bit of a fish out of water…he is struggling to make ends meet, and ends up looking after his rich friend’s kid for a day when Dad has to dash off while shopping. He bonds with the kid who is difficult with nannies, and a plan is hatched. Hire DJ Charlie, and get the kid squared away while Mom and Dad struggle with work/life balance. Elba is good, but you knew that already.
Piper Perabo plays the mom, and while I loved her in Covert Affairs and Coyote Ugly, I was a pass for Notorious. I don’t know if she’ll have a big role here, but it wasn’t promising in Ep1. JJ Feild plays Dad, and he’s okay, nothing exciting to see. Two supporting roles of wacky locals are played by Guz Khan (best friend and mooch, Del) and Jocelyn Jee Esien (landlady Auntie Lydia who’s a caricature, not a character). Meh.
Which leaves a lot of the attraction of the show to rest on the shoulders of the kid, aka Gabrielle. She’s nervous about starting a real school for the first time, plus she’s left alone too much so she acts out for attention. Nothing too serious, but well, it wouldn’t be funny if she didn’t have hijinks. Frankie Hervey is the actress, and it’s her first role. She is a bit uneven, but watchable.
In the end, I would predict RENEWAL on Elba alone, and the rest of the cast is different enough not to fall into Silver Spoon territory. But it wasn’t interesting enough to me to keep watching. Okay, nothing special.
So, someone involved in this TV series either spent way too much time at film school, or has delusions that they can be Quentin Tarantino if they just get some good mood music. I didn’t know much about the show when I went to watch it, something to do with dirty cops, and there wasn’t much in the description that led me to see it as anything but CANCELLATION material. Once I got into it, and saw that it was about a cop who doubles as a hitman, I thought it might have some potential.
Except here’s the thing. The episode I watched was 90 minutes long, and has about five minutes of actual action in it. It was ridiculous. The opening scene to set the mood for the show was almost 5 minutes of people staring out the road saying very little. There’s some random conversation about the one cop and his messed up view of marriage, and when he gets killed about ten minutes in, there’s no real loss. A stop for a shakedown before that runs about 4-5 minutes long, and could have been edited to about 20 seconds without any loss. The whole episode could have been 10 minutes long and you wouldn’t have lost much.
On top of that, the main character who is supposedly being “slowly dragged” into the crime business is an LA sheriff named Martin, played by Miles Teller. Teller has a weird history of roles…Willard in Footloose (the one who can’t dance but loves to fight), Reed in the Fantastic Four, Peter in Divergent+Insurgent. Usually he has some sort of dynamic range, even if it isn’t Oscar-worthy. Here, from start to finish, he’s a robot. It’s like he’s on super-strength Valium. There is NO emotion for almost the entire episode. Why do I care about anything with him? I don’t.
Almost every interaction with every character is him staring at people and them staring back. Conversations that have about 10 seconds of content run 3 minutes. With EVERYONE he meets. It’s like film school masturbation, and the worst show I have seen in years.
I’m going with CANCELLATION, I’m not even going to review the other characters and actors.
I tripped over a reference to a “new” show called Special, and I didn’t really know much about it. Something about a main character who was disabled and gay, and that was about it. Then I watched the first few minutes of it in passing, just to get a feel for it, and the initial truth of the show hit me hard.
I had heard of the creator, Ryan O’Connell, previously but I didn’t realize it was the same person. He has cerebral palsy and has written some pretty raw posts over the years about his life with CP, being gay, just day to day stuff, and some of the posts went viral. I had read some pieces here and there, generally knew about him more so than knew his story, but it was apparently one of his viral pieces that caught the eye of Jim Parsons (Big Bang Theory) and they agreed to a show on a miniscule budget and fifteen-minute episode format to talk about Ryan’s semi-auto-biographical idea.
So the premise is based on Ryan’s life, where he was hit by a car and injured, but relatively minor as car accidents go. However, afterwards, he moved to New York and made all these new friends and acquaintances, and rather than tell them he had CP, he told them he was injured in the car accident. In short, he changed his narrative from disabled to injured. And he liked that people didn’t treat him like a disabled person anymore. So he kept it up for awhile, before eventually writing a blog post as part of preparation for a book arc where he “came out of the disabled closet”.
In the show, Episode 1 has him being hit by a car and then starting a job at a blogging magazine site as an intern. He’s excited to be there, but hasn’t told them he’s disabled. Through a series of slight miscommunications, they come to understand that he was in an accident and his CP-like symptoms are the result. He goes from disabled to injured, which feels great to him, so he doesn’t correct them.
I’d love to tell you the acting is amazing, but well, they had no budget so Ryan O’Connell is acting as himself with no acting experience. He’s pretty good though. There are lots of small characters — a mom, his boss, some coworkers, a physio-therapist, etc. — and they are okay, but about the same feel as you might get from an amateur theatre. Yet I’m hooked.
Hooked for an entirely personal reason, all of which is summed up by a quote from Ryan’s character before the accident, reflecting on the nature of having mild CP:
I’m not able-bodied enough to be hanging in the mainstream world but I’m not disabled enough to be hanging out with the cool DP crowd.
I’ve used that paradigm (without the judgement) to describe my own son’s condition as he also has mild CP. For him, it shows up in things like amateur sports programs. His coordination and body movements are not good enough for running and moving to do regular soccer, for example, or hockey/skating lessons, or swimming…his body has too much tone in it, plus he has twists in his legs. He also has limited strength in his upper body. But, equally, he doesn’t need much accommodation. So he is usually way more functional than any of the other people in “disabled sports” groups. He has no impediment for speech or cognitive limitations, just physical coordination, and so like Ryan’s example, he’s in limbo between the two worlds. It’s hard to find opportunities for him for certain things, camp activities at times, for instance because he can’t quite do the regular group thing but he doesn’t need a spot in the disabled group. Not to mention that we don’t necessarily want him taking a spot from someone who really needs that type of spot (there are often limited numbers of spaces available). Yet there aren’t in-between groups for “mildly affected”.
And, honestly as a parent, we can’t relate. Something he has taken to pointing out at times — “You don’t understand”. He’s right, we don’t, not exactly. We can intellectually picture the issues, but we haven’t lived it. But when I heard Ryan O’Connell say those words above, it was like a small #TruthBomb going off in my heart. With lots of questions.
Will my son feel the same way? We don’t think our son is gay, but I don’t think he would know yet (he has no interest in anything in that area), but either way, will he feel some of the same romantic and sexual isolation that Ryan talks about? What else don’t we understand?
Yes, it’s a comedy, not a documentary. There are some funny bits, including him talking to his PT about dating, and joking that he thinks it’s funny that the PT thinks he has enough self-esteem to be on Grindr. With some relatively dark self-effacing humour about what his gay disabled profile would say.
I don’t know if the subject matter would appeal to everyone. But it resonated with me, and I am attracted to his style of writing. I’ve recently ordered his book too, apparently somewhat overlapping with the series in places. So I’ll read that when the series is done.
I would have predicted CANCELLATION before seeing the show, but afterwards, I’m going to go with RENEWAL based on the rawness in the first episode.
