THR Critics on ‘The Bear,’ ‘Presumed Innocent’ & More
DANIEL FIENBERG: How the blazes have we reached the end of the summer already? Sorry, Matthew McConaughey in True Detective. Time isn’t a flat circle. It’s a vortex, and the summer of 2024 got sucked right in.
Since June, politics has given us The Worst Debate in History, an assassination attempt, a new Republican vice-presidential candidate (and attendant memes), a sitting president dropping out of the race, a new Democratic presidential nominee, and the meteoric rise of her avuncular running mate, whom 95 percent of Americans couldn’t have picked out of a lineup in May.
Smack in between two political conventions, our attentions shifted to Paris for the Olympics, where we marveled at the largely E. coli- and entirely shark-free beauty of the Seine, celebrated Simone Biles, ogled French pole vaulters, held our breath through one impossible comeback after another, and attempted to make sense of competitive breakdancing rules — all while accompanied by the dulcet tones of Snoop Dogg.
What a short, strange trip it’s been! And when what counts for originality in the world of scripted TV is “What if Presumed Innocent, only with a differently ludicrous twist?” or “What if Time Bandits without the original’s wacky eccentricities?” or “DRAGONS?!?!?”, what incentive has there been to leave the emotional volatility and unpredictability of the real world behind?
ANGIE HAN: Unfortunately little, to be honest. To your point, it feels like most of the summer’s buzziest pop-culture moments have been news and/or sports and/or live events. Meanwhile, on the scripted TV front, the past few months have oscillated between “kinda slow” and “deathly slow.”
That’s despite the much-anticipated returns of several high-profile shows. HBO’s House of the Dragon returned after nearly two years away … only to deliver what essentially amounted to a whole season’s worth of table-setting. The third season of Hulu’s The Bear was so divisive that it launched an entire cycle of discourse about whether the show has secretly been bad all along. (My take: No, and it’s still pretty good.) Amazon’s The Boys has never been one for subtlety, but its fourth season gave up any pretense of clever commentary, content to just repeat our reality but louder. I don’t doubt plenty of people are still watching these shows, but are folks as excited about them as they used to be? Because I know I’m not.
All that said, there were still some highlights this summer if you were willing to look past the most inescapable ratings hits. Peacock’s We Are Lady Parts returned after nearly three years away with an even more thoughtful and ambitious second season and gave us such bangers as “Malala Made Me Do It” and “Villain Era” to boot. HBO’s Industry is more addictive than ever as it enters its third season, with its comedy, its drama and its casting (Sarah Goldberg! Kit Harington!) firing on all cylinders. AMC’s Interview With the Vampire continued to be one of the sexiest, funniest, darkest and most straight-up entertaining shows on television, in a second season that suggested the only souls more prone to drama than theater kids might be undead theater kids.
What’s been your impression of this summer’s returning titles?
DF: I enjoy the comic-operatic excess of Interview With the Vampire, and it’s established a tone that’s remarkably fertile for actors whose tendency is to go “hammy.” Eric Bogosian has rarely been better. Ben Daniels was an exceptional addition to the second season. This feels like a niche the show could steer into even more, becoming a wilderness sanctuary for chronic over-actors. I have perhaps a different feeling than others toward the series’ core relationship; while I like Jacob Anderson’s Louis and Sam Reid’s Lestat very much when they’re separate — I loved the first half of this season — the show becomes monomaniacal when they’re together.
If you’re talking about returning horror-comedies, though, Paramount+’s Evil, wrapping up its four-season run as we chat here, is still in a class of its own. Robert and Michelle King’s series, transplanted after a brief introduction on CBS, got an injection of fresh buzz courtesy of Netflix exposure. And the push toward its apocalyptic climax has been close to perfect, especially with its meta exploration of what happens when your TV show — or your church-affiliated demonic investigation department — is abruptly canceled despite its apparent success. The Evil makeup and visual effects work has never been scarier, the daughters and their overlapping dialogue have never been funnier, and Katja Herbers, Mike Colter and Aasif Mandvi have a chemistry that far longer-running ensembles wish they could even approach.
Evil and Interview both struggled to cut through the miasma of real-world events. That can’t be said for the third season of The Bear, which was all anybody could talk about for a week or two and … then vanished, conversationally. Was that because these 10 episodes were more divisive? Because they were dropped all at once? Or because there’s only so much talking you can do about Carmy’s self-absorption, superstar chef cameos and different types of napkins when democracy is threatening to collapse on a different channel?
AH: I’m gonna go with D: all of the above. But at least The Bear got that week or two of conversation. That’s more than I can say for my favorite new series of the season. HBO’s Fantasmas is an interconnected series of vignettes set in a New York City as only Julio Torres could envision it: burdened with the same systemic injustices and labyrinthine bureaucracies as our own world, but made approximately 1,500% more whimsical with the addition of hamster nightclubs, litigious elves, and whatever Pirulinpinpina’s people are. Sure, it might not break radically new ground for its star and creator — from its themes to its design to its jokes, it’s very much of a piece with his other works, including this spring’s film Problemista — but that only speaks to how distinctive and original his voice is.
Fantasmas was a much-needed breath of fresh air in a season that otherwise tended toward stodgy. Shows that looked promising on paper struggled to pay off in practice. Apple TV+’s Sunny boasted gorgeous production design, an intriguing cast and ambitious themes … and writing too thin to make any of it amount to the sum of its parts. Netflix’s Eric was all good intentions wrapped up in shiny prestige-y packaging; a shame it forgot to concoct characters or a plot interesting enough to make its swings land. Disney+’s The Acolyte functioned beautifully as a reminder that Manny Jacinto really ought to be in more things, but far less successfully as an exploration of family, faith and betrayal, or as an expansion of our understanding of the universe’s light-side-versus-dark-side mechanics.
It wasn’t all bad. Presumed Innocent and Lady in the Lake, both on Apple TV+, were handsome, star-studded vehicles blessed with mysteries interesting enough to keep me clicking on to the next episode, even if neither ultimately felt as deep as they could have been. Hulu’s quarterlife-crisis dramedy Queenie and Apple TV+’s small-town daydream Land of Women weren’t exactly reinventing the wheel, but they soared on the strength of characters worth falling in love with. And whatever else you want to say about Amazon’s My Lady Jane, I give it all the credit for coming up with an absolutely cuckoo-bananas idea and running with it.
Are there any other gems I’m missing?
DF: Among the summer’s big new shows, there was too much chasing of brands that were already thin to begin with or lost their meaning in their new iterations. Did we need an Orphan Black spin-off (AMC/BBC America’s Echoes) without the primary thing people watched Orphan Black for? Jordan Gavaris and Evelyne Brochu in awful old-age makeup are not, in fact, Tatiana Maslany. Did we need a full series adaptation of Sausage Party? I would argue that once you’ve seen one audaciously protracted hardcore orgy featuring food products, you’ve seen them all. Did we need, 40+ years after the movie, an adaptation of Time Bandits that sanded off every single Terry Gilliam rough edge?
Time Bandits at least got good in its second half when it started to tell an original story. That was the reverse of my feelings about Presumed Innocent — apparently such a smash it went from “limited series” to “renewed” in less than a month — in which the comfort of watching David E. Kelley back on sturdy legal-thriller footing carried the first half, before the ludicrousness took over.
That, of course, is why Fantasmas is so special: The only thing that Julio Torres’ movies and TV shows resemble is other movies and TV shows from Julio Torres. And even then, Fantasmas isn’t Los Espookys or Problemista. His vision is queer, surreal, haunting and hilarious, and even if Fantasmas isn’t a Bear-sized hit, it’s my favorite dystopian, trans-forward sketch show featuring a tone-policing blue social media manager named Pirulinpinpina of the summer.
One of the summer’s few other shows to impress me with its audacity was Lady in the Lake, which director Alma Har’el transformed into a far weirder, dreamier exploration of trauma and identity than the Natalie Portman mystery was sold as.
It’s too bad nobody had content worthy of feeding off the real-world summer events we couldn’t look away from. For example, Peacock had a two-week Olympics captive audience, but used it to promote the gladiator cliché-spewing Those About to Die and the tonally disjointed Steph Curry mockumentary Mr. Throwback (rather than We Are Lady Parts, which is exceptional and, at its heart, an underdog sports story only with music). Meanwhile, I’m not sure if the October 31 premiere for the second season of Netflix’s The Diplomat will be catching a crest for Kamalamania or if politics fatigue will have set in by then.
AH: At the rate the news cycle has been going lately, two months from now might as well be five years from now. I have no idea whether we, as a nation, will be in the mood to watch at that point and I have no interest in pretending to, which (among many other reasons) is why it’s not my job to program television. All I know is that after weeks of what feels like tumbleweeds at the tail end of summer, I’m more than ready for the deluge of fall TV to come and drown me once more.
