In Which Bullets Flew All Through The Abbey

Wrote A Hit Play

by ETHAN PETERSON

The Halcyon
creator Charlotte Jones
ITV

The Halcyon (of ITV's spring series The Halcyon) is a hotel somewhere in London, I can't say precisely where. It has one Jew, one black man, one Indian fellow. It has one gay, several unmarried women, one German, one Austrian, one American. It really has everything when you think about it. It even has the singular crush of Max Fischer, one Olivia Williams:

Watching Wes Anderson's disturbing 1998 film Rushmore is now an altered experience in several ways. A close friend of mine suggested that Anderson should do a cut of the film without Bill Murray, in the style of Garfield Minus Garfield. After all, Fischer's relationship with his older patron is sort of besides the point. It is not the real reason he cannot consummate a romantic relationship with his teacher. The real reason is that she is not a very good or interesting person. Max's young love seems impossible in retrospect.

So does the Second World War. Events at the Halcyon Hotel are often interrupted by air raid sirens, but everyone involved tries to go on having a good time. Creator Charlotte Jones goes to substantial pains to make this Downton Abbey-clone less innocent overall. The action of the war is serious and severe, and many lose their lives.

Lady Hamilton (Olivia Williams) is an awful crone whose husband cheated on her with an anti-Semitic German woman. After he dies, Ms. Hamilton takes over the hotel with her two sons, the gay Toby (Edward Bluemel) and Freddie (Jamie Blackley), who is carrying on an elaborate love affair with the assistant manager of his hotel, a woman named Emma (Hermione Corfield). Lady Hamilton is a serious villainness for most of the show, which does not really put Rosemary Cross/Olivia Williams' extensive charm to good use.

Coming from the stage, Charlotte Jones is very deft at patterns of speech, and it is a relief not to hear Julian Fellowes' distinctive period pitter-patter. At times the denizens of The Halcyon talk like the twentieth-century actors they actually are, but this kind of verging on melodrama is actually a welcome relief. It is tedious to watch reserved people all the time.

Unfortunately, the minority characters of the Halcyon are employed purely to make their British betters look more virtuous, a clever retcon of history. The Halcyon's manager, Richard Garland (Steven Mackintosh), announces that France has fallen to the Germans and all the British people joke about how they'll get terrible sauerkraut there. Soon the severity of the war awakens a collective sense of self-preservation, but all-in-all, this took far too long. Six million Jews died while the U.S. and England were content to joke around.

Despite its rather ragtag plot and character work, Jones has selected an impressive cast of performers who keep her lively dialogue humming. It is difficult to grow bored of watching The Halcyon given the seventeen plotlines occuring at any one time. At times Jones' substantial monologues and speeches become seriously hokey, but as long as you are celebrating England, you may as well do it with a lecture and a song.

Still, it is hard not to watch all these British stories and think of the six million. There is one Jew in the cast, and he is a cook. British anti-Semitism never makes more than a token appearance. At the Halcyon, as on Noah's Ark, diversity is tolerated as long as no one minority becomes a majority. Even the Nazis here are not so bad - like Hitler, who prized British society and customs, they are respectful of the one place they never seemed keen to conquer.

The simple fact of being British overcomes a lot, and The Halcyon restates this again and again. Such nationalism is timely and uncomplicated, like Max Fischer's love for this chain-smoking old woman.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which Marriage Remains Not Quite As Sweet As You Think

Just Another Apple User

by ETHAN PETERSON

Imposters
creators Paul Adelstein & Adam Brooks
Bravo

Despite having been bilked out of his life savings by a disingenuous American woman named Saffron (Inbar Lavi), things are still pretty great for Ezra (Rob Heaps). For one, he does not appear to have much in the way of life savings, as much of his wealth is the wealth of his parents who run some kind of business. Ezra's bullshit detector should have been ringing loud and clear when a purported waitress from Belgium agreed to convert to Judaism, but for some reason he felt this was par for the course. He'd had a wonderful life.

After Saffron leaves, Ezra meets Richard (Parker Young), who looks almost exactly like him. This is partly because neither actor is in, fact, Jewish, which is a very hurtful casting choice. You will spend a lot of time trying to tell Ezra and Richard apart, although the key can be found in Ezra's questionable American accent, which slips into British inflection from time-to-time. In the pilot episode of Imposters, Ezra attempts to kill himself with an extension cord after trying to put his head in an oven. He succeeds at neither enterprise, which weirdly makes us loathe him even more. What kind of man sees his marriage fall apart and becomes even less sympathetic? The man with the cringey name of Ezra Bloom.

This is cannily done by creators Paul Adelstein and Adam Brooks, since if Saffron really was a monster, then they couldn't spend all her scenes putting this attractive Israeli-American actress in a series of less likely outfits. "She's just doing her job," Imposters convinces us to think, since the show is not really interested in the victims of crime, who all share a similar (boring) psychological profile exposing their own weakness and vanity. The imposters themselves are the focus here, led by a woman named Lenny Cohen (Uma Thurman).

Victims, according to Imposters, do not really lose much that is not already missing. This is completely fucked up, but what else would you expect from Bravo? After Ezra finds his wife gone, he plans to call the police so he can rescue her from her captors before he views the message she has left for him. It is super-apologetic and very nice overall, thanking him for their time together and asking that he not try to find her. It was a great deal more kind than any break-up I have ever had.

Instead of taking his wife's well-meant advice, Ezra completely self-destructs. He gets increasingly drunk and tries to convince his friend Gaby (Megan Park) to adopt a Belgian accent during intercourse, since it is the only way he can really get turned on now. Shortly thereafter he finds out that Saffron had engaged a third victim, a woman named Jules (Marianne Rendon), to whom she was also married. The badinage between these three people is enough to make even Lorelai Gilmore take a nap.

Jules lives in the most magical apartment I have ever personally witnessed. Eventually, Imposters means us to conclude that Saffron and her group of con artists only target people with such astronomical sources of revenue that it would be hard to feel any concern for them at all. How would they even miss the loss of income? Even the emotional damage, we are led to believe, is considerably less. Wasn't Saffron sort of well-meaning in how she broke these people's hearts?

First the Bravo Network ruined the entire concept of divorce, which I had so much faith in up until now. Now they purport to implode the entire premise of human emotions and trust in general. These are deeply cynical, awful television executives, and it somehow makes it so much worse than they have cast these extremely beautiful and kind actresses in the roles of villains. The only time I ever really hated Uma Thurman was when she was intimate with Quentin Tarantino.

Watching Ms. Lavi perform Saffron's various roles, including the cuckold of an asshole banker (Aaron Douglas) and the boyfriend of a tech mogul (Stephen Bishop), is quite frankly delightful. She is extremely talented at using her body language to convincingly influence other actors — she gives them so much to engage with as a performer. Ms. Lavi's different accents begin to slip at times, but who can blame her? Each of the people whose lives she enters would probably give her everything if she simply asked

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

 

In Which Another Unfortunate Event Has Yet To Occur

Children Lie

by ETHAN PETERSON

A Series of Unfortunate of Events
creator Mark Hudis & Barry Sonnenfeld
Netflix

The children at the center of the eight episode Netflix series A Series of Unfortunate Events are assholes. The first thing they demand after their parents die in a fire is access to a lavish library owned by a local attorney, Ms. Strauss (Joan Cusack). The three Baudelaire kids — Violet (Malina Weissman), Klaus (Louis Hynes) and Sunny (Presley Smith) — can't stop marveling at this new enclosure, which approximates the tony furnishings provided by their parents from an unknown and probably illicit income. They are so used to being rich that they are constantly clawing to return there in the years before Violett will inherit the family's money.

It turns out at the end of the very first episode that the Baudelaire's parents have escaped and were not murdered in a fire at all. Worse, they are portrayed by Will Arnett and Cobie Smulders. Perhaps nauseated by their kids' constant, insubstantial quoting from the books they have read, the senior Baudelaires escape to Peru, where various laws about miscegenation are relaxed. The two never show the slightest bit of affection for one another, and behave more as siblings than a married couple.

The aesthetic that surrounds the story of the Baudelaires being passed from guardian to guardian by Mr. Poe (K. Todd Freeman), the family's banker, can best be described as if Roald Dahl fell asleep. A few episodes that take place around the area of Lake Lachrymose are layered in a gloomy mist; the orphans' custodian Aunt Josephine (Alfre Woodard) lives on an imposing cliff over the water.

Josephine is afraid of absolutely everything except her surroundings, while the kids themselves are only afraid of their surroundings. Lemony Snicket (Patrick Warburton) explains the concept of dramatic irony in a lengthy sequence — these frequent breakings of the fourth wall are the only humor not provided by the antagonist Count Olaf (Neil Patrick Harris).

Mr. Harris has the advantage of portraying the only fulled fleshed-out character in this entire show. The role of Olaf is perfectly suited to his many talents, even if the singing bits are a bit forced. The extensive disguises he takes on are generally fun to simply look at, and every second that he is off the screen forces us to various dark conclusions about the actual meaning behind A Series of Unfortunate Events.

The thematic point of A Series of Unfortunate Events is that adults are children barely grown themselves, and can be relied upon for no more wisdom that any other potential source of information. Despite the fact that they meet many sinister such people, Klaus and Violet continue to look for adults to provide them with financial and emotional security. They do not learn anything more about themselves during this process, and indeed have no actual flaws or recognizable character traits beyond caretaking for a baby.

This aspect itself is most disturbing. Violett and Klaus do not appear to change their younger sister's diapers. The baby never cries or seems displeased, and is most happy chewing on hard things like a puppy. Author Daniel Handler's basic perception of young people is that they are blank slates upon which various things are imposed or arranged; he is just as guilty as Mr. Poe for being ignorant and Count Olaf for being greedy. His is the sin of pretending to know it all.

Barry Sonnenfeld is intent on casting many actors of color to replace the mostly white retinue that surrounded the Baudelaire children in the 2004 adaptation of Handler's books. These substitutions are well-meant I am sure, and putting Alfre Woodard in the role of a grammarian who is frightened of everything does play against her usual type. Race is completely obscured by a flattening that never permits any of the adults in the Baudelaires' lives to be altered by circumstance.

Without much in the way of character or plot, A Series of Unfortunate Events succeeds on a much more basic level. The show is an astonishing feast for the eyes. Sonnenfeld backed out of the feature film project in 1993 because he was concerned that the $100 million he was offered as a budget would not be enough to do justice to the many effects and costumes required.

With Netflix as the major backer, it seems that no expense has been spared. The reptile collection of Dr. Montgomery Montgomery (a hilarious Aasif Mandvi) actually gives the kids some of tangible world with which they can interact. Disappointingly, Dr. Montgomery only gets a single evening to engage the children. He wins their trust but never gives his own, leaving them as bereft of answers about their parents as when they arrived on his property.

The sheer amount of time spent going on and on about how awful the circumstances are for the Baudelaires is exhausting after the first couple episodes. Once Klaus is smacked across the face — the rest of the time the kids never suffer violence, never hunger and are frequented housed in massive estates with considerable resources. They complain about going to the movies, about the size of their bedroom, about having to do any kind of household work. Klaus, Sunny and Violet are merely victims of a pervasive mediocrity with which they never quite come to terms.  

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.