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"Dead to Me", streaming on Netflix
Grief makes us illogical. We tell people in mourning things that are weightless and do not make sense, and in distress we act strangely. At some point, we do not feel like doing anything substantial. In the next, we are suddenly obliged to dance. Who knows why
This sums up the contradictory nature of "Dead to Me," a light, superficial comedy about an angry and distressed woman looking for the murderer of her husband and the friend she made along the way. During her ten half-hours, episodes creator Liz Feldman associates a moment to another, suspending all oddly, if not totally.
It is useful for the series to revolve around two brilliant performances by Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini, in which a newly widowed couple of widows who meet in a group of affliction and play more or less instantly. Such a configuration resembles the beginning of a long television series interspersed with scenes of tenderness, vulnerability and a few heart-rending frames of heart-rending screams on the toilet and in the beds.
"Dead to Me" contains a few, except that he also aspires to build a mystery. That's where it stumbles.
From her earliest moments, Jen, Applegate's fragile real estate agent, is angry at the unfathomable concept that someone would have spilled her husband and gone, leaving him dying .
The mourning makes Jen a contemptuous and shredding creature, in the sense of caustic humor, who meets her in front of Judy de Cardellini, sweet and weird in every way and perhaps a little too eager to please, and whose fiance died suddenly of a massive heart attack. Judy is repairing, but Jen wants a form of justice and seeks to find the person who killed his wife.
The less we know about "Dead to Me", the more twists linking each episode will be effective, except that you can probably guess where the show is heading towards the end of the first episode. Again, this is not intended to beautify brain synapses with deep thoughts and theories.
But this is where this notion of contradictory value comes into play, because "Dead to Me" is easily consumable. The comic situations are extremely light and we do not know why Applegate suddenly launches into a jazz dance sequence. Although god, she moves and is fun to watch.
You know what I mean? Does not the packaging treat as crisper and thinner the secret to gobbling up massive amounts with less guilt? Yes, that's it. And is there no room for ephemeral pleasures, whether you are emotionally compromised or simply exhausted? Certainly.
It's also a Netflix show, programmed and populated with stars of famous brands killing every second in front of the camera, as Applegate and Cardellini do, or at least that seduce, like Ed Asner and James Marsden when they appear later for reasons that I will not go into because – as I said – twists.
"Dead to Me" is successful, it is the root of the bond that is established between Jen and Judy, sharing the feeling that their situation is disconcerting and strange and that they react accordingly. As their separate and shared situations become more and more strange, the viewer is forced to contemplate how we generally call women nuts, imbalances and frailties, while men in similar situations would see their bursts of behavior. strange excuses because of their grief.
When "Dead to Me" is presented, however, you can take each image as face cards in a game that mixes well but lacks something, which is playable as long as you forget the fact that it is missing one or two. Which is very nice if you just want to be distracted by a series of satisfactions. Given the right circumstances – or even the worst circumstances a person may be in – a show like this could be just what a person needs.
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"Chernobyl", first Monday at 21h, HBO
Another difficult truth about the series dealing with death is that they tend to be difficult to watch. Extremely difficult. Sometimes we understand that from the beginning and yet, the horror is invading you.
"Chernobyl" exposes the opening moments and subsequent attempts to cover the 1986 explosion in the infamous Ukrainian power station that sent radioactive material through what was then the Soviet Union, the Western Europe and up to Scandinavia.
For those who remember, the disaster was one of the worst nightmares of all. Once the time was up, Chernobyl became a shortcut for any kind of disaster, even a child's tantrums. To distance oneself from an unimaginable tragedy is quite simple when one lives far away.
In this miniseries, writer Craig Mazin and director Johan Renck place the viewer at the center of the film, from the moment of the explosion. The truly horrible scenes, however, show people gathered on a nearby bridge, watching the pillar of light dividing the sky above the plant while their children play in radioactive ashes falling like snowflakes from the sky. This happens in the first episode of a five-part miniseries, and at that point we know that most, if not all, are sentenced to death.
So, if the name does not allow you to know what you are subscribing to, the silent description of these worldly tragedies will surely do. As a warning, the majority of scenes depicting human beings that stand out do not start seriously until the third installment.
The shocking realism with which these atrocious deaths are portrayed only makes the dramatization of misinformation by the government even more dramatic, especially when Stellan Skarsgård's Deputy Prime Minister, Boris Shcherbina, initially compares the severity of radiation. to an X-ray of the thorax.
One can not commit to looking at "Chernobyl" without understanding how harsh this visual experience is. At the same time, the performances of Skarsgård, Emily Watson and Jared Harris are sufficiently passionate and nuanced to force the thirsty viewers to empty the roles. And this story is vital enough to hope that the world has a lot of regular viewers.
I suppose the main point of confusion, though explicable, is the choice to have Harris, who describes nuclear physicist and upset whistleblower Valery Legasov, as well as Watson (playing another physicist) and Skarsgård, describe their roles without using the Russian accent. The reasoning may have been to avoid distractions, but the British accents (and Skarsgård's words) distract him once the brain understands that these English actors play Soviet characters.
Relatively speaking, this is a small argument about a series that does its best to condense the story of a major disaster into a format that people can connect to. Under the blood and despair, "Chernobyl" is a lesson in arrogance and willful ignorance.
Faced with the truth delivered by competent scientists, politicians have also invested in the maintenance of power and its traps have rejected the threat, more concerned about appearances than by hundreds of thousands of lives. And looking at these scenes, we can only wish that we never attended a sequel to that in our lifetime.
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"Game of Thrones", aired Sunday at 9 pm, HBO
The good news is that fewer favorite characters died as we thought in The Long Night. The bad news is that many people are dead and Cersei is just sitting at King's Landing, sipping his purple drink, laughing and laughing. as she waits to mop up the remains. Whatever it is, at this point anything can happen, including nothing at all. Three episodes left!
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