‘Tis the Season to be Viewing… and Reading
This holiday weekend, I spent a lot of time viewing and reading. Probably like you. I’ll share my favorites if you share yours. First the viewing.
Succession. The HBO drama, in its third and finest season, is the best serial on TV these days. Period. Yes, it’s a relentlessly bleak inspection of power and family dynamics. But it’s closely observed, often mordantly funny, expertly written, and powerfully acted. Just when you were ready to click off HBO as hopelessly enthralled by the 25-to-35 year old demographic, along come a tentpole series nearly as good as the old Sopranos.
The Humans. And you thought your Thanksgiving dinner was a family disaster? Like Succession, The Humans, Stephen Karam’s darkly intense screen adaptation of his Tony Award-winning play (available on Showtime) seems to be unwatchable. But it’s relentlessly, oddly compelling. In the course of moving a young couple into a dilapidated building in New York’s Chinatown, a family reveals its raw fissures as well as its surprising resilience. Another stunning ensemble, featuring performances by the great Richard Jenkins and by Amy Schumer and Stephen Yeun (among others).
Get Back. Hours and hours of The Beatles’s breakup? This long and winding, three-part documentary on Disney Plus can’t be that interesting. But for this hardcore Beatles fan it is so far — although I’ve only watched the two-hour Part One. I’m fascinated to see the Beatles develop the songs that were later featured on their last two albums — as well as on John, Paul and George’s solo debuts. The main insights for me so far have focused on Paul’s leadership of the band by this point, in early 1969 (for good and ill); John’s growing disengagement from the band (which nonetheless still sparked his genius); and George’s increasing dissatisfaction with playing the role of overlooked kid brother.
The primary relationship, even as it’s coming apart, is between Paul and John. They communicate in their own shorthand language. Paul only has eyes for John, even as Yoko is joined at the hip to her new husband. You have to feel sorry for Paul, trying to play band leader, pushing and prodding his bandmates back into creative mode. But when George walks out, after taking enough from Paul, the writing is on the wall. And we’re still in episode one! I can’t wait to watch the rest. We’ve never seen the dissolution of creative chemistry on film like this before. Thanks to director Peter Jackson for cutting 150 hours of footage down to three episodes.
The Great British Bake-Off. The show, once one of my great pleasures, has fallen off a cliff with the loss of judge Mary Berry and witty hosts Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins — who’ve been replaced by the deeply, cringingly unfunny Noel Fielding and Matt Lucas. But the formula still works, if groaningly at times. This season’s contestants were particularly strong — good bakers, colorful personalities. Don’t tell me who won — I’m going to watch the final episode tonight. God help me.
And now for my favorite new books. I don’t have any stellar recommendations lately. But I liked three recent novels: Colm Toibin’s The Magician (because I’m fascinated by its fictional subject, Thomas Mann); Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, because I found her account of an interpreter’s life inside and outside the court in The Hague where war criminals are put on trial to be strange and haunting; and Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence, about an ex-con turned bookseller, who’s literally haunted by a former customer.
I also have high hopes for two nonfiction books:
The Trials of D. H. Lawrence, a biography of the English novelist who has intrigued me ever since I watched Ken Russell’s screen adaptation of Women in Love (and yes, ever since reading Kate Millett’s scathing Sexual Politics in college).
Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli. I’m told by friends who’ve watched The Godfather (the greatest Hollywood film ever made) even more than I have that this is the best, most definitive inside account of the making of Francis Coppola’s masterpiece.
Novelist Katie Kitamura