What is the best San Francisco TV show of all time?
From 'Nash Bridges' to 'Looking,' plenty of television shows have set their stories in San Francisco, using the city as a backdrop for police procedurals, fantasy dramas and classic sitcoms.
Chronicle Culture Critic Peter Hartlaub recently rediscovered what he says is the best, the short-lived 'Midnight Caller,' which followed a cop-turned-late-night-radio-host as he offered talk therapy to the Bay Area over the air waves and solved a crime or two.
Now, we're looking for Chronicle readers' picks. Choose your favorite scripted series set in San Francisco from the list below and tell us why it deserves the crown.
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San Francisco Chronicle
18 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: ‘The Nightingale' shows you can use circus to talk about AI
As the husband gets home from work, he doesn't just tell his wife about his day. He flips her around his arm or his shoulder, as if she's a wheel or toy. There's nothing unnatural or gimmicky here; it's expressive. Theirs, you can tell without words, is a playful, loving, close relationship. Elsewhere in 'The Nightingale,' diving hoops become the brush through which that same man and some minions search for a rare bird with beautiful song. In another scene, a large outline of a cube — balanced, twirled and juggled like Atlas hoisting a globe — helps establish a tech leader's lonely, megalomaniacal ambition. Such is the promising vision of People's Circus Theatre, which Felicity Hesed founded in 2023. 'The Nightingale,' which opened Friday, June 6, at the Children's Creativity Museum Theater, uses homespun circus to adapt Hans Christan Andersen's 1843 fairy tale about a precious bird, the emperor who covets it and its eventual replacement by a bejeweled facsimile. In our era of artificial intelligence, we need art that helps us understand what differentiates humans from increasingly realistic robots, why that distinction matters and what replacing living beings with soulless machines might cost. If 'The Nightingale' seems ideal source material for that purpose, Hesed's straight-theater scenes bludgeon, telling us phones, excessive work and unchecked greed are bad. The show's geared for ages 7 and up, but reaching elementary schoolers doesn't require the baldness of a church pageant. Hesed succeeds most the more closely she hews to circus. When a tech exec called the Emperor (Joy the Tiger) hoists the Nightingale (Rosemary Le) for an aerial pas de deux on his open-sided cube, you feel the show's lesson more acutely precisely because it's made without words. Watch how he starts forcing, even shoving her appendages to hang from particular sides, like she's his prisoner, then how he gets to drop to the floor while she stays aloft. The cube — the shape of his company's logo and its lead product — has become her cage. 'The Nightingale' uses a youth ensemble (which is why the Chronicle isn't assigning the show a little man rating) alongside its adult performers, and Hesed shows great promise in making gorgeous art with novice actors. In one scene, when our protagonist, Sadit (Scott Dare), first enters the woods to search for the bird, a half-dozen acts of different animals tumbling, flipping and more sprinkle the stage to conjure the chittering activity of the forest floor. In one especially apt touch, the rodents juggle, which looks a lot like the way they scatter crumbs as they eat in real life. Other scenes, however, seem more designed to give the kids the chance to show off one more juggling routine than to serve the narrative. Do we really need to see four separate attempts to feed the Nightingale with juggling pins and balls as she wilts in her gilded cage? Then there are the circus routines, which derive part of their pleasure from proximity to the audience. You're close enough to hear performers pant like percussion instruments, to get vicariously dizzy when the Nightingale or her mechanical counterpart (Cami Boni) spin in the air, to lose track of how, exactly, an aerialist isn't plummeting to the floor and to feel in your cranium just how unforgiving that floor must be. Circus itself, in 'The Nightingale,' serves as a powerful counter to AI. No machine could replicate the wonder of two pulsing humans lacing their legs together in midair. Were a machine to express a feeling by stiffening its spine, we'd just shrug and say machines are supposed to be stiff anyway. If AI is supposed to make things easier and more efficient, 'The Nightingale' implies, some things are meaningful only because they're hard.
San Francisco Chronicle
2 days ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Dakota Johnson says ‘Madame Web' tanking wasn't her fault: ‘Who cares?'
Dakota Johnson has freed herself from the ' Madame Web ' debacle. The actress says the tanking of the 2024 superhero movie she starred in 'wasn't my fault,' and put the blame on the decision-makers at Sony Pictures. 'There's this thing that happens now where a lot of creative decisions are made by committee. Or made by people who don't have a creative bone in their body,' Johnson told the Los Angeles Times in an interview published Wednesday, June 4. 'It's really hard to make art that way. Or to make something entertaining that way. And I think unfortunately with 'Madame Web,' it started out as something and turned into something else. And I was just sort of along for the ride at that point.' ' Madame Web,' released in February 2024, starred Johnson as the Marvel Comics title character, an offshoot of Sony's ' Spider-Man ' series. The movie cost $100 million to make, and took in just about that in the global box-office; typically a movie needs to gross about three times its budget to break even theatrically. The movie also got terrible reviews — it currently holds a dismal 11% positive rating on aggregate — and sparked some intense social media reactions. 'But that happens,' Johnson said. 'Bigger-budget movies fail all the time. I don't have a Band-Aid over it. There's no part of me that's like, 'Oh, I'll never do that again' to anything. I've done even tiny movies that didn't do well. Who cares?' But that's not the only news Johnson has made this week. Reports say her eight-year relationship with Coldplay frontman Chris Martin has ended; she had a near wardrobe malfunction on 'The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon' and, in perhaps the weirdest moment, confessed she once sent a gallon of gorilla poop to a friend's ex-boyfriend. The latter confession came on Vanity Fair magazine's famous lie detector test, posted Thursday, June 5. 'Yes, I did do that,' Johnson admitted. 'It's been quite a while, it's been some years. … I'm not a monster.' Johnson, 35, who was raised in San Francisco while her father, actor Don Johnson, was filming the TV series ' Nash Bridges ' in the city, is currently starring in 'Materialists.' The rom-com co-starring Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal and directed by Celine Song (' Past Lives ') opens in San Francisco theaters on Friday, June 13.
San Francisco Chronicle
2 days ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
New S.F. Pride festival loses headliner weeks before event
Oakland R&B singer Kehlani has pulled out of the lineup for San Francisco's new Pride celebration, SoSF, leaving the event without a main headliner three weeks before it's scheduled to take place. The festival, a new one-day block party, announced that the 'After Hours' singer has decided to no longer be a part of the line-up' in an Instagram post shared on Thursday, June 5. Organizers also announced that the event, set for June 28, will no longer be held at Pier 80's warehouse. Instead, it will take place outdoors at 900 Marin Street, just across the street from the original location. The Chronicle has reached out to SoSF for more information. 'Nasty' singer Tinashe and Grammy-winning pop artist Kim Petras remain on the updated bill as headliners, and German DJ and Portola Festival alum Horsegirl has been added as a special guest. Still others on the festival's roster appear to be in flux. San Francisco DJ Adam Kraft, the 'Reparations' drag show and event company Fake and Gay have also dropped out of the lineup according to an Instagram story post from Kraft, which Fake and Gay then reposted. Kraft teased that a statement on the artists' decision to drop out would be 'prepared soon.' None of these acts are listed on the SoSF website anymore. Kehlani has been under fire recently for her stance on the war in Gaza. Her performance at Cornell University's end-of-school-year Slope Day was nixed by the school's president in April due to what he deemed 'antisemitic, anti-Israel sentiments." The artist has frequently used her platform to speak out in opposition against Israel and Zionism. She included keffiyehs, traditional Arabic scarves often associated with Palestinian identity, in the music video for her 2024 song 'Next 2 U,' which also uses the phrase 'long live the intifada,' which translates to 'uprising' or 'resistance' in Arabic. The term is also considered, by some, as a call for violence against Jews. Though the Oakland School for the Arts alum quickly responded via an Instagram video, refuting accusations of antisemitism by clarifying that she is 'anti-genocide' and 'anti the actions of the Israeli government,' more concert cancellations followed.
