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The Age
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
All US television is Trumpy now, even when it's not
In the original SATC era we wanted to join the wealthy and aspirational foursome for a drink, but now the zeitgeist has turned. The television shows that feel most relevant to the moment, and which are the most engaging, are all about the suffering and the immorality of the super-rich. It feels more comfortable, now, to reassure ourselves that while billionaires and tech-bro oligarchs appear to be running the world, they're living lives of miserable inauthenticity. It started with Succession, a brilliant and darkly funny exposition of the ways in which inherited wealth can corrupt family relationships. The creator of Succession, Jesse Armstrong, has just released a movie, Mountainhead, about a foursome of tech billionaires who hole up in a mountain mansion in Utah as the world seems to be ending. More recently we have Your Friends & Neighbours, starring Mad Men's Jon Hamm, a square-jawed hero of all-American good looks but with just enough despair in his face to hint at inner spiritual desolation. Hamm plays Coop, a one-percenter hedge fund manager enraged by his divorce (his wife left him for his good friend), who loses his job after a low-level sexual indiscretion at work. In order to maintain his lifestyle (which includes $4500 skin treatments for his daughter and $30,000 tables at charity galas), he resorts to stealing from his friends and neighbours. These people, who live in a fictional, highly manicured wealth conclave outside New York City, are so obscenely rich that they have $200,000 watches and rolls of cash lying around in drawers. Hamm does what he has to do – he becomes a cat burglar with a cynical philosophy. Loading Coop is just a man trying to get by, and if that doesn't involve selling his Maserati, or getting a new (albeit less well paid) job, then it is a testament to the show's good writing that we are still with him, even when we question his attachment to a lifestyle he purports to disdain. Another new American show, Sirens, stars Julianne Moore as the beautiful philanthropist wife of a billionaire hedge-fund manager, who is summering in her uber-mansion (it has a turret) on an unnamed east-coast big-money island similar to Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard. She has a creepy, co-dependent relationship with her young personal assistant, who comes from poverty and dysfunction but who is loved in a way her wealthy boss never will be. Of course, these shows have a buck each way – they seek to satirise the super-rich and expose the underlying emptiness of their lives, while allowing us the vicarious experience of living in their luxury for an hour or so. The Hollywood Reporter calls it 'affluence porn'. We get access to the calfskin-lined interior of the private jet. We get to enjoy the week-long wedding festivities in Tuscany and gawp at the marvellous outfits, all while judging the protagonists for their materialism. In AJLT the materialism is not there to be judged; it is an integral part of the fun. Perhaps AJLT feels off because the writing is bad, and the plot lines so tired that dogs must be enlisted to prop up the action. Or maybe it is because in the second Trump administration the US political environment has become so oppressive and so inescapable that no story feels true unless it references it, however obliquely.
Sydney Morning Herald
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
All US television is Trumpy now, even when it's not
In the original SATC era we wanted to join the wealthy and aspirational foursome for a drink, but now the zeitgeist has turned. The television shows that feel most relevant to the moment, and which are the most engaging, are all about the suffering and the immorality of the super-rich. It feels more comfortable, now, to reassure ourselves that while billionaires and tech-bro oligarchs appear to be running the world, they're living lives of miserable inauthenticity. It started with Succession, a brilliant and darkly funny exposition of the ways in which inherited wealth can corrupt family relationships. The creator of Succession, Jesse Armstrong, has just released a movie, Mountainhead, about a foursome of tech billionaires who hole up in a mountain mansion in Utah as the world seems to be ending. More recently we have Your Friends & Neighbours, starring Mad Men's Jon Hamm, a square-jawed hero of all-American good looks but with just enough despair in his face to hint at inner spiritual desolation. Hamm plays Coop, a one-percenter hedge fund manager enraged by his divorce (his wife left him for his good friend), who loses his job after a low-level sexual indiscretion at work. In order to maintain his lifestyle (which includes $4500 skin treatments for his daughter and $30,000 tables at charity galas), he resorts to stealing from his friends and neighbours. These people, who live in a fictional, highly manicured wealth conclave outside New York City, are so obscenely rich that they have $200,000 watches and rolls of cash lying around in drawers. Hamm does what he has to do – he becomes a cat burglar with a cynical philosophy. Loading Coop is just a man trying to get by, and if that doesn't involve selling his Maserati, or getting a new (albeit less well paid) job, then it is a testament to the show's good writing that we are still with him, even when we question his attachment to a lifestyle he purports to disdain. Another new American show, Sirens, stars Julianne Moore as the beautiful philanthropist wife of a billionaire hedge-fund manager, who is summering in her uber-mansion (it has a turret) on an unnamed east-coast big-money island similar to Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard. She has a creepy, co-dependent relationship with her young personal assistant, who comes from poverty and dysfunction but who is loved in a way her wealthy boss never will be. Of course, these shows have a buck each way – they seek to satirise the super-rich and expose the underlying emptiness of their lives, while allowing us the vicarious experience of living in their luxury for an hour or so. The Hollywood Reporter calls it 'affluence porn'. We get access to the calfskin-lined interior of the private jet. We get to enjoy the week-long wedding festivities in Tuscany and gawp at the marvellous outfits, all while judging the protagonists for their materialism. In AJLT the materialism is not there to be judged; it is an integral part of the fun. Perhaps AJLT feels off because the writing is bad, and the plot lines so tired that dogs must be enlisted to prop up the action. Or maybe it is because in the second Trump administration the US political environment has become so oppressive and so inescapable that no story feels true unless it references it, however obliquely.
The Herald Scotland
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Don't let your preconceptions stop you, this is a fascinating TV drama
'What?' 'They're going to shut down the country.' We learn Denmark is being evacuated because, like much of flatland northern Europe, it's about to go underwater. But don't for a second assume that what follows is some Will Smith-scale, CGI-coated disaster movie sequence of events. Instead, this series, a massive hit in Europe, focuses instead on the events surrounding one extended family, who are tipped off about the government's decision to close the country and exit six million people. Read more The effect of this is we're immediately gripped by the moral issues faced; if almost all of your money is invested in your home, and it's about to become worthless, should you try and sell before word gets out? Where will you live? How will you live? You may be a successful architect in Denmark, but will France let you in? Can you even think about bringing new life into the world when you don't know which country you will be living in? The focal point of the series is Laura, (Amaryllis August), a happy 19-year-old at school who just before the announcement falls in love with the boy with the floppy hair and the huge grin. Can you stop this giant wave of passion any more than you can stop the ocean from flooding into your house? Laura's decisions, we learn, impact her entire family. Yes, it could have been tempting to focus on the visual horror element but instead the director – aided by a quite brilliant cast – has chosen to home in on the detail of evacuation. The desperate-to-leave Danes find themselves drowning in red tape. They have to make immense sacrifices, such as the young mum whose nine-year-old soccer star son Lucas has been selected to join Liverpool FC. Yet UK immigration won't allow her in, and she's forced to flee to Romania. And while it could have been easy to hammer home the existentialist crises we face from global warming, the fears held by many over immigration, this seven-parter is way too clever to throw buckets of freezing cold water in our face, instead the themes working through the characters. And it's all the more powerful to witness the white, middle class Scandinavians finding themselves being pinballed around Europe. This is clever, engrossing, underplayed television in which devastation is played out via the emotional reactions, yet it's given scale and filmed in several countries. Most importantly, it's a powerfully stare into the soul of humanity, asking how we would act given similar circumstances. And it's a great reminder that not all the great TV these days is found on the major streamers. Tom Hughes as Dr James Ford and Zoe Telford as Dr Kate McAllister (Image: free) Yet sometimes it is. As we know from John Hamm's Mad Men days, he does vulnerable better than a tiny tot wearing a thin baby-grow lying in a cold pram in the middle of a Scots winter. This time around he's starring in the wonderfully crafted Your Friends & Neighbours, (Apple TV, Fridays) as the Maserati-driving hedge-fund manager Coop, who's life smacks against the backboard when he discover wife Mel shooting hoops in the bedroom with his basketball-playing best friend. Just when things couldn't be any worse, Coop loses his job and believes he has no choice but to take up cat burgling the upstate New York homes of those whose parties he still attends. This is a lovely satire on the shallowness of fatuous lifestyles, false smiles and faked friendships. But at its heart is the realisation that Andy Cooper really wants to put his ex-wife under pressure. This week Hamm's eyes were at their wistful best as Coop and Mel took a college -finding trip, which became a revealing walk in the garden of remembrance. Still on the theme of choices and consequences, Malpractice (ITV1, Sunday and ITVX) is back doing for docs What Line of Duty did for cops. And here's the delicious dilemma faced by Dr James Ford (Tom Hughes). Who would you treat first – a woman with postpartum psychosis, or a pregnant crack addict about to be sectioned? Written bv former NHS doctor Grace Ofori-Attah, the first episode allowed for a neat slow build up. We like Ford. We know he has to be in two places at once and he can't clone himself. The pressure mounts. He cuts corners. Or does he? He tells white lies. But what is the handsome young psychiatrist? An innocent man – or an arrogant, entitled, thick-skinned trickster? It's up to Callahan and Adjei (Helen Behan and Jordan Kouamé) from the Medical Investigations Unit to find out, and we discover Torquemada wasn't nearly so tough as these two. But of course, also under scrutiny is the perilous state of the NHS, which sees Ford make his choices the first place. There are consequences too for Ross Kemp's appearance in Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC1, Tuesday). And we're not just talking about the long-term impact of the opening scene in which the EastEnder is seen jogging while wearing a funny little hat with Shrek ears. (A nickname beckons). In fact, that was about the most entertaining part of this utterly dreary hour-long excuse for documentary. Ross Kemp uncovered his family's history (Image: free) Kemp now spends much of his life peering into other people's lives via TV 'investigations' but he really wants to have a good talk with himself and investigate why he agreed to take part in this series at all. Okay, it's not every week that we can expect the participant to discover their great uncle Barney was once Blackbeard's best pirate friend, or great granny Ethel worked alongside Florence Nightingale in the Crimea. But the best/worst tale this hour came up with was that Kemp's great grandfather Pop (short for his nickname Popeye) was on a ship that was torpedoed during wartime. Who'd have thought that possible? To make it all worse, when actors are on this show they feel compelled to act; excited/astonished/devasted – whatever the moment calls for, even when it doesn't. Ross Kemp, sadly, didn't hold back on the emoting, offering a little sprinkling of tears at the realisation that Pop, (who liked a good drink, another major revelation) spent some time in the drink before being rescued. If the BBC continues to release episodes such as this, it could have a major impact. We may begin to believe that either subjects steer researchers away from the really interesting backstories (why focus only on the mother's side?) or that the format has simply become so lazy it's prepared to sell us the inane. Take action now, Auntie.
Sydney Morning Herald
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Money buys happiness, right? Not in the lifestyles of the rich and miserable
There are three broad spirits in which American television portrays the rich: aspiration, judgment and reassurance. The aspirational spirit makes you want to have what they have, the judgmental spirit condemns them for what they've done to get what they have, and the reassuring spirit tells you that you don't want what they have anyway. Often, these spirits coexist in the same portrayal. Even exercises in what seems like pure aspiration — a reality TV real estate show, say — can feel like a rough draft for an eat-the-rich jeremiad, while even stories that are intent on portraying rich people in a critical light find it hard to escape from some sort of aspirational identification. Imagining oneself hanging out in the resorts on The White Lotus is part of the show's appeal, even when you're officially glad you aren't one of the characters. And a show like Succession, in which the Murdoch-esque family was not just flawed but also malign and aggressively miserable, still stirred a certain kind of envy in the frictionless way its billionaires moved from yachts to palazzos to alpine and tropical retreats. So the most interesting thing about Your Friends & Neighbours, a new Apple TV show in which Jon Hamm plays a New York City moneyman who starts thieving from his gilded neighbours to keep up appearances after he loses his high-paying job, is that it manages to eliminate almost any sense of aspirational identification from its portrait of leafy Connecticut hyperaffluence. It isn't just that its characters, inhabiting a world that resembles the richest parts of Greenwich or New Canaan, are unhappy, flailing, depressed. They are also denied the compensations that are supposed to attach to wealth. For all their millions, they still don't seem financially or socially secure, and although the show deliberately showcases various luxury goods (high-end watches, Rolls-Royces, fancy Scotch), the overall ambience is extraordinarily bare of style and beauty, offering instead a world of blah décor, undistinguished fashions and cavernous homes that just look like overpriced McMansions. A couple of years ago, I praised the show Fleishman is in Trouble for its effective portrait of a specific kind of almost-upper-class anxiety, the sense instilled in many striving meritocrats that even if they are doing well, they're still missing out on a security that you simply can't achieve on a doctor's or lawyer's salary: the trust fund, the financial cushion, the assurances of generational wealth. The characters in Your Friends & Neighbours are the people that the striving meritocrats in Fleishman might reasonably envy — not the Bezosian billionaire class but the people for whom $15 million homes are normal and watches worth $100,000 can be stolen and not missed. And the new show functions as a very direct and reassuring response to meritocratic status anxiety by portraying its rich world as a place where unhappiness is only magnified and financial security is still an illusion. Generational wealth or no, they are all still stressing about getting their daughters into Princeton University, and the pressures of keeping up with the mansion dwellers next door mean that even a top dog like Hamm's Andrew 'Coop' Cooper is just one bad break away from financial calamity. As part of the target audience for this kind of reassurance, I appreciate the pandering: Watching the first few episodes of the show did, indeed, make me feel better about not being as rich as the on-screen characters. But is the pandering perspective true? Is this the right way to depict the landscape of the contemporary rich — as a fundamentally dreary place, with all glamour banished? Is Your Friends & Neighbours getting at a truth that eludes all the more aspirational portrayals?
The Age
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Money buys happiness, right? Not in the lifestyles of the rich and miserable
There are three broad spirits in which American television portrays the rich: aspiration, judgment and reassurance. The aspirational spirit makes you want to have what they have, the judgmental spirit condemns them for what they've done to get what they have, and the reassuring spirit tells you that you don't want what they have anyway. Often, these spirits coexist in the same portrayal. Even exercises in what seems like pure aspiration — a reality TV real estate show, say — can feel like a rough draft for an eat-the-rich jeremiad, while even stories that are intent on portraying rich people in a critical light find it hard to escape from some sort of aspirational identification. Imagining oneself hanging out in the resorts on The White Lotus is part of the show's appeal, even when you're officially glad you aren't one of the characters. And a show like Succession, in which the Murdoch-esque family was not just flawed but also malign and aggressively miserable, still stirred a certain kind of envy in the frictionless way its billionaires moved from yachts to palazzos to alpine and tropical retreats. So the most interesting thing about Your Friends & Neighbours, a new Apple TV show in which Jon Hamm plays a New York City moneyman who starts thieving from his gilded neighbours to keep up appearances after he loses his high-paying job, is that it manages to eliminate almost any sense of aspirational identification from its portrait of leafy Connecticut hyperaffluence. It isn't just that its characters, inhabiting a world that resembles the richest parts of Greenwich or New Canaan, are unhappy, flailing, depressed. They are also denied the compensations that are supposed to attach to wealth. For all their millions, they still don't seem financially or socially secure, and although the show deliberately showcases various luxury goods (high-end watches, Rolls-Royces, fancy Scotch), the overall ambience is extraordinarily bare of style and beauty, offering instead a world of blah décor, undistinguished fashions and cavernous homes that just look like overpriced McMansions. A couple of years ago, I praised the show Fleishman is in Trouble for its effective portrait of a specific kind of almost-upper-class anxiety, the sense instilled in many striving meritocrats that even if they are doing well, they're still missing out on a security that you simply can't achieve on a doctor's or lawyer's salary: the trust fund, the financial cushion, the assurances of generational wealth. The characters in Your Friends & Neighbours are the people that the striving meritocrats in Fleishman might reasonably envy — not the Bezosian billionaire class but the people for whom $15 million homes are normal and watches worth $100,000 can be stolen and not missed. And the new show functions as a very direct and reassuring response to meritocratic status anxiety by portraying its rich world as a place where unhappiness is only magnified and financial security is still an illusion. Generational wealth or no, they are all still stressing about getting their daughters into Princeton University, and the pressures of keeping up with the mansion dwellers next door mean that even a top dog like Hamm's Andrew 'Coop' Cooper is just one bad break away from financial calamity. As part of the target audience for this kind of reassurance, I appreciate the pandering: Watching the first few episodes of the show did, indeed, make me feel better about not being as rich as the on-screen characters. But is the pandering perspective true? Is this the right way to depict the landscape of the contemporary rich — as a fundamentally dreary place, with all glamour banished? Is Your Friends & Neighbours getting at a truth that eludes all the more aspirational portrayals?
