Chris Pine's new TV show is dark, disturbing and completely immersive

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This was published 5 years ago

Chris Pine's new TV show is dark, disturbing and completely immersive

By Brad Newsome

With so many entertainment options, it's easy to miss brilliant TV shows, movies and documentaries. Here are the ones to hit play on, or skip.

I Am the Night


Stan*, from Tuesday

This dark and disturbing limited series is all the more creepy for being based on the true story of Fauna Hodel and her grandfather, notorious Los Angeles doctor, libertine and suspected serial killer George Hodel.

It takes place mostly in the LA of the 1960s. That LA is a brutal city untouched by the peace-and-love sentiments of the hippie movement, a place of grimy, run-down, pre-war shacks, and one in which criminal police openly deal out violence on behalf of powerful patrons and their own untrammelled hatred.

But I Am the Night finds the teenage Fauna (India Eisley) hundreds of miles away in Sparks, Nevada, where she lives with her bitter, alcoholic single mother, Jimmy Lee (Golden Brooks, producing a performance of withering intensity).

When Fauna, who has been brought up thinking she is mixed race, learns that she was adopted from a white family, she sets out for LA, where her grandfather's Mayan-revival mansion looms like the temple of some malevolent god.

India Eisley and Chris Pine star in I Am the Night.

India Eisley and Chris Pine star in I Am the Night. Credit: Stan

Meanwhile we meet washed-up reporter and traumatised Korean War veteran Jay Singletary (the exceedingly watchable Chris Pine), who was ruined by a long-ago run-in with Dr Hodel (a perfectly loathsome Jefferson Mays). Paths will cross and blood there will be.

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Writer Sam Sheridan, adapting Fauna Hodel's autobiography, and director Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman, Monster) sweep the viewer into their milieu from the very first shot.

It certainly helps that Eisley (a long-time veteran of The Secret Life of the American Teenager) is so perfectly cast, her wide eyes and fawn-like physicality perfectly evoking an ingenue about to stumble into a horror for which she is utterly unprepared.

But Sheridan and Jenkins don't neglect their other characters, or any aspect of their setting - each gets foregrounding commensurate with their significance, and each contributes towards making this week's first episode an uncommonly immersive and accomplished piece of television.

I Am the Night is on Stan from Tuesday.

I Am the Night is on Stan from Tuesday. Credit: Stan

The race angle is particularly instructive. The racist police violence of the period isn't casual or random; it's deliberately measured out in order to keep non-whites in their place, and Fauna's journey across that bloody line adds a great deal of emotional freight in itself.

If the series isn't a straight LA noir of the kind perfected by James Ellroy, it's certainly in the same area code, touching on some of the same people and events that have inspired Ellroy - not least the murder of Elizabeth Short, the so-called Black Dahlia.

Surprisingly funny reality TV series The Casketeers is on Netflix.

Surprisingly funny reality TV series The Casketeers is on Netflix.

The Casketeers
Netflix

There's a lot packed in to this charming and surprisingly funny reality series following the work of colourful Kiwi funeral director Francis Tipene, his wife, Kaiora, and their long-suffering staff.

There's lots of organic workplace and relationship comedy, fascinating insights into the funerary traditions of Māori and Pacific Islander people, and a poignant tenderness in the way Tipene goes about preparing the bodies of the deceased for viewing by their families.

It's an unexpectedly delightful celebration of life in the constant presence of death.

Sweet, sassy and very funny: catch Derry Girls on Netflix.

Sweet, sassy and very funny: catch Derry Girls on Netflix.

Derry Girls
Netflix

The Derry of the 1990s seems like a place from an especially distant past, what with all those brand-new classics from The Cranberries all over the radio, and with armed British soldiers stopping and searching children's school buses.

But teenager Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson) and her school chums are focused on more eternal concerns - such as social mortification and the terrifying threat of being banned from the neighbourhood fish and chip shop.

Created by real-life Derry girl Lisa McGee, it's sweet, sassy and very funny.

Grant Bowler stars in outlandish drama series Defiance.

Grant Bowler stars in outlandish drama series Defiance.

Defiance
Amazon Prime Video

Grant Bowler is great to watch in this outlandish but likeable post-apocalyptic drama series developed by Rockne S. O'Bannon (who also created Farscape and Alien Nation).

Bowler's nice-guy tough guy character and his adopted alien daughter (Stephanie Leonidas) travel the Missouri badlands trying to strike it rich with salvage from crashed spaceships - while trying to get along with no fewer than seven stranded alien races.

It's imaginative stuff, and some nice little touches ensure that the extraterrestrial element doesn't overpower the human one.

Don Cheadle, Andrew Rannells and Regina Hall star in Black Monday.

Don Cheadle, Andrew Rannells and Regina Hall star in Black Monday. Credit: Stan

Black Monday
Stan

The "Black Monday" stock-market crash of 1987 was a crisis that shook the financial world.

But it also provided an opportunity: an opportunity for Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Black Monday creators Jordan Cahan and David Caspe to mine a thin seam of '80s nostalgia and to use the general awfulness of their characters as licence to amuse themselves with egregiously tasteless, unfunny jokes and outdated attitudes towards women, race, homosexuality and pretty much anything else you can think of.

In Don Cheadle, Regina Hall and Andrew Rannells, Black Monday does at least have three fine actors working valiantly to make something of the flimsy material.

Cheadle brings boundless energy as amoral, cocaine-fuelled Wall Street trader Maurice Monroe, an outsider who styles himself as a black Moses who will "put the brother in Lehman Brothers"; Hall is his oldest friend and the nearest thing to a conscience at his misogynistic little frat-bro firm; and Rannells is a naive, buttoned-down dork whose new algorithm might revolutionise stock trading.

That the early episodes come off so tonally confusing, insubstantial and unpleasant is a pity.

The Pervert's Guide to Ideology is written and presented by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

The Pervert's Guide to Ideology is written and presented by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
DocPlay

Slovenian political philosopher Slavoj Žižek is pulling apart 70 years' worth of cinema to show how films have revealed, reinforced and occasionally challenged such prevailing ideologies as fascism, Stalinism and modern Western capitalism.

Director Sophie Fiennes deftly inserts Žižek into such classics as Jaws and Taxi Driver, the better to make his points.

Expect darkness at the heart of James Cameron's Titanic: a retreading of the "reactionary myth" that the languid upper classes can regain vitality by sucking it, vampire-like, from the lower ones.

*Stan is owned by Nine, the publisher of this website.

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