Binge-r #175: Work in Progress + Ad Vitam
Second Chance: Theo Germaine (Chris) and Abby McEnany (Abby) in Work in Progress
WORK IN PROGRESS S1
Streaming Service: Stan
Availability: All eight episodes now streaming
The humour in this freewheeling but quietly ambitious American comedy moves seamlessly between the mordant and the marvellous – when it segues you don’t just get sharp punchlines, but also a differing perspective. That’s invaluable in opening up the cloistered life of Abby (Abby McEnany), a self-described “fat queer dyke” from Chicago whose unhappiness and phobias leads her to set a deadline: if nothing changes within 180 days, she tells her therapist, she will commit suicide. The response Abby gets is the first of many surprises on this show, which balances the bleak intent of her ultimatum with the vicarious moods of everyday life.
Created by McEnany, a veteran comic, and series director Tim Mason, who in turn penned the episodes with Lilly Wachowski (The Matrix), Work in Progress twists expectations by giving Abby an unexpected offering: a budding relationship with waiter Chris (Theo Germaine, Netflix’s The Politician), a trans man who at the age of 22 is half her age. Instead of asking Abby to drag herself upwards, it elevates her and lets the vertigo set in. The narrative isn’t afraid to suggest Abby has fallen into selfishness and self-defeat, so the attention of Chris, who is emotionally and physically attracted to her, is a different but equally demanding challenge.
All of this unfolds with storytelling that intertwines queer history and generations, as Abby moves between her circle and Chris’s, set-pieces such as a public bathroom meltdown after other women once again misidentify Abby as a man, her romantic past, and a lights out sex scene that is at once farcical and fulfilling. This era of the idiosyncratic and illuminating comedy, shaped by Louie and Atlanta, has produced some fine shows, and this is one of them. A scene played for laughs – such as Abby spotting a fictionalised version of an actor whose real life character she unfortunately resembled – will be circled back to in a subsequent episode so that Abby has to deal with not just adversity but also empathy. Work in Progress is unheralded, but it shouldn’t be unrewarded.
Live Forever: Garance Marillier (Christa) and Yvan Atal (Darius) in Ad Vitam
AD VITAM S1 (Netflix, all six episodes now streaming): Netflix has satisfied my taste for weird European science-fiction – seriously, you should watch Dark [full review here] – and this French series set in a world where ageing can be held at bay plays, with middling success, to that genre. “We have conquered death,” a reporter breezily declares during a handy opening montage, but the regular “regeneration” process isn’t available until people turn 30, creating a strange impasse for the young. Their existential queries have an extreme response in an underground suicide cult, a shocking act in a world that looks like ours but where people can’t comprehend death. When bodies wash ashore on a Mediterranean beach the case is assigned to experienced – he’s 119-years-old – police detective Darius Asram (Yvan Attal), who soon turns to a survivor of the cult’s last appearance a decade prior, the institutionalised Christa (Garance Marillier). With a slow but evocative pace, this is more a philosophical investigation than a procedural – it’s about identity, mortality, and the burden of unchecked time. The leads carry it: Attal’s world-weary demeanour has never made more sense, while Marillier is compelling as a decoy returning to a society she can’t comprehend.
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: A bleak addiction drama about a son back from rehab and a mother trying to understand the world that tempts him, Ben is Back (2018, 103 minutes) puts Julia Roberts and Lucas Hedges at the centre of America’s opioid age; Logan Lucky (2017, 118 minutes) is Steven Soderbergh in breezy heist mode, with Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Riley Keough, and a wildly accented Daniel Craig plotting to rob a NASCAR race.
New on SBS on Demand: There’s a curious second season of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope – Jude Law in a papal speedo! – now streaming on SBS on Demand, but they’ve also added the Italian filmmaker’s best movie, Il Divo (2008, 110 minutes), a baroque study of political power’s gnomic grip with a masterful Toni Servillo as controversial former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti.
New on Stan: One of the great American movies of the 1950s, Sweet Smell of Success (1957, 97 minutes) is a scalding study of ambition and self-loathing with Burt Lancaster as a powerful newspaper columnist and Tony Curtis an amoral publicist; a distaff Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Hustle (2019, 94 minutes) simply struggles to be funny despite the voluminous efforts of Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson as very different con artists.
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