Binge-r #210: Staged + Tehran
Acting Up: Michael Sheen (Michael) in Staged
STAGED
Streaming Service: ABC iView
Availability: All six episodes now streaming
The Zoom comedy is quickly becoming a self-contained genre: an era-specific production where the anxieties and unpredictability of COVID-19 home life get filtered through multiple screens. As humour it’s based on sly acknowledgment and relief, so the edges aren’t overly sharp, but that’s not an issue when it’s handled with the wit and dexterity of this British series where lockdown brings out everyone’s hang-ups. Playfully awkward, Staged stars Michael Sheen and David Tennant (last seen together in Amazon’s Good Omens, [full review here]) as slightly exaggerated versions of themselves – famous actors in isolation with their respective families, trying to rehearse the play they’d been playing to do together, Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, with a budding director, Simon Evans, desperate to hold on to what would have been his big break.
In reality Evans was a successful stage director about to shoot his first feature film, but as the creator of Staged he’s cast himself as a nervy, occasionally duplicitous hopeful. Tennant and Sheen easily inhabit his depiction of them: the former is unsettled, nervous, and a little wary of his friend and fellow actor, while the latter is domineering and occasionally demanding. The obvious comparison is Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip series (the most recent of which, Greece, is also on iView), but there’s less competitiveness to their interaction. The pair’s rambling conversations have wordplay and confessions, friendly jibes and a touch of thespian one-upmanship.
With its 22 minute episodes, Staged doesn’t overly lean on putting the duo together. Some of the funniest – and driest – humour comes in the form of household discussions between the actors and their real life partners, Tennant’s wife Georgia and Sheen’s girlfriend Anna Lundberg. Neither woman sees the actors as anything but a partner with no shortage of foibles, while Evans is forced to camp out with sister, Lucy Eaton, who brings out the 10-year-old in him. In such circumstances, where home-schooling might be abandoned by 10.30am and the wine consumption is spiking, there’s a touch of identification and a welcome contrast to the celebrity twists that start to feature from the third episode. It’s a morsel of a show, but a tasty one.
Iran So Far Away: Niv Sultan (Tamar Rabinyan) in Tehran
TEHRAN (Apple TV+, four episodes streaming, new episode each Friday): A spy thriller that gravitates to the intimacy of family and identity, this Israeli series begins with a Mossad hacker, Tamar Rabinyan (Niv Sultan), being smuggled into Iran, where her mission is to sabotage critical infrastructure before a major operation. The plan is good, but the human frailties it exploits are unpredictable, and she has to go on the run, pursued across the capital by a Revolutionary Guards commander, Faraz Kamali (Shaun Toub). This Israeli series was created by Moshe Zonder, who previously wrote the first season of Netflix’s Fauda [full review here], a series that moves Israel’s perceptions of Palestinians beyond the merely adversarial. Here he depicts the different strata of Iran, from youthful dissidents to conservative activists, while opening up the background of his two protagonists, each of who believe they’re doing the right thing in serving their country. Tamar’s background as the child of Iranian Jews who left the country adds a cultural knot, as does trying to survive as a wanted woman in a society where male authority is routinely wielded. The plotting stumbles somewhat towards the end, but the accumulated insight makes this drama more than just another impossible mission.
>> Good Show/New Service: Stan has picked up the rights to all three seasons of Harlots, the lively 1763-set drama about the rivalry between two London brothel madams that’s an incisive period examination of Georgian norms and female agency [full review here].
>> Further Reading: If you have Foxtel’s new streaming service, Binge (cool name!), I can’t recommend I May Destroy You enough. Michael Coel’s follow-up to Chewing Gum [full review here] is a wrenching but nonetheless creatively thrilling dissection of sexual assault’s impact on a young London writer that I wrote about for The Monthly [full review here].
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ambitions were unbridled after Boogie Nights and the result was the sprawling Magnolia (1999, 198 minutes), a baroque Californian epic of family and happenstance featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Jason Robards, John C. Reilly, Tom Cruise and a great many more actors trying to encompass his vision.
New on SBS on Demand: A decade before Parasite, Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho made the compelling Mother (2009, 130 minutes), a thriller about a marginalised parent (Kim Hye-ja) trying to prove that her arrested son is innocent of a murder; in Fatih Akin’s In the Fade (2017, 102 minutes), Diane Kruger gives one of her best performances, also as a committed parent, whose need for vengeance against a pair of extremists pushes her to their depth.
New on Stan: The Fighter (2010, 116 minutes) is a boxing biopic with a Rocky-like trajectory starring Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale, but for most of it David O. Russell camouflages the conventions with combative intimacy and enquiring handheld camerwork; Steve Martin skewered Los Angeles as the writer and star of L.A. Story (1991, 96 minutes), a satirical comedy co-starring Victoria Tennant, Richard E. Grant, and Sarah Jessica Parker.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to catch up on Stan’s Trump prosecution The Comey Rule and Netflix’s ebullient Victorian-era teenage adventure Enola Holmes.
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>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 260 series reviewed here, 152 movies reviewed here, and 36 lists compiled here.
