Binge-r #251: Hacks + Mr Corman
Red Right Hand: Hannah Einbinder (Ava) and Jean Smart (Deborah) in Hacks
HACKS S1
Streaming Service: Stan
Availability: All 10 episodes now streaming
Life really is a joke in Hacks, a wonderfully beguiling Stan show about the dramas that fall upon funny people. Finely balanced at every turn, it is a bracing update of the odd couple format that moves across generational, fiscal, and cultural lines without ever denying either of the central characters the backbone of their beliefs or the safety of their failings. Having had a bad tweet torpedo her Hollywood career, comedy writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) is eventually reduced – as she sees it – to taking a gig writing gags for Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), a comedy legend in the lucrative 100 shows a year in Vegas of her career. Neither understands the other, nor is predisposed to wanting to.
Obviously, as this debut season unfolds the barriers between the two women will start to come down. But as salty as the dialogue is, a defining quality of creators Lucia Aniello (Broad City), Paul W Downs (Broad City), and Jen Statsky (The Good Place) work here is how much verve and emotional tension they work into traditional story points. It takes Ava talking back to Deborah – “even Liberace would think it was too much,” she says of a couch in the star’s Las Vegas mansion – for the latter to give the former a chance, but the moment is neither prosaic nor accommodating. Hacks understands that people don’t necessarily change, and part of the joy of the series is seeing two defiant people entrenched by their outlooks circle each other. Hannah is young and arrogant, Deborah ageing and successful. Any breakthrough they have is hard fought and yet funny.
The writing steadily folds in the supporting cast, including Downs as the manager of both comics and Kaitlin Olson as Deborah’s wayward adult daughter DJ, but as good as the ensemble is the show is an alter to worship Jean Smart. The veteran actor, whose credits include Designing Women and Frasier, has been exceptional recently in Watchmen, Mare of Easttown, and now Hacks. Smart shows us the grind of fame, the ceaseless routines. “Good is the minimum, the baseline,” Deborah tells Ava, and the direction – primarily from Aniello – is particularly good at observing how systems work. This Las Vegas is garish, but also deeply functional from top to bottom, to the point where even Deborah has to struggle to keep what she’s earnt. Nothing comes easily in Hacks, but watching it is a pleasure.
Life Lessons: Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Josh Corman) in Mr Corman
MR CORMAN (Apple TV+, all 10 episodes now streaming): As he did with his 2013 feature film, Don Jon, the Hollywood actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Inception, Snowden) oversees all the creative roles while starring in this idiosyncratic comic-flecked drama about a Los Angeles grade five teacher struggling to find his personal equilibrium. Discursive and wildly eclectic in tone, Mr Corman brings a cinematic strand of arthouse angst to the streaming age – Paul Thomas Anderson’s expressive romantic-comedy Punch-Drunk Love may be the nearest cultural reference. At the end of the first episode Gordon-Levitt’s Josh Corman, a failed musician, has a coruscating argument with the woman he went home with, Lindsey (Emily Tremaine), but when she slaps him he flies through the window into a fantasia netherworld. As it digs into Josh’s unsettled anxiety, the show liberally applies numerous such gambits; the third episode concludes with a musical number (co-written by Gordon-Levitt) that Josh performs as an act of understanding with his mother, Debra Winger’s Ruth. With Juno Temple playing Josh’s ex, these 10 half-hour episodes have a lot of artistic goals, perhaps too many. It doesn’t always click, but the ambition is appealing.
>> Further Reading: One of my favourite current shows is HBO’s The White Lotus, screening weekly on Foxtel but also streaming on Binge. I wrote about Mike White’s scathing, succulent satire for The Monthly [full review here].
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: With a quietly stinging Christopher Walken turn lurking inside it, Jason Bateman’s The Family Fang (2015, 106 minutes) is a deadpan comic drama about the adult children – Bateman and Nicole Kidman – of performance artists reunited with their parents; Zombieland (2009, 87 minutes) is as much fun as you can have with the zombie apocalypse as Emma Stone, Woody Harrelson, and Jesse Eisenberg play entangled survivors.
New on Stan: An invigorating, genre bursting action-comedy, Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block (2011, 88 minutes) uses a South London housing estate and inhabitants played by John Boyega and Jodie Whittaker to update genres and expectations; Stan has just added all kinds of Batman content, live action and animated, but you can simply start with Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008, 153 minutes) starring Christian Bale and Heath Ledger.
New on SBS on Demand: There’s a remarkable performance by the great Israeli actor Ronit Elkabetz in The Band’s Visit (2007, 84 minutes), but Eran Kolirin’s film about an Egyptian police orchestra that gets stranded in a tiny Israeli town has numerous grace notes, as the unexpected lodgers set off a series of intimate, revelatory encounters that find a focus in Elkabetz’s café owner and Sasson Gabai as the musicians’ unyielding leader.
>> Missed the last BINGE-R? Click here to read about Stan’s star-studded medical malpractice drama Dr Death and Netflix’s new supernatural Icelandic thriller Katla.
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>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 322 series reviewed here, 162 movies reviewed here, and 41 lists compiled here.
