Just finished up a few series on the old Streaming Machine....
"Fargo" Season 5 (FX/Hulu)
Just finished watching Season 5 of this quirky series.
This one takes place in Minnesota and North Dakota in 2019, and it opens up with an almost shot-for-shot duplication of the classic 1996 movie of the same name: Two masked intruders appear on the front porch of a Minnesota household, break into the house, and kidnap the wife of a car salesman.
The similarity pretty much ends there, because the victim, Dot Lyon, played by Juno Temple, is no ordinary passive victim. Turns out that she has been living under a false identity for several years with her husband and young daughter. When a fluke circumstance brings her true identity to light in certain circles, it triggers a series of events begins that are played out in true Fargo-like style.
Turns out that she was married before, to a right wing nut Sheriff Roy Tillman in a neighboring North Dakota County. Why did Dot leave him, and why does Tillman, played with a hateful intensity by Jon Hamm, want her back so desperately? That is the crux of the series for this season.
The other major characters in this season is Dot's mother-in-law, Lorraine Lyon, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. She if the CEO of a "debt reduction" company, who brings new meaning to the phrase "ruthless". Her character is terrific.
Throw in assorted Minnesota and North Dakota police officers, FBI agents, all the crooked cops and whacko militiamen under Tillman, and peripheral characters such as spouses, and Lorraine's chief of staff attorney, Danish Graves, and a mysterious force of nature character named Munch who is 500 years old, and you've got, well, "Fargo."
It is well written and acted, and it is quirky, funny, suspenseful, and violent, everything that you have come to expect from the series. One of the underlying plot points this time around involved extreme domestic violence, much of it off camera, but not all of it, and that sometimes made it, for me at least, a difficult watch at times.
Still, if you've been a fan of this series, you've got to see this one.
Leigh, Hamm, and Temple
Three and one-half Stars from The Grandstander.
"The Crown" (Netflix)
The sixth and final season of this series was split into two parts. The first four episodes revolved around the events surrounding the courtship of Diana, Princess of Wales, by Dodi Fayed, all leading up to her death in the tunnel in Paris, the callousness of the Royal Family in the wake of that event, and the crisis that it brought towards the Monarchy.
The final six episodes jumped forward a few years and focused on Prince William and to a lesser degree, Prince Harry. We got to see how William met and began to court Kate Middleton. In the midst of that, one especially touching episode revolved around Princess Margaret and her final years and death.
The series concluded with the marriage of Charles and Camilla, and ended with Phillip and Elizabeth having a private conversation in a private chapel within Westminster Abbey. Unless you wanted to time jump twenty-five years or so and conclude it with Elizabeth's death in 2023, this was as good a way to end this lavish royal soap opera as any.
In the time leading up to the Chuck and Camilla's wedding, we saw Imelda Staunton as the Queen having "conversations" with her younger selves in the persons of Claire Foy and Olivia Coleman, the actresses who played the Queen in prior seasons. That was a pretty nice device, I thought.
Saunton, Coleman, and Foy as QE II
In digging around the internet doing some research for this post, I found a reference to a possible Prequel to The Crown that would cover the time from the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 up until the ascendancy of Elizebeth to the throne. Personally, I'd love to see that, but the article that mentioned this was dated 2021, so apparently those plans appear to be dormant for now.
Taken as a whole, "The Crown" gets Four Grandstander Stars, but I give Season 6 only Two and One-half stars.
"Lessons in Chemistry" (Apple TV+)
The 2023 best selling novel "Lessons In Chemistry" was big among the book club circuit, so it was a natural to be picked up for a movie or, as is becoming the case more and more, a steaming video series.
Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant chemist, but because she is a young woman in 1950's America, avenues for her to advance and excel in the man's world that science was at the time are limited. Another scientist, a man of course, at the University where she works takes her on as an assistant, they fall in love, tragedy strikes, Elizabeth becomes a single mother and a community activist, and through a series of events, she also becomes a TV star by hosting a cooking show on a local TV station, where she still encounters the piggish attitudes in the Man's World of television.
Brie Larson, who produced the series, stars as Elizabeth, and she is quite good in it. She also bears an uncanny resemblance to actress Cybill Shepard (on whom I have had a crush for well over fifty years).
We liked the show, although it was not one of those series where as soon as an episode was over we said "Let's watch one more episode right now!" It took us a while to get through it. Also, Linda tells me that this series differs quite a bit from the book, so you readers who loved the novel are hereby forewarned.
Two and One-half Stars from The Grandstander.
Coming up....
We have started to watch "Feud: Capote vs. The Swans" (FX/Hulu) which shapes up to be a delicious bit of scenery chewing trash, and I am looking forward to begin watching the newest season of "True Detective" (HBO Max) starring Jodi Foster. We are also working our way, season-by-season, othrough binge watching "Seinfeld" on Netflix. We just finished Season 6.
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