The Week That Was - April 28, 2025
One of the most underrates shows on TV, catching up on a prestige comedy, and the horrors of AI
With the Wolves in the playoffs and in a pretty good position to move to the Western Conference Semifinals after Sunday’s thrilling 116-113 win to go up 3 - 1 in their first round matchup with the Lakers, I dedicated a lot of time to watching basketball this week. We did start The Studio and the second season of Vanderpump Villa, though I don’t know if Stassi getting shoehorned into the show will be enough to keep me engaged with what is otherwise a baffling show—half-Vanderpump Rules, half-Below Deck but with a weird blurring of lines where the staff have downtime in the villa while guests are there and sometimes party with them, which seems like it should never happen. We also got to welcome The Rehearsal back, and its second season looks to potentially be as insane as the first, with Nathan Fielder finding the most ridiculous ways to spend HBO money just one episode in.
TV
Dark Winds (Season 3) - Balancing the arcs from two books and getting an extra two episodes to work with in Season 3, John Wirth & Co really nailed things this season, sending star Zahn McClarnon to new depths of pain and doubt. Over the past decade or so, McClarnon has established himself as one of the best actors on the small screen, slaying it in Fargo, Longmire, and Reservation Dogs. This is his greatest platform though, and he does so much with the rich material he’s given.
That’s not to say this show is all about him. Kiowa Gordon and Jessica Matten get their Jim Chee and Bernadette Manuelito arcs too, and Matten’s run on Border Patrol this season let her stretch her legs a little outside of the Navajo Reservation in a way that showed she could really handle herself on a larger scale. I liked Wirth reuniting with Hell on Wheels vet Christopher Heyerdahl, though his having been cast in another Wirth show meant certain things were likely for his character.
This season also saw notable guest stints from Terry Serpico, Bruce Greenwood, Jenna Elfman, Alex Meraz, and especially Raoul Max Trujillo, who were all fun foils for our trio of heroes. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the work Deanna Allison (Emma Leaphorn) did this season. The emotional weight of everything Joe Leaphorn was facing came down to how it affected his marriage, and Deanna Allison gave that weight serious gravity. Her agony this season was gut-wrenching. Fantastic season. AMC, AMC+
Hacks (Season 2) - Given the fact that Season 4 is currently dropping, one could reasonably infer that the fact I was two full seasons behind on this that I’m not wild about this show. While we didn’t get back on the horse for two years, Season 2 was nice to return to. This show thrives on the pairing of its pair of leads, Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance, the institutional Vegas comic who would broadly be looked down upon by much of the entertainment industry, and Hannah Einbinder’s Ava Daniels, the young writer who can’t help but shoot herself in the foot at every turn and ends up helping write new material for Vance.
In the second season, we see Vance dealing with a situation where her very comfortable decades-long residency has ended and she’s left to struggle to find her place in the comedy world. The second season was a breezy watch, balancing its comedic and dramatic beats well, making Ava sweat her end-of-season-one mistake for the whole season in a way that wasn’t her only focus but that they could come back to a couple times an episode. Though the writing staff don’t always nail the supporting cast’s contributions to the plot, Smart and Einbinder are great, and I’m sure we’ll be jumping back into Season 3 shortly. Max
Film
Companion (2025) - After kicking around for the greater part of the last two decades in TV, Drew Hancock makes his feature-length directorial debut, thanks in large part to producer (Barbarian writer/director) Zach Cregger who encouraged Hancock to take the helm. This is a great horror/dark comedy exploring the obvious endpoint for AI, fuh—er, robots. Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Harvey Guillén, Lukas Gage, Megan Suri, and Rupert Friend have fun with the cabin in the woods setting, and Thatcher and Quaid that they’re establishing themselves as go-to leads for interesting genre work. This reality is nigh. Lots of sad dudes are gonna be modding their screwbots with unexpected consequences. Really fun stuff here, and it doesn’t go as prurient as the subject matter would suggest it might. Max
The Big Clock (1948) - This film fails in casting Ray Milland as its noir hero. As close friends are aware, I cannot stand Ray Milland. Here, he is fundamentally unlikeable, and rooting for the protagonist is central to whether or not this film works. Charles Laughton rarely works for me as an actor, and he doesn’t nail the comically outsized titan of industry, Earl Janoth (a surname that may as well be made up). This is apparently the third John Farrow film I’ve seen—the other two being Robert Mitchum vehicles that I saw about a year ago and have zero recollection of—and while the other two weren’t memorable enough to even register a year later, this is worse than those two because I will remember it for all the wrong reasons. This is clunky noir where I’d like both the villain and hero to perish in the end. Now back to writing my Ray Milland spite-script. Criterion
The Wild Party (1975) - Ostensibly inspired by the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, I watched curious about what I assumed had to be early Merchant-Ivory fare, not knowing James Ivory’s first feature was directed in 1963. I’m by no means a Merchant-Ivory aficionado, but I figured the combination of them and Raquel Welch would be enough to make this palatable. Instead, I was treated to one of the worst movies I’ve seen in ages.
Seemingly every five minutes, I was confronted with a completely confounding choice. The only film written by Broadway man Walter Marks, this is a mess. There’s needless voiceover that randomly has a stretch like 45 minutes in where without warning IT IS GIVEN DIRECTLY TO CAMERA by the actor. Raquel Welch is given little to work with, and doesn’t do much with that, asked in her first scene to do a befuddling bedroom semi-flapper routine TO NO ONE. The music, also written by Marks, is mind-numbingly bad, with the songs speaking explicitly to what is being acted out on screen, on the nose and cloyingly imitation 1920s in a way that is an active irritant.
More importantly, none of the moments that are meant to be emotionally resonant matter at all because nothing that happens is even remotely earned. Awful movie, and this is the restored initial director’s version that has been in circulation since 1981 or so after American International Pictures released a version blasphemously cut down to 91 minutes without James Ivory’s input. I honestly wish I had gotten to see the cut-down version. A putrid film that’s not even fun if you like trash. Prime