If you are interested in watching the Emmys live, they will be broadcast at 3 a.m. on September 20 on Yes TV Comedy and Sting TV, and then rebroadcast in an edited version (that will surely be an improvement on the always-overlong show) at 9:30 p.m. that evening and will be available on Yes VOD. There are few sure bets with the Emmys, but Michael K. Williams, the actor who was so extraordinary as Omar Little on The Wire and who just passed away is expected to win an award for his role on Lovecraft County, and The Crown is likely to sweep the drama awards.
Speaking of Emmy Awards, another great television actor – one of the best loved of all time – Edward Asner, who also died recently, won seven Emmys and is the most honored male performer of all time by the television academy. He is best known for playing Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and many episodes of this series are available on YouTube. He was incredible at being gruff and even nasty, yet still inspiring love. The relationship between the hard-drinking, no-nonsense Mr. Grant and the perky Mary was the glue that held the show together. His performance inspired the spin-off Lou Grant, a series in which he became a newspaper city editor and which was a drama set in the world of journalism, which ran for five seasons and which can also be seen on YouTube. He had a remarkable 406 credited roles on the Internet Movie Database, with seven still to be released. In recent years, he often worked as a voice actor and younger audiences may know him as the hero of the Pixar movie Up. He will be missed, but his work can still be enjoyed.
ALL FIVE seasons of the French series The Bureau are being released on Hot HBO, starting on September 19 at 9 p.m. and running Sunday-Thursday, and will also be on Hot VOD and Next TV.
The Bureau is about a fictional French espionage agency and focuses on an agent with the code name Malotru (Mathieu Kassovitz) who has just returned to Paris from a mission to Syria, where he lived years as an undercover agent. But it is not easy for him to settle down into his old life once his former girlfriend from Damascus, a historian called Nadia El Mansour (Zineb Triki, one of the series standouts), arrives in Paris to take part in covert talks between the Syrian government and rebel forces. This complex, extremely watchable series is in French with Hebrew titles.
Promising Young Woman, which won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay by Emerald Fennell (who plays Camilla Parker-Bowles on The Crown), will be available on Cellcom TV starting September 15. Carey Mulligan stars as a former medical student determined to avenge those who were responsible for the distress that caused her best friend to commit suicide. It’s a black comedy and a revenge drama, which I enjoyed while I was watching it, although later, when I thought about it, it seemed overly politically correct. It definitely has its moments, though, and Mulligan is excellent.
CELLCOM TV is featuring two recent Israeli films this month. Eytan Fox’s Sublet is currently streaming and it tells the story of an American travel writer coping with grief, played by John Benjamin Hickey (who appeared in the recent In Treatment reboot), who comes to Tel Aviv and meets a young film student (Niv Nissim) who changes his outlook on life. I was a script editor on this movie, so I am partial to it, but it has gotten terrific reviews around the world. Ofir Raul Grazier’s The Cakemaker will begin streaming on September 22 and it tells the story of an Israeli man who falls in love with a German baker and then it gets very complicated. Both of these movies are mainly in English.
ALL SERIES about four women friends are not created equal. What made Sex and the City, the ultimate girls-bonding series, work so well was that you could believe that the characters were friends. They actually seemed to like each other and even if the stories the series told were not strictly realistic – they seemed to have a lot of time to hang out, considering that they were career women – the series still made sense.
The new Netflix four-girlfriends series, On the Verge, has some funny moments, but the characters and plot seem to have been conceived in dozens of conferences, not out of any need to tell a story. Justine (Julie Delpy, the series creator) is a French chef in Los Angeles struggling to write cute anecdotes about cooking for a book project, whose indulgent parenting style upsets her cold and strict French husband. Yasmin (Sarah Jones) is a racially and religiously mixed married mom who suffers from panic attacks that bewilder her nerdy, devoted husband. Anne (Elisabeth Shue) is a clothes designer who gets high every afternoon. Ell (Alexia Landeau) is a broke single mother of three children of different ethnicities. They are all beautiful and appealing in some ways, but none of it hangs together and all the quirks and diversity feel overly schematic, as if the writers were checking off boxes on a list of requirements for a contemporary series. Delpy has directed some good movies, including Two Days in Paris and Two Days in New York, which are relationship comedies, and she co-wrote Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset and Before Midnight. But here, her shtick, which is showing her insecurity about growing old while she is still porcelain-skinned and ethereal, is not enough to sustain interest.
NETFLIX IS also promoting its new thriller series, Clickbait, which has a good setup but ends up being more annoying than suspenseful. It stars a bleached blond Zoe Kazan (The Plot Against America, The Big Sick) as the difficult sister of Nick (Adrian Grenier, who played Vince on Entourage), a seemingly happily married physical therapist who goes missing and then turns up in a YouTube video, confessing to abusing women, and facing down the threat that he will be murdered when five million people view the video. You won’t be shocked to learn that all is not as it seems with these characters. As twist after twist is revealed, each one seems to be less interesting and more implausible than the one before it.