This is not about looking in the trunk of memories, the one in which series such as Twin Peaks or The OA are found that distanced themselves from what the viewer assumed they should expect from television fiction. This is a practical guide with the aim of recommending and vindicating four series broadcast in the last two months and that, not even because of their ability to move in hybrid genres, crazy premises or unhealthy atmospheres, allow them to regain faith in the series.
How many times do we feel that, as entertaining as they are, we are living in groundhog day on television? Who does not want to feel those butterflies in their belly from time to time when faced with the novelty, with the promise of a new world, of a disconcerting intimacy? Well, these four series, which are found on four different content platforms, are formulated from originality and at the same time are between interesting, essential and overwhelming.
Camille Léger (Fleur Greffier) ​​has not seen her father, the world’s greatest winemaker, for twenty years when he dies. He doesn’t exactly inherit his mansion and his wine collection. Before he died, Alexandre Léger (Stanley Weber) planned a competition between his biological daughter and his best student, Issei Tomine (Tomohisa Yamashita): whoever guesses three wines selected by the expert will win the entire inheritance. For the French woman, the test is an opportunity to reconcile with an absent father and for the Japanese man it is a way to defy her family, who are pressuring him to give up her passion. But Camille has an obstacle that goes beyond Issei’s talent: a traumatic childhood prevents her from taking even a single drop of alcohol.
This creation by Quoc Dang Tran, which adapts the manga by Shin Kibayashi and Shu Okimoto, has an original premise but its recommendation goes beyond the starting point. Drops of God is a sophisticated psychological drama that has a slow presentation, almost approaching the tone of a thriller, and at the same time it feels like playing. The tones of France and Japan draw inspiration from their respective traditions, with Issei’s scenes often drinking from the comic. It explains how a $12,000 bottle of wine is opened as if we were exposing the El coup plan.
He knows how to bring the philosophy around wine closer to the viewer and, when he has to represent smells and the way in which Camille experiences flavors, the script and the director Oded Ruskin have resources that transport you to a universe of your own. The best thing about Las Gotas de Dios is not that it is original but that he knows how to build his own personality from the premise, approaching the material from a total artistic perspective.
Danny (Steven Yeun) is not having a good time. His parents had to return to Korea due to problems in the family business, which they lost. Amy (Ali Wong) is succeeding a priori but reconciling motherhood with the expansion of her business has exhausted her, especially because of the image of an empowered woman that she feels she must convey. So, when her cars are about to crash in a parking lot and they insult each other, they unconsciously set a mission: to ruin each other’s lives in order to vent all her existential frustration.
Lee Sung Jin must be recognized for his ability to frame Bronca in comedy in a questionable way (a more cinematic comedy than traditionally on television, of course) but induce it in a state of almost permanent tension. It’s so narratively solid that you could almost say it’s its own subgenre, tense comedy. Ali Wong is in a state of grace while containing his talent as a comedian and Steven Yeun is confirmed as one of the actors to always take into account in Hollywood (oh, that Minari who took him to the Oscars!).
It is a hilarious, incisive fiction that at times can leave you breathless. And, after a few brilliant opening episodes, the lull of the middle stretch is deceptive. For a few minutes it seems that Bronca could lose the brutality in her portrayal of the burden of adult life, the weight of the responsibilities acquired. But it’s a calculated stretch of calm to top off the story with its bite and pressure with two inspired installments, even drawing one of the cruelest laughs on recent television.
Sister Simone (Betty Gilpin) is one of the few people who do not want to have contact with Mrs. Davis, an artificial intelligence that controls the planet. For some, she is a technological Deity who has brought peace and happiness. For others like Simone, it’s something that has overridden the will of the human race, entertaining them on absurd missions. However, when Intelligence asks Simone for a favor in exchange for her own extinction, the nun agrees without a second thought. She must find the Holy Grail.
Damon Lindelof, the chief creative officer of Lost who later shone with more authorial bets such as The leftovers and Watchmen, now wants to have fun at the hands of Tara Hernandez, a screenwriter who came out of The big bang theory, after works so charged at a dramatic level. And what is Mrs Davis? An unclassifiable madness, at times irritating because it is so intelligent and eccentric that it is believed, placing one twist after another that is impossible to predict. But, of course, this is also downright stimulating as a viewer.
And, to top off this list, the Mantle twins. Beverly and Elliot (Rachel Weisz) are New York’s two brightest and most in-demand gynecologists on Lovers. They want to change their profession: to stop treating pregnant women as patients, since “a pregnancy is not a disease”, and to improve reproductive techniques. To open their own women’s health center they need the investment of a millionaire businesswoman (Jennifer Ehle) who owes her fortune to opioids. But, if Elliot’s lack of scruples, who wants a laboratory to bypass legality and any sense of ethics, were not enough, in the background is the true conflict of the Mantles: a relationship of dependency that goes beyond toxic.
Scriptwriter Alice Birch takes David Cronenberg’s film as a reference, which had Jeremy Irons in the shoes of the Mantle twins, and gives a feminine patina to themes related to gynecology such as motherhood, obstetric violence, surrogacy, menopause or perinatal mourning. And, as she asks for this fictional universe originated in the novel by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland, she does it from a femininity as undeniable as her skepticism towards women as beings of light by default. Her equality discourse is clear: women can be as corrupt, executioners and oppressors as men when they are passed through a class filter.
Since the existence of Hannibal, there has not been such a sick work with an aesthetic that has been taken care of in detail (the photography, the cold locations, the omnipresent red in the health center, the meaty representation of food, as if we were witnessing acts of cannibalism and not just meals). The amazing thing is that Alice Birch touches so many sticks in the conventional, with a supine bad milk, and emerges victorious as a doctor after giving birth to octuplets. And Weisz, overwhelming, addresses two characters with as much forcefulness as nuances. Hypnotic.
