It seems like last week I was re-watching two thrillers – “Cross” and “Day of the Jackal” – in a single review. (Because it was.) And now I’ll look at three more, grouped in a similar way. I guess that’s a thing! And there are more on the way.
Why so popular? Thrillers promise… thrills. Even the less good ones can maintain interest over several episodes, if they add enough false leads, surprising plot twists, a minimum of action and suspense and a surprising revelation held back until the end of the series like a carrot on a stick. You may be disappointed once you get there, but you will get there.
Doing everything correctly is “Get Millie Black” (HBO at 9 p.m. PT Monday, first episode now airing on Max) – the echo of “Get Christie Love!” » the Teresa Graves cop show from the mid-70s, a rare series with a black woman in the lead, doesn’t seem like a total coincidence – set mostly in the humblest neighborhood of Kingston, Jamaica; Tamara Lawrance plays Millie, who was sent as a child to live in England, where she becomes a Scotland Yard detective. After her mother’s death, she learns that her brother Orville, whom she thought was dead, is alive.
So, it’s a year later; Millie works for the Kingston police and her brother Orville has become her sister Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen), living with a tribe of gay and transgender outcasts in the storm sewer system called Gully. “Most people would call this place a sewer,” Millie says. “My sister lives there.” The ravine is a real place; Jamaica is notoriously homophobic: “The most homophobic place in the world? » Time magazine asked in 2006 – with anti-gay laws still in force, keeping Millie’s partner Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) in the closet.
As in most cases? — detective fiction, one case reveals another; the suspense comes from never knowing exactly where we are going. Millie’s search for missing teenager Janet Fenton (Shernet Swearine) is complicated by Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie), a (white) British detective who arrives from London in search of rich (white) youngster Freddie Summerville (Peter John Thwaites). Freddie, he says, is needed in England to help take down a major gang; but he is also a person who interests Millie. As these storylines collide and various factions vie for advantage in the rubble, there will be murders, attempted murders, and even more murders.
The characters are alive, humanly unpredictable and perfectly played. The five-part series feels original, unlike anything we’ve seen before. Created by the Booker Prize-winning Jamaican novelist Marlon Jamesit registers as authentic to its place and its inhabitants, while being faithful to the black – tropical Raymond Chandler tradition.
In Netflix’s “The Madness,” Colman Domingo plays Muncie Daniels, a media expert who finds herself at the center of a mystery.
(Amanda Matlovich/Netflix)
Created by Stephen Belber, the old-fashioned conspiracy thriller “Madness” (Netflix, premiering Thursday), proceeds from the Hitchcockian device of an ordinary Joe who finds himself at the center and suspect of a mystery, and goes on the run to clear his name, like Robert Donat in “The 39 Steps” or Cary Grant in ” North by Northwest.” Alfred Hitchcock limited these stories to a few hours, and I think if he had the chance to span multiple episodes, he would have stuck with two. “The Madness” does its job on eight, which strictly speaking is more than it needs. But there’s a lot to like about it.
Colman Domingo plays Muncie Daniels, a CNN black pundit and fill-in anchor based in Philadelphia, who, in the series’ opening moments, is attacked by a guest for no longer being involved in “the fight”, limiting himself to Harper’s magazine or at an Ivy League conference, when he once led a nonprofit “that took on racist landlords.” The implication, which later comments will make explicit, is that he lost himself – as one friend puts it, “following his career, his ambition, his whims, and then lying to himself about it all the time.” People are quick to tell Muncie where they think he’s failing.
The absent-minded father of his teenage son Demetrius (Thaddeus J. Mixson) and adult daughter Kallie (Gabrielle Graham), he drags his feet on a divorce from Elena (Marsha Stephanie Blake). Seeking escape, Muncie travels to a borrowed cabin in the Poconos, where, almost immediately, he finds a neighbor’s body cut up in a sauna—so much for relaxing. After escaping two masked attackers, he calls the police; the sauna, you guessed it, is clean as a penny. Meanwhile, evidence is gathered to trap him.
Domingo must spend a lot of time looking worried or pained; his stress wears off after a while, and so it’s a relief to be reunited with him (briefly) at a backyard barbecue, in relative safety. (And the whole Megillah seems to have a positive effect on his marriage, which is good.) John Ortiz as an FBI agent, Deon Cole as Muncie’s friend and lawyer, and Stephen McKinley Henderson (currently appearing in “A Man Inside” have a season at 75) as an old family friend and cigar store owner.
The action takes place in colorful locations – a chase in an empty theater, a meeting in a colonial leisure village, a reconnaissance in a suburban swingers bar – which would not be out of place in a Hitchcock film, were it had worked up to the time. suburban swingers bars. The plot involves white supremacists, militant anarchists (“basically Antifa on meth with Uzis”) and a few gazillionaires, one of whom is played by Bradley Whitford, as the trail leads, as it must, higher and deeper, into the dark heart of capitalism. America. (“Maybe this is all a little more important than you thought,” someone in Muncie suggests.) Of course, these days the (real) conspiracies seem to be all out in the open, which makes “ The Madness” a bit quaint.
Showtime’s “The Agency” stars Michael Fassbender as a secret CIA agent and Jodie Turner-Smith as his love interest.
(Luke Varley/Paramount+ with Showtime)
Premiering Friday on Paramount+ with Showtime (Showtime at 9 p.m. PT Sunday) is “The Agency” as in Central Intelligence. Based on a French series, “Le Bureau”, and set largely in London, it was “created for American television” by Jez Butterwortha Tony-winning British playwright, and his brother John-Henry Butterworth, who previously collaborated on the screenplays of “Ford versus Ferrari” the biopic of James Brown “Get up” And “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” This is the least thrilling of these thrillers.
Michael Fassbender plays Martian, the code name by which his colleagues call him (he also has a few other names, used as suits him); As the series begins, he is ordered to return, with just two days’ notice, from Ethiopia, where he has been undercover for some time, to the agency’s London station – forcing him to telling new lies to his married lover, Samia (Jodie Turner), who has lied before. -Black-smith). Samia, after a certain time, will arrive in London, where they will continue their journey clandestinely. Coincidence?
Back in London, Martian connects with manager Naomi (Katherine Waterston), who he only met via Zoom, boss Henry (Jeffrey Wright) and top boss Bosko (Richard Gere). It’s not a seamless transition. His apartment provided by the agency is bugged and his movements are followed. (The scruffy agents assigned to follow him represent the show’s only real attempt at humor.)
Dr. Blake (Harriet Sansom Harris), one of the show’s most focused characters, arrives from Langley “to assess mental health throughout the department,” and while this seems particularly, if not exclusively, for the sake of From Martian, it’s true that almost all of these people seem unhappy – with the notable exceptions of Blake, Naomi and Owen (John Magaro), another handler – as a result, these are the people you’re happiest to see . Martian is mostly a pill, at work, at home with his teenage daughter, Poppy (India Fowler), and even with Samia. We understand that he’s good at his job and that he’s a person of some authority, torn between love and work, but when has that ever been an excuse?
The series has the strange quality of being underwritten and overwritten; people don’t talk a lot, and when they do, they don’t necessarily talk like people: “There are 170,000 words in the English language,” says Bosko. “Every year, 2,000 of them become obsolete; they enter the great verbal bathtub of our collective being. Currently, these words revolve around this open drain: stoicism, courage, duty, honor, sacrifice.
Of the promised 10 episodes, as of this writing only three were available for review, by the end of which things are only just starting to come together. One assumes – one hopes, anyway – that something fascinating will happen in the remaining seven hours, but the production is so rich in style and the characters so poorly developed that it is difficult to elicit more than a superficial interest in the fate of anyone.
This could of course change. Disparate storylines will likely converge. There’s a compromised double agent on the loose in Eastern Europe, leading to some pretty torturous torture scenes, and a new recruit, Danny (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), sent on his first mission with what appears to be little or no no preparation.
“Doing this work has a cost,” she told him. “A prize. Are you sure you want to pay it? » (The price is to “survive totally alone forever.”) Run away, I want to say. There are so many other shows you could be in.
