There are series about people we love to hate, but there’s a new trend: series featuring difficult and self-absorbed but eccentric, charming people we hate to love.
By HANNAH BROWNThe Duchess: Canadian comedian Katherine Ryan with Steven Raskopoulos who plays the boyfriend.(photo credit: NETFLIX)
The Emmys are coming up on September 20 (they will be broadcast on September 21 at 3 a.m. on Yes Drama here) and fans of Shira Haas, who enjoy her work on the yes show, Shtisel, will be watching closely to see if she wins the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie Award for her performance in the Netflix show, Unorthodox. Haas, who filmed herself reacting to the news of her nomination with great joy, is in very good company among nominees – who include two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett and one-time winners Octavia Spencer and Regina King. It’s very difficult to predict television awards, but Haas’s performance generated a great deal of buzz and she definitely has a chance.There are series about people we love to hate, but there’s a new trend: series featuring difficult and self-absorbed but eccentric, charming people we hate to love. The Duchess, a new series on Netflix, is one of these. It stars Canadian comedian Katherine Ryan as a spirited single mom named Katherine in London who earns what seems to be an extraordinarily good living making statues of nude women, has a brilliant, angelic daughter, an annoying ex who used to be a star in a boy band and an adoring, too-good-to-be-true boyfriend who is smart, funny, sexy and wants to commit.Katherine has decided what she wants is another child, but not with her loving boyfriend. Meanwhile, she says outrageous things to the mother of a bratty girl who bullies her daughter at school, even sending the woman’s husband nude photos of herself. She also has an annoying habit of wearing flowers and tiaras in her hair.In short, she’s what used to be called a “kook,” and while the show is well-written, fast-paced and often funny, it gets tiresome. The template for a crazy, not-always-likable heroine is the main character in Fleabag (available on Amazon Prime), but unlike Katherine, she looks at the camera and says what you’re really thinking, often putting herself down, and when the big reveal about her comes (at the end of the first season), it is upsetting and makes you reevaluate her. So if you’re in the market for a quirky heroine, try Fleabag rather than The Duchess.Documentaries that celebrate eras where people had a lot of fun and were very creative and productive are enjoyable and that’s probably why people keep making movies about the Laurel Canyon music scene in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Echo in the Canyon, by Andrew Slater, which is streaming on Cellcom TV starting on September 27, features great clips of performances from that era in which so many musicians came together in this Los Angeles neighborhood, as well as candid interviews with many musicians and music producers, including legendary executive Lou Adler, Michelle Phillips (who was with the Mamas and the Papas), Jackson Browne, David Crosby, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills, Brian Wilson and Neil Young. Purists may object to the fact that a fair amount of screen time is given to a tribute concert featuring contemporary artists, including Jakob Dylan and Fiona Apple.Helen Mirren and Ian McKellan have a great time in the cat-and-mouse swindle drama, The Good Liar, which is running on Hot Cinema 1 on September 19 at 10 p.m. and will be available on Cinema Time starting on September 20. He’s a career con man, she’s a wealthy widow; and that’s all you need to know. The plot may get overly twisty at times, but if you can get past that, you’ll enjoy these two stars.The Bold Type is a comedy-drama series running on Yes Drama, as well as Yes VOD, Yes Binge and Sting TV, about three young women who work together at a women’s magazine in New York City in an era when virtually all magazines are going broke and/or cutting way back. It isn’t always as clever as its title, but it’s often very funny in how it skewers the pretensions of older editors trying to lure young readers.
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