Breaking Bad – Hank vs. the Twins Scene: Hank (Dean Norris) fends off the Twins (Daniel Moncada & Luis Moncada).
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Who says college campuses and comedy don’t mix these days? Netflix’s new series The Chair — debuting Friday, Aug. 20; I’ve seen all six episodes — proves they still can, mining plenty of sly laughs from a supposedly humorless setting. (It’s rarely laugh-out-loud hilarious, mind you, but more mildly “oh, that is funny” amusing.) Rich with intriguing characters and armed with a breezy comedic tone, the campus comedy from first-time showrunner Amanda Peet is a smart, low-key charmer that sneaks up on you.
The story takes place at Pembroke University, a prestigious but dusty Ivy League-ish college with lots of portraits of old white men on the walls. Sandra Oh stars as Jin-Yoon Kim, a dedicated academic who has now risen to become the first-ever female chair of the school’s English department. She’s proud of her accomplishment, but now she’s learning how tough it is to be in charge, forced to make hard budget cuts, defuse brewing scandals and fend off overreaching administrators and donors. A wealthy benefactor keeps pushing for this year’s distinguished guest lecturer to be… David Duchovny. He went to Yale, you know!
Jin-Yoon’s biggest problem: Her department is plagued by a cluster of crusty old white professors whose huge salaries and outdated teaching methods are holding back progress. (Bob Balaban is perfectly cast as the imperious Elliot.) Plus, she has to babysit her department’s most popular professor: Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass), a failed novelist and a drunken mess. (Yes, he’s a cliché, but at least he’s aware that he’s a cliché.) Jin-Yoon goes into crisis mode when a moment of stupidity from Bill goes viral and snowballs into a full-blown scandal, threatening to bring the whole system crashing down.
The perpetual culture clash between college professors and students is fertile ground for conflict, and The Chair does boldly dip its toe into thorny issues like racism, sexism and white privilege. But thankfully, it never gets too bogged down by those issues to lose its sense of humor. The gaping generation gap is a reliable source of laughs, and while most of Pembroke’s students are generically woke and don’t really stand out, no one here is made out to be a villain. Even the crusty old professors are given dimension. (It feels like it’s based on a novel, even though it’s not. It has that literary feel to it.)
Oh has always shown hints of comedic flair on dramas like Grey’s Anatomy and Killing Eve, and it’s fun to watch her get to fully explore that side of herself here. (Jin-Yoon is a complex jumble of neuroses, ambition and good intentions.) Duplass is solid, too, as Bill, but I wasn’t sold on the dynamic between him and Jin-Yoon. The show seems to want to shove them together romantically, when it’d be better if it just let them be friends. But Holland Taylor is a feisty treat as Joan, one of those crusty old English professors who’s exiled to the basement of the school’s fitness center and is determined to find out which student is trashing her in his teacher evaluations. It’s a goofy subplot, but Taylor has a lot of fun with it; this is her best role in years.
The Chair is a nice, tidy six-episode binge, and at about three hours total, it feels like a slightly extended indie-film comedy, set to a soundtrack of jangly college radio hits from the likes of Vampire Weekend and the Smiths. We know Peet as an actress, but this is her debut as a TV writer and showrunner, and she shows a real knack for humanist comedy. (Peet’s husband David Benioff and his Game of Thrones partner D.B. Weiss serve as executive producers, too, but don’t worry: This one sticks the landing.) The scripts have a distinctly dry sense of humor, and the cast finds a nice rhythm right away. It’s like they’re thankful to be in something that’s actually grounded and funny and true to life for once.
It wraps up nicely as a self-contained story, too, so I’d be fine with it being a one-and-done series, I suppose — but this campus tour was so enjoyable, I’d happily sign up for more.
THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Netflix’s campus comedy The Chair makes the grade with a smart, humanist tone and a wealth of intriguing characters.
Breaking Bad – This Is Not Meth: Walter (Bryan Cranston) confronts Tuco (Raymond Cruz).
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Well, Mr. Corman is certainly Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s vision. Not only does the actor star in the new Apple TV+ dramedy — in his first regular TV role since he was a wisecracking teen alien on 3rd Rock From the Sun — but he also serves as creator, writer, director and executive producer on the project. So really, he has no one to blame here but himself.
Mr. Corman (debuting this Friday, Aug. 6; I’ve seen the first three episodes) tries to take us inside the mind of a dissatisfied white guy facing an existential crisis, but the end result is more whiny and self-indulgent than insightful. It takes big chances at times, but those mostly fall flat; it feels like a rough draft that needed another pass and a few more sets of eyes on it.
Gordon-Levitt stars as Josh Corman, a thirtysomething fifth-grade teacher who is deeply unhappy with his life and wants to do something more, something different. He used to be a musician, but he hasn’t picked up an instrument in years, and that missed opportunity haunts him at every turn. (“The only people who become teachers are people who wanted to do something else and gave up,” a girl snidely informs him.) He’s broke, he’s lonely, he’s anxious and he’s surrounded by fake friends yammering about creating “content” and becoming “verified.” Plus, he’s constantly trying not to offend anyone by saying or doing the wrong thing — by being a typical white guy, basically.
The problem is that there’s not much more to Mr. Corman than Josh moping around. The show feels as aimless as its lead character is, and it’s hard to pin down what it’s trying to say, exactly. Josh starts having panic attacks, and he’s disconnected from everyone else in his life, so we’re stuck inside his head… and that’s not a pleasant place to be. (“The world is completely f—ked,” he cheerfully muses at one point.) Broad City‘s Arturo Castro plays his roommate Victor, and Debra Winger plays his judgmental mom, but it’s mostly just Josh on his own, and the episodes feel claustrophobic as a result. Josh does start to pick up his instruments and try music again, which is a promising story angle — but that’s fleeting, and it’s not long before he’s back to moping again.
Mr. Corman comes from A24, a production company known for daring, boundary-pushing fare, and this does have an indie, idiosyncratic feel to it, with quirky music, jittery handheld camerawork and animated detours. But it lacks focus, as if Gordon-Levitt had a hundred different ideas scribbled down in his notebook and tried to cram them all into one show. And when it aims high and gets weird, it gets really weird: In what has to be one of the strangest TV scenes of the year, Episode 3 ends with a fantastical song-and-dance number featuring Josh and his mom singing an original duet about mothers and sons. Like… huh?
I did appreciate those glimmers of something bigger and more ambitious — we could use more proudly weird TV shows, frankly — but the weird bits are never quite integrated into a cohesive story. (The song-and-dance number doesn’t work, for example, because it’s so far removed from Josh’s relationship with his mother as we’ve known it to that point.) Mr. Corman is billed as a “comedy,” somehow, but it’s missing the laughs. It seems to be going for cringe comedy, but we just end up cringing. I felt more sad watching it than anything. Ultimately, Josh’s lack of direction and gloomy worldview are an anchor that drags the narrative momentum to a halt. Maybe he’ll start to figure things out by season’s end… but who wants to stick around to find out?
THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Mr. Corman is a gloomy, indulgent portrait of a sad white guy that never gives us a good reason to care — or to watch.
Breaking Bad – Genius of Meth Scene: Hank (Dean Norris) talks about consulting on a case.
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Breaking Bad – You’re Heisenberg Scene: Hank (Dean Norris) calls out Walter (Bryan Cranston).
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Breaking Bad – You’re a Drug Dealer Scene: Skyler (Anna Gunn) calls out Walter (Bryan Cranston).
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Check out the new The Walking Dead Season 11 Comic-Con Trailer starring Norman Reedus! Let us know what you think in the comments below.
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US Air Date: August 22, 2021
Starring: Norman Reedus, Lauren Cohan, Jeffrey Dean Morgan
Network: AMC
Synopsis: The final season begins August 22, 2021.
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Breaking Bad – Gus Fires Walt Scene: Gus (Giancarlo Esposito) fires Walter (Bryan Cranston).
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Breaking Bad – There Was No Fugue State Scene: Walter (Bryan Cranston) tells his therapist the truth.
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Breaking Bad – Hank’s Death Scene: Uncle Jack (Michael Bowen) shoots Hank (Dean Norris).
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