By the time the series arrives at its Season 2 finale, featuring divorced astronauts Tracy (Sarah Jones) and Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman) in one of the most suspenseful and devastating action sequences ever aired on TV, it emerges as that most fascinating of phenomena. Yet it’s also woven through with clever twists (an episode that functions as an all-female “The Right Stuff”), disorienting time jumps (it’s already leapfrogged from 1969 to the early 1990s) and moving domestic drama (including the platonic marriage of convenience between a gay man and a lesbian in Reagan-era Texas). Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, mostly operates as a workplace drama, one I’ve taken to glossing as “‘Mad Men’ in Space,” with Sterling Cooper replaced by NASA and New York by the moon. The alternate history of the space race, from Ronald D. But once you embrace its idiosyncrasies, the payoff is sublime. Returning Friday for its third season, it’s still unnecessarily shaggy in stretches, with a shall we say questionable approach to historical causation. I admit, I have more reservations about “For All Mankind” ( Apple TV+) than its most ardent admirers.
Meredith Blake Catch upĮverything you need to know about the film or TV series everyone’s talking about (As Dustin Lance Black recently told The Times, it is easy to breed dangerous men “if you blur the lines between selfish desire and the voice of God.”) And while there is discussion of the prairie dresses and the elaborate braided hairstyles that captivated the media after the 2008 law enforcement raid on the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Texas, “Keep Sweet” stands out in a crowded field of FLDS documentaries by focusing on harrowing the stories of survivors - impossibly brave women like Elissa Wall, who was married off to her abusive 19-year-old cousin at the age of 14 but later escaped and testified against Jeffs.
Directed by Rachel Dretzin, “Keep Sweet” includes a trove of chilling archival footage, photos and audio recordings that make viscerally clear the extent to which women and children were trafficked and sexually exploited by men who claimed to be holy.
On the heels of “Under the Banner of Heaven” comes another series about fundamentalist Mormons, Netflix’s “Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey.” The four-part docuseries offers an in-depth look at the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a polygamist sect whose leader and so-called prophet, Warren Jeffs, is currently serving a life sentence plus 20 years for the sexual assault of two girls. And even the comic will concede, “There’s more in this world than anyone can understand.” - Robert Lloyd He leaves some room to be offended, but wise viewers will consider his points of view. (To the idea of comedians as modern philosophers, he responds with typical empathy: “It always makes me feel sad for the actual modern-day philosophers - who exist, you know?”) Topics, some of which might be considered hot-button, include gambling (he had a problem), racism, gender, politics, recovered memories, plane crashes, living wills, human remains and how the world one knows becomes the world newer people determine.
Where some comics Know It All, Macdonald comes across as a man who has learned some things but also would not swear to knowing anything. Dressed in a pink shirt and blue sports jacket, wearing headphones over a ball cap, Macdonald’s face fills the screen - that of a bright child who may just have done, or is about to do, something quite naughty, but also that of an innocent, lighting up when an offbeat insight suddenly occurs.
Titled “Nothing Special,” with the comedian’s impossible-to-parse mix of irony and sincerity, it is accomplished in a single take, bare-boned and close-up.
Caught between the pandemic that kept him from a live audience and the cancer that killed him, on the eve of an operation that might have, in the summer of 2020 Norm Macdonald, in the spirit of leaving nothing on the table, sat down and delivered material bound for his next - and as it happens final - Netflix special.