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Uncontrollable disgust, wild girls and faltering municipality: review of new series

The new adaptation for Stephen King proves once again that it's time to let go of his works, a pleasant surprise from the Torah series about survival on a lonely island, and the combination of comedy greats Tina Fey and Ted Danson does not create the sparks we had hoped for.

This is what we thought of "the position", "lost in nature" and "Mr. Mayor"

Tags

• Position - Stephen King

• Lost in the Wild

• Tina Fey

• Ted Danson

• TV review

Ilan Kaprov and Ofir Artzi

Thursday, January 21, 2021, 00:00

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Trailer for the Stephen King (CBS) Mini-Position

The Stand

At this point in our lives, it seems strange that the thriller by Stephen King has not yet been written about television adaptations of Stephen King books.

Over the years this matter has become a real phenomenon, certainly in view of the popularity and commercial and critical success of the prolific writer.

It seems that once every few months another adaptation to another of his works emerges, and although there are of course great successes ("Walls of Hope", "Curry", "Me and the Guys", "Green Mail", "It"), the amount of failures or trivial and forgotten works They cost dozens of counters.

You can actually see this fictional work come to life in King's familiar patterns: a man with a mission, caught up in a mysterious phenomenon with a deadly potential (writing a screenplay for Stephen King's book), and trying to get out of it safely.

"The Position" was already televised in 1994 in a not-so-bad mini-series, starring Gary Siniz and Molly Ringwald.

But now that King's prolific imagination and reality have decided to join forces, a story about humanity in the midst of a deadly flu is becoming more relevant than ever.

It should be noted that the production was completed a few days before the TV industry went on strike, so its creators were unaware of the reality in which their series would be released.

At the center of the "position", which rises today in Israel on yes (and originally from the CBS All Access network), in a world where most of humanity is extinct and a collection of survivors is trying to find its way through the rubble, is a fierce struggle between good and evil.

On one side is an elderly woman named Abigail (Whoopi Goldberg) and on the other "The Dark Man" (Alexander Skarsgård, "Big Little Lies"), a nickname that pretty much sums up his work.

The series even boasts a special and unusual bonus in adaptations of this kind: King himself wrote an entirely new ending for it, thus adding another layer of interest to fans of the book.

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Nor does James Marsden save her.

"The position" (Photo: PR, CBS)

Josh Boone, the man behind the failed "New Mutants," created the series, and it was to be the first warning light in King's fictional book about the failures of his adaptations.

"Position" tries to be a lot of things at once, and somehow misses them all: it tries to challenge the viewer through a non-linear plot, a story of growing up, allegories of good and evil and lots of visual horrors.

These tools are used by King well in the written format, mainly due to his phenomenal writing talent, but also because he is gifted with the ability to sweep the viewer into the matter even though the hidden outweighs the visible.

And he also knows how to stop when necessary, and especially not to stretch the rope beyond the limit where the fun becomes oppressive.

You must have already guessed that Boone and the "position" fail resoundingly in each of these stages.

First and foremost, and above all else, "The Position" is a tedious and smeared series.

Episodes of an hour that just drag and drop, add another unhappy character and another dreamy mindpack and jump from one point of view to another.

This is a plague that is spreading recently on television: series that boast impressive visuals and mistakenly think they can rely on it alone.

It does not work.

By the second episode, even the interest in the values ​​of production and filming had disappeared.

Without them, the series' failure to produce a coherent plot line or interesting characters sharpens dramatically.

The fact that everyone is suffering and miserable and surrounded by horrors, leads to boredom at a very early stage.

All this although the game itself is actually quite fine, these are simply the characters that do not produce a gram of curiosity.

And if all this were not enough, "The Position" is also a repulsive series in the most explicit sense imaginable.

Her fondness for Gore casually, pointless, just to justify a little more of the "gloom" around her, produces a real reluctance.

Eye-popping eyes, people being preyed upon by mice, spilled intestines, swollen throats, everything is just thrown on the screen in a collection of unbearable and mostly unjustified disgust.

In the reality of TV abundance, it is very easy to abandon series that do not hold or are not interesting enough, even if they are completely reasonable.

Abandoning the "position" felt like relief.

Not exactly what you would like to see written about the status of your series.

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Lost in the Wild

The new original drama of Amazon Prime Video (which is therefore also available in Israel, and with a Hebrew translation) tries to produce a hybrid between two popular genres: Survival Reality and Adolescent Drama.

She does this through a group of teenagers, strangers to each other, whose plane crashes on a lonely island and condemns them to learn to survive on their own.

And yes, the association that came to your mind right now with reading the plot summary, is exactly what you thought: each embodies a stereotype or at least a required category (the beautiful Christian, the combative, hopelessly optimistic, naturally surviving lesbian, the spoiled rich daughter, the emo, etc.) , And each of the episodes focuses on flashbacks from each of their lives, thus creating the emotional connection to the character we see before us.

And above all this is another layer: this crash did not happen by accident.

While there is nothing original about all of this, the stick of "Lost in Nature" (a generic and silly name, certainly in the face of the requested "wild girls") works, in part also because of self-awareness.

In one episode, one of the girls tells another girl that "we will not be a 'breakfast club'."

But this is exactly what "Lost in Nature" does successfully: a dramatic and turbulent melting pot of black girls at a time when adolescence is at their most dramatic threshold, never to have discovered how much they needed each other if they had not been abandoned together.

And unlike that series that you're probably still thinking about, part of the uniqueness of "Lost in Nature" is the fact that the heroines are really alone.

There is no mysterious evil in uniting in front of him, other than loneliness and hunger, so that they are "stuck" with each other and with the fears, scratches and circumstances that led them to this place.

The result is an effective and at times even exciting drama, which holds up well even in a season of ten episodes lasting about an hour.

The "Lost in Nature" collective works well, as mentioned, although there is a lack of uniformity in both the quality of the game and the quality of the writing between the various girls.

For example, the character who is supposed to be the "brain" in the group, behaves and expresses himself in a babyish and strange way that is inconsistent with her insights, while another carries with it a painful farewell story as an excuse for unbelievable and capricious over-dramatic behavior.

To this must be added the extra tier, the one that cannot be expanded without sailing into the spoiler districts, but suffice it to say that it leads the series to a situation where it is not really clear how it is supposed to hold more seasons.

On the other hand, its ending is clearly not one that can be compromised.

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Mr Mayor

The development of comedy series is a long and complex process that involves a number of different incarnations and sometimes takes years.

It is rare for the general public to get a peek at it and compare the final product to the initial nucleus, and it is doubtful if anyone is even interested in it - why bother to know a prototype of a product, or a first draft of a script, that will surely look completely one at the end?

What are we, a nation of guinea pigs?

Of course not.

Tina Fey's new comedy provides another reason for not wanting to be exposed to unfinished TV work products: the potential for disappointment from the end product.

Sorry for anyone who has not yet been exposed to this sucks knowledge, but "Mr. Mayor" was originally supposed to be a spin-off of "Rock 30" starring the great Alec Baldwin, in which his divine character Jack Dongy is elected mayor of New York and forced to face the non-political world Familiar (as a wink to rumors that Baldwin is considering doing it himself).

But Baldwin decided to retire after a year of negotiations, and was replaced by Ted Danson ("Free at the Bar," "The Good Place"). Danson is no less great but lives in California, so Faye and co-writer Robert Carlock had to re-knead the concept. And pour it into a new-old mold - Neil Bremer is just a wealthy businessman who was unexpectedly elected mayor of Los Angeles. Still, in the first scene where Danson turns to the camera and asks with a bastard smile and outstretched hands "Can you believe it?", It's hard to believe not. These are remnants of that script, and long for an alternative universe where it did happen.In

general, the spirit of the original concept (and of "Rock 30") lines up in almost every corner of "Mr. Mayor", starting with the character of the foolish speaker (Bobby Moynhan) that sounds like a reincarnation Kenneth's intern, to Bremer's daughter (Kayla Kennedy), who's just as annoying as a descendant of Jack Dongy and Avery Jessup could have been. Indeed, the mayor's inability to serve in his office now revolves around general Trumpian clumsiness instead of condescension. An arrogant tramp (as would be the case with Dongy), and Danson at least definitely settles into it with amiable

comfort.Faye and Carllock's writing is still sharp, silly, topical

And fun, even if a little less accurate this time, and it seems that most of the arrows of cynicism are now directed towards the city of Los Angeles itself, which snatches countless bumps and drops that are actually the funniest parts of the series.

On the other side stands Holly Hunter, in an unfortunate hairstyle, which is a surprising casting mistake in its severity: Hunter plays Mayor Bremer's ideologically-rivaled rival who becomes his deputy to undermine him, likely with future aromas of sexual tension, but something just doesn't sit well there.

Her game is squeaky and not comical enough, the chemistry between her and Danson just doesn’t exist, and she usually runs around like a wet dog who doesn’t find his place in the overall fabric.

Again, this is a dangerous and sucks game, but if one sails into the thought of that alternative universe and imagines Leslie Nop in its place for example, it is quite difficult to be satisfied with the current version of "Mr. Mayor."

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