WHAT'S ON TV in November 2022?

What are you watching or plan to watch, in November?

Our library system has the Dark Shadows TV collection and it has come in for me. I remember watching it in high school. Don't know how well it has held up but looking forward to watching it again.

>2 JulieLill: An entire day?, week?, month?, with Barnabas Collins! Lucky you. Enjoy.

In Search of Ozu (2018) Streaming via Criterion Channel. 46 min. doc; mostly Japanese w/English subtitles. Director, Daniel Raim. Yasunari Ozu 1903-1963. Opens with shots of his grave, where the practice is to leave offerings of things he enjoyed in life – sake & beer. Last shots also of the grave. Single Japanese character on the tombstone: “Nothing.” Never married, lived with his mother all his life & died shortly after she passed. Didn’t become an incel though. Women in his films are portrayed sympathetically, Doc focuses primarily on his late films, where he used color for formal purposes. CC is currently streaming the color films: Equinox Flower (1958) -- Floating Weeds (1959) -- Late Autumn (1960) -- The End of Summer (1961) -- An Autumn Afternoon (1962), his last film. Hope to catch some of the earlier black & whites on HBOMax’s TCM hub. Doc evokes the late director with the pre-Internet of things: memorabilia from archives in Japan, computer chip-less artifacts instead resonating with personal and/or aesthetic meaning. Personal, not necessarily spiritual, despite the Zen allusion on the gravestone, creator of artisanal films. Most noteworthy for me: a rusted “crab leg” support for cameras shooting at tatami level (low) that was Ozu’s signature shot; a red tea kettle he chose himself that he placed in various indoor shots (floor level for the most part), used to coordinate with the wrapping paper of a gift brought to the house; a green bakelite telephone matching the painted wall of an office; the painted tea & sake cups he selected. Paintings play a role, too – picture of a kabuki demon contrasting with the soft glow of an actress entering an after-work bar. Not mentioned in the doc, but I noticed that in Equinox Flower he shoots actors passing in & out of a wedding reception room via an adjacent corridor; the shot directs the eye so as to view the actors passing under a reproduction of the Mt. Fuji painting that is the logo of Shochiku, the film company he worked for. Ozu handwrote his shooting scripts -- Japanese vertical columns for each – color-coded – speaker, with numbered shots, coordinating with his own storyboards. The Japanese script titles were created by Ozu & shot with fabric backgrounds, at least in the color films. Inspired me to look into Everyday Aesthetics by Yuriko Saito. Unfortunately, interest in Ozu among Japan's "younger generation" was waning at the time the doc was made.

Able to add the Ozu CC collection to its My List feature, but can’t yet figure out how to access My List!

Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 9 (2010) Director Michael Beyer. Conductor Claudio Abbado, Lucerne Festival Orchestra. From my bluray collection (finally got my old soundbar connected to the new TV & BD player with a more up to date optical cable). Once heard/watched another version on Amazon Prime streaming when Abbado was working with a student orchestra, & the delicacy of the last movement – sort of like R. Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration -- was very impressive. The finale of this version, here w/seasoned pros (Sabine Meyer on lead clarinet) can best be described as sublime. Abbado died in 2014 & already looks frail (hopefully not yet suffering from the cancer that would take his life), but he controls this orchestra to the last whisper.

Secrets of the Lost Liners.. Doco SBS, Fascinating, 6 hour long episodes in all.

>5 Aussi11: Sounds good. I really like stories like that. I remember watching 6 hours of divers exploring the Titanic. My grandfather worked in the shipyard in Belfast that had built the Titanic.

News of the World (2020) 1 hr 58 min. Director Paul Greenglass; screenplay Greenglass & Luke Davies, based on the novel by Paulette Jiles. Although filmed in New Mexico, story takes place in Texas ca. 1870; good photography of the setting. As a reminder to myself, the Federal holiday Juneteenth celebrates June 19 1865, the legal emancipation of slavery in Texas & the final legal fulfillment of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863; Texas was the longest holdout in recognizing legally that people of color – blacks – were … people. And by the way, the Native Americans … also people. The difference between legal & reality – or realities – is part of the background for the movie. The beginning of Captain Jefferson Kidd’s (Tom Hanks) odyssey begins when he comes upon the corpse of a black man hanging from a tree with a sign proclaiming Texas as White Man’s Country. Kidd is a former Confederate officer & preacher, now making a secular living digesting & reading newspapers (accepting a dime per listener in contributions) at gatherings across post-war Texas. USA Yesterday. The dead man was trying to fulfill a Federal order to repatriate a victim of the Anglo-Indian wars, a pre-teen survivor of a homesteader family massacre, Johanna (Helena Zengel), who was brought up by her Kiowa captors & has forgotten all of her German family’s language & culture; she only speaks & thinks in Kiowa. IMDb points out that in historical reality she would have been captured & brought up by the Comanche (cue John Ford’s The Searchers). When Kidd finds the child, he shortly encounters Federal troops, & he is tasked with fulfilling the repatriation order; he has some familiarity with the southern part of Texas where her surviving family is said to dwell. Kidd & Johanna form a sort of bond when they are trailed by 3 thugs who first try to buy her for sex trafficking & then trail the pair to a hillside battle. As a Confederate veteran he is not allowed to carry any ammunition other than shotgun birdshot (he makes do with a borrowed handgun until he runs out of revolver bullets), but the girl brings him the bucket of dimes earned at a recent reading & these transform the shotgun shells for deadly use. I recall this as the climax of the book, but the film has further stops, where Kidd & the girl meet up with a crew of buffalo hunters led by a Peckinpah-like warlord-type who tries to make Kidd read the warlord’s version of the news. After escaping, Kidd & the child first stop at the homestead where Johanna was captured – the bloodstains of her slaughtered family are still on the wall. When they continue onward, Kidd tries to convince her to forget the past & look forward, but Johanna’s take on her culture is that the past is necessary to go forward. Later they are caught in a sandstorm after their horses die, but are saved, presumably because the child is able to convince a group of presumably Kiowa families to give them a spare horse. (Are the families migrating out of Texas, having been pushed out by the white settlers?) Eventually they make their way to the girl’s surviving relatives, where Kidd is able to leave her. He returns to his town of origin, San Antonio, to make peace with his own past, to visit the grave of his wife. Then, looking forward, he returns and reclaims Johanna from her relatives, and together they continue to go from town to town, proclaiming the news of the world (ending on a reading of a secular resurrection). Here, it seems to me the screenwriters abridge Jiles rendering of Kidd’s decision: in the novel (as I recall) the relatives are as exploitative & cruel in their way as the sex trafficker thugs, & Kidd effectively re-kidnaps her to save her. One thing the movie makes more explicit is that the bond between the child & Kidd (the reader) is the storytelling – the news (as in its gospel roots) is a kind of magical talisman, a liberation from the “realities” of the bigotry encountered in some of the listeners at Kidd’s readings, in the warlord propaganda of the buffalo hunter warlord. Not so much because it offers facts, but because it speaks of wonders as it entertains, of possibilities & alternatives.

My incentive for watching: it is scheduled to leave HBOMax by the end of November, so unless it gets bumped off to another streaming service, that’s it. It’s been some time since I read the novel, but my impression is that the screenwriters & director added quite a bit more to the original source.

>7 featherbear: Loved the movie and the book. Jiles is one author I would read again!

Amazon Prime: The Little Hours (2017) 90 min. Direction & screenplay, Jeff Beala, based on stories from the Decameron. Though credited with the screenplay, I understand much of the dialog & acting is improvised. Hardly a classical reenactment, in any case; it’s more like an SNL feature length skit, but with no studio censorship regarding language, nudity, blasphemy or anything else I might have overlooked. Suspect the instigator may be the producer, Aubrey Plaza (April Ludgate of the series Parks and Recreation). Here we have gotten to a nunnery, featuring three miscreants, Sisters Alessandra (Alison Brie), Ginevra (Kate Micucci), & Fernanda (Plaza), supervised, after a fashion, by Mother Superior Maria (Molly Shannon) & Father Tommasso (John C. Reilly). There is a running joke about a donkey that is left dangling, probably for the better. The nuns grapple with bitchery & depression, or improvise upon such weighty subjects rather lamely. Meanwhile, we have a jealous, Guelph-obsessed nobleman Bruno (Nick Offerman) – would have been a hoot if his wife Megan Mullaley had played the adulterous spouse, but that bit of casting fell through apparently – who seeks to have cuckolder Matteo (Dave Franco) castrated, but the lad escapes & is befriended by Father T., who is looking to replace the convent’s gardener & mechanic who has recently quit due to relentless abuse from the potty mouthed nuns. To limit – well, intercourse – with the younger nuns Father T. comes up with the stratagem to have Matteo pretend to be a deaf mute. At about the time the sisters suss out that the new gardener can hear & speak & otherwise use his tongue and Boccaccio things begin to ensue, the convent has a surprise visit from Bishop Bartolomeo (Fred Armisen). One of the better scenes has the crestfallen Bishop determining sins & assigning penances to the naughty nuns. Interesting, though not exactly uproarious, to see what a whole generation of younger actors unacquainted with such concepts as “worldliness” or “religious devotion” toy with what were once the icons from which their parents were already at an ironic distance.

Also on Amazon Prime, starting to watch a new series produced by & starring Emily Blunt, The English (2022). 6 episodes; I’m somewhere in E2. Blunt plays Cornelia Locke, an English noblewoman out to revenge the death of her son. She teams up with a Pawnee ex-scout, Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer). Guy’s a real hardbody, so at this point kinda hard to tell whether this is going to be a bodice-ripper or a revisionist look at the old west like News of the World (or why not both?). Unlike Tom Hanks/Captain Kidd, Whipp is a veteran Indian-killer (of Pawnee tribal enemies), plus we have uncomfortable situations where Whipp & Locke kill a trio of white & native mercenaries who murder a German husband & his pregnant wife who are part of a persecuted religious sect the local ranchers want to be rid of (see for example Heaven’s Gate). Both the settlers & the ranchers are in conflict over land once promised to the natives (Whipp’s family once had a claim). As a veteran, Whipp thinks the government will allow him to claim a few acres for his own stake – we’ll see how that works out, though one suspects things ... won’t. Short term, what will Locke & Whipp do with the the surviving children of the murdered settler couple (the baby cut out of the body of its dead mother)? Anyway, seems like a M/F superhero duo on a quixotic mission to explore other issues.

Next on my DVD/Netflix rental queue was the Scandinavian TV series The Bridge aka Bron/Broen (2011) Just checked IMDB & the damn series went on for 24 epis; I’ve seen the 1st three, now waiting for the 2nd disc with what I thought were the concluding episodes. I’ve seen at least 2 later versions of the series, & was a bit surprised to learn Netflix DVD seemed to total 6. Sometimes getting the impression – where have I seen this before? – the Swedish detective Saga (Sofia Helin) does look a lot like the French detective Elise (Clemence Poesy, The Tunnel). All versions are absorbing, recommendable stuff, though it may only be the Scandinavian original that notes the personality similarities between the successfully functioning autistic detective & the “truth terrorist.” I’ve seen the entire runs of the U.S./FX series The Bridge (the first version I’ve seen, with an affecting performance by Diane Kruger, w/Demian Bechir as the lawman from Mexico) & the Anglo-French The Tunnel with Poesy & Stephen Dillane. All versions begin with a body found on the border between 2 countries (& so 2 cop personalities from different jurisdictions meet cute), in this case a bridge connecting Denmark with Sweden. Although the languages are far closer than English-Spanish or English-French, I’m sure much of the richness in the cultural & linguistic differences brought out in the series aren’t registering to non-regional ears.

Figured out for the most part how to bookmark collections & individual films on the Criterion Channel, but that’s mostly what I’ve been doing on this resource. I will note that anime is not a strong suit on this site, but way more than enough to watch otherwise. Highly recommended if you have a smart tv that can load the app. Plus the UConn women’s basketball season is starting, & I keep discovering new books to read; the lists of 2022 publications on TLS & The New Yorker sites are online & I’m still stumbling on 2009 purchases I’d forgotten about.

The Wolf Man - The Complete Legacy Collection
I found this DVD series of Wolf Man films, consisting of 5 films which starred Lon Chaney Jr. Also in this collection was another film, in which a very young June Lockhart was accused of being the She Wolf of London and lastly a 1935 film Werewolf of London starring Henry Hull and Warner Oland best known for his Charlie Chan films. I enjoyed the films but probably liked June Lockhart film the best of the bunch!

Via Peacock streaming: Nope (2022). Director/screenplay. Jordan Peele. Cinematography: Hoyte van Hoytema. Not much of a fan of Get Out, & don’t remember too much of Us, though I’d probably watch it again. But I enjoyed this one, even if it didn’t seem entirely coherent, so for sure the best Jordan Peele I’ve seen so far. OJ (i.e. Otis Haywood Jr, played by Daniel Kaluuya) runs a horse farm with his father (Keith David); the horses are rented out to filmmakers for horse scenes (in the moviemaking lingo, OJ is an animal wrangler). His sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) functions as his agent, for want of a better term. Palmer is almost as annoying as she is on Twitter, but as the movie progresses, she is sort of redeemed; got to admire Peele’s generosity. The wrangling business not being what it was, and with his father killed by random falling objects from the sky, OJ has to rent or sell his animals to a nearby Western amusement park run by Rick “Jupiter” Park (Steven Yuen), a former child star of a kiddy Western – hence Park’s old time Western park -- later traumatized by a berserk chimpanzee incident in a very shortlived sitcom. The chimp incident haunts the film, providing theme & on some level motivation, while being absurd, though perhaps not absurd enough. Anyway, back on the ranch, Ghost, the white horse OJ Sr. died on, is spooked and its screams are the last we hear of the poor animal, and – what was that!? Why hasn’t that cloud moved in days? Probably something not to be fooled around with, but Emerald sees it as the path to fame & fortune, or an appearance on Oprah, and she & OJ visit the local electronics big box in search of a surveillance system, & the resident geek, Angel Torres (Brandon Perea; new to me) joins up with them to capture images of it. To pay for the gear, OJ has to sell his last horse to Park, who uses it as a part of a spectacle to summon … what, exactly? It appears that, like the chimp incident, a climax in family entertainment is transformed into an incident only partly digestible. On the ranch, the wranglers use a (white) horse effigy stolen from the theme park, to lure the whatever it is within camera range only to be interrupted by TMZ. Arguably Peele’s take on popular entertainment bites off a little more than it can chew, so the ending might be ruefully self-referential. I’d watch this again.

On Netflix, finished a 4 part extended version of The Hateful Eight I’d been watching off and on. Hard to believe it came out in 2015; I think I saw the original a year or so later on one of the streaming sites. Peele shot Nope in IMAX; Tarentino shot his own movie in the wide screen of the spaghetti Westerns he emulated; I’m only familiar with the TV size versions, unfortunately, though my TV monitor is not small. That said, most of the film takes place on a studio set, the interior of a stagecoach stop in the middle of a blizzard, not unlike the warehouse in Reservoir Dogs, or, of course, much of Ford’s Stagecoach, with Tarentino doing what he does best, weaponized dialog. Maybe a deeper dive into The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, where the Civil War is also a touchstone event. In the Leone film, the war is behind the cynicism of the treasure hunters; Tarentino chooses to bring out the racial issues that ignited the war that have hardly been extinguished in the post-war period of the film (or today, of course). Leone’s “good” is at best neutral, but in the feature under review the good have been exterminated even before Tarentino’s film has begun, and the concluding act of sadistic revenge is a most uncomfortable uniting of the union & the confederate; both the killers & the hangmen seemed both ugly & bad; the bloodstained letter from “President Lincoln” comes across as both a forgery & Tarentino’s concluding nasty joke. Maybe the disquieting revenge has something more recent than Leone in mind, i.e. the 2 earlier revenger tragedies, Django Unchained & Inglourious Basterds. I didn’t notice any performances that seemed off, but a particular shout out to Jennifer Jason Leigh as Daisy Domergue; don’t think I’ve seen her since the Alec Baldwin movie Miami Blues all the way back in 1990; checked IMDB – so many character driven dramas I’ve missed.

I always read posts on this group (which I have only recently joined) with interest but do not feel that I can contribute much as I do not subscribe to streaming services such as Netflix.
Here in the UK I have access to the BBc's iplayer and the other free streaming services of terrestrial channels. I don't feel that there is much of interest there for anyone else.
However I thought that some of you might like to hear about 'The English', newly arrived on BBC TV and also on Amazon Prime. This Western features Emily Blunt on a very personal mission in Kansas and as an English aristocrat constantly in danger from predatory and greedy folk, not least because she carries a lot of money with her. She meets native american
Eli Whipp( played by Chaske Spencer) a member of the Pawnee tribe and former US cavalry scout, who reluctantly travels with her, on his way to claim the land he owns in Nebraska.

The series is beautifully shot and evokes a time in the American West when towns were only just being built and life was tough in the extreme. It pulls no punches with regard to the dangers of such a place and time with the possibility of violence around any bend for the unwary traveller. The two leading actors interact wonderfully, the tension arising from their coming from very different cultures mitigated by a sense of a friendship developing. I have only seen two episodes but am firmly hooked already.

Criterion Channel. Alphaville (1965) B&W, 1 hr 39 min. French w/English subtitles. Director & screenplay, Jean-Luc Godard. Godard shoots a 1984-type science fiction story as an American noir, featuring Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution, a tough PI type here as an American spy going under the nom de guerre Ivan Johnson. Shot in Paris using mostly night shots & the then existing modern architecture to suggest the future city of Alphaville, a dystopian world run by a computer, Alpha 60. A6 functions sometimes as a narrator, interlocutor, prosecutor, & is the ruler of the city, avatar of logic and science. Caution, in contrast, embodies American brutality & violence (modeled on Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, it would seem) but also poetry and imagination. As a spy, Caution is out to assassinate Werner von Braun – formerly Nosferatu – but falls in love with von Braun’s daughter, played by Godard’s Muse & mistress, Anna Karina. Sex may be the antimatter that disrupts the scientific dystopia (what would 1965 Godard have made of online porn?).

Amazon Prime. The dystopia ruler trope resurfaces in John Dies at the End (2012) Color, 1 hr 39 min (coincidentally the same length as Alphaville). Director & screenplay, Don Coscarelli. Travel from America to Alphaville seems to be by automobile, which seems unscientific; this film doesn’t go with distant solar systems or galaxies, but passages to alternate universes, dreamed up by physicists to make up for our disappointment in the limitations of the speed of light for travel to other worlds. To get from one universe to another is a problem overcome by ingestion of “soy sauce,” a mind altering drug that is also a shape shifting parasite that kills you if you’re not compatible, or allows your consciousness to bypass before/after, inside/outside, life/death, this universe/that universe. The first half unfolds as a shaggy dog story as told to reporter Arnie Blondestone (Paul Giamatti) by Dave Wong (Chase Williamson; the film is based on a story by David Wong – joke?) in (of course) a Chinese restaurant, who tells of a phone call in the night from his fellow dealer John (Rob Mayes) at first from a freakout at his house after taking a dose of soy sauce, then from the grave after he dies in police custody (rather than at the end, by the way). In the course of their journey, the dealers hook up with Amy & her dog, Bark Lee, both of whom will have a key role in saving the universe when the duo of Dave & John pass into the alternative universe (with Bark Lee) and meet Korrok, an AI created from a pig’s head by a genius who died in Dave & John’s universe but lived to nurture a pig’s head into an AI in the Alternate Universe. Korrok controls the world and runs it like Hitler because it’s smarter than Hitler and all humankind combined, but he must contend with Dave, John, & Bark Lee. In something of a parallel to Alphaville 60, the would-be storyteller Arnie Blondestone has some unfortunate surprises in store, another victim of the imagination.

I’m not a subscriber but the Starz premium channel was available free from my cable provider for the holiday weekend, so I took a look at a couple as a break from reading or watching sports (UConn women woke up in the second half & beat Iowa & Caitlin Clark). I’m not a fan of Marvel movies & don’t understand why there are so many Spiderman/men, but people claim to see good things in the latest, Spiderman No Way Home; I caught The More Fun Stuff Version (2022; the original 2021) 2 hr 37 min. Since I haven’t been keeping up, the opening was confusing (Jake Gyllenhall looks silly in a supercostume but is needed to betray Spiderman’s secret identity); took a quick look at the previous film, but a high school trip to Europe was too Young Adult for me, so I’m just winging it in the extended “sequel.” This one, like John Dies at the End, is also based on the Alternate Universe trope, though this one seems more directly in debt to Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse (2018), an animated feature that I found visually interesting when I caught it on, if I recall, Netflix. This one is live action, & Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is a senior in high school, with his best pal Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) & girlfriend MJ (Zendaya); he now has a mother substitute, Aunt May (Marisa Tomei). The whole background is Young Adult Comedy and the struggle with forming an identity. With his "secret identity” as Peter Parker revealed, the lad runs to his mentor Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) a master magician & one of the Avengers, to somehow restore his anonymity. However, the spell is marred by Peter’s indecision (what about my girlfriend, doc?) & the spell only succeeds in bringing back villains of Spiderman movies past – Doc Ock (Alfred Molina), The Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Electro (Jamie Foxx), The Lizard (Rhys Ifans), and Sandman (Thomas Haden Church). Dr Strange instructs Peter to recapture all of the villains, which he does, but when all of the bad guys are in lock down, the doctor tells Peter to send ‘em back where they came from. Since they all met their deaths at the hands of alternative Spidermen, this has certain ethical issues for which Peter is unwilling to take responsibility, so he decides to cure them using science (this storyline seems to have been devised by Fox News) but this results in all of the villains escaping to wreak devastation in a world where climate change does not exist. However, in the ensuing chaos bff Ned picks up some of Dr Strange’s magical powers to open portals to alternate worlds, & to the rescue come the Peter Parkers of two Alternate Marvel Licensing Universes, Andrew Garfield & Tobey McGuire. So, while beginning with adolescent identity issues, we get a war of the universes with multiple check your pronouns identities. Still a Marvel Superhero Young Adult Comedy that lacks the eccentric humor of a stoner comedy like John Dies at the End. It did employ a lot of people, as the extended credit sequence at the end indicates.

Also from Starz free weekend: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) 1 hr 47 min. Director & screenplay, Tom Gormican (with Kevin Etten on the screenplay). I’m sure there’s already been an action-comedy about a movie star held hostage by a fanatic with a screenplay; just can’t recall who what where when. Still fun stuff, because the movie star is Nick Cage, and he is best known for his work in big buck action spectaculars, for getting in debt, and taking on any B movie role to make money. So he plays a simulacrum of himself, with a backstory of an ex-wife & a 16 year old daughter (Sharon Horgan & Lily Mo Sheen, respectively) he neglected for his career. His super fan is the outlandishly rich Javi Guttierez (Pedro Pascal) who promises the actor $1 million for his presence at a bday party for his daughter at his estate in Mallorca (turns out he really wants to convince Cage to star or produce a script he has written). However, when Cage arrives in Spain, he is briefly kidnapped by 2 American agents (Tiffany Haddish & Ike Barinholtz) who believe Guttierez is the head of a drug cartel, holding the daughter of the Spanish prime minister hostage (she’s kidnapped in the opening sequence; she’s a Cage fan) to influence the upcoming election. Being short staffed, the idea is for Cage to get chummy with Guttierez & find out where the girl is being hidden on the estate. All he’s able to discover is Guttierez’s Nick Cage memorabilia room, complete with a statue of Cage as Castor Troy (complete with the original gold-plated semiautomatic pistols) & the 2 bond weepily over Paddington 2. In order to get Gutierrez to open up, Haddish comes up with a scheme for Cage to appeal to Javi’s softer side by inserting the kidnapping of the protagonist’s daughter to transform the script into an action movie rescue. Gutierrez at first does not like the idea but then flies in Cage’s ex-wife & daughter (note: movie actors, not Cage’s actual wife or daughter) to test the concept. While Cage reacts histrionically, Javi is called to another room where the real drug lord, his cousin Lucas, awaits, who informs him that Nick is a spy for the CIA). Much “real” i.e. movie action ensues. Entertaining meta comedy, even if it seems to be a re-do of an earlier movie.

I've been making my way through The Powers That Be, streaming on Crackle. One of the few flops from producer Norman Lear, running only 21 episodes in 1992-93, and that's about all it deserved; the writing's clunky -- creators David Crane and Marta Kaufmann hadn't quite hit their stride yet, with Friends just around the corner -- and the political satire hasn't dated well.

But my goodness, the cast! John Forsythe as a US senator, Holland Taylor as the wife who desperately wants him to be president, Valerie Mahaffey as their shallow daughter, David Hyde Pierce as her husband (a Congressman who's only occasionally mildly suicidal), 11-year-old Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the grandson, Eve Gordon and Peter McNicol as the senator's aides, Robin Bartlett as the senator's illegitimate daughter whose arrival kicks off the series, and Elizabeth Berridge giving a master class in physical comedy as the much put-upon maid. Their comic timing and line readings are so good that the show seems a lot better than it actually is.