Q Wave’s Watchlist: September 2021
"There's nothing to watch" is not a phrase that should exist in a world drowning in content. Join us every month to get curated content - from the latest and greatest to revisiting oldies - we'll help you avoid the dreaded “Netflix Block” and find something to watch!
The Chair (Netflix)
While the life of college students has been well documented in movies and television for ages, reaching all the way back to the raucous Animal House of the late 70’s, very rarely do we the audience get a peek behind the curtain at the institution itself and the inner workings of it. Undoubtedly that’s what makes The Chair so compelling.
National treasure Sandra Oh (Killing Eve), plays Ji-Yoon Kim, a somewhat messy and frazzled, yet intelligent and capable single mother who is the newly appointed chair of the English department at the fictional Pembroke University. Ji-Yoon is the first woman chosen for the position and faces her share of sexism and racism in her new undertaking in the position, but the show does a good job of keeping episodes tightly contained to their 30 min time slot. Mining the usually stuffy setting of a university for laughs and treating the series as a workplace comedy that hinges on Oh’s performance makes the show entertaining to watch.
What makes The Chair worth watching is it feels like a somewhat accurate, albeit slightly comedically heightened, account of what it would be like to actually chair a department at a real university. The deeper the series goes, the more apparent it is that being in the position Oh finds her character in should be seen as more of a hassle than an honour, and it’s a position she is able to play off wonderfully. The series also does an effective job at highlighting how institutions like universities may be seen as progressive institutions of education but are actually engulfed in structural issues like keeping certain hierarchies in place. It’s tough to recall a series that has looked at post secondary education through this lens before, and although the themes explored may sound somewhat weighty, there is no shortage of laughs from Oh herself and her co-stars including Holland Taylor (Hollywood), who plays crotchety Professor Joan Hambling, and Jay Duplass as Professor Bill Dobson, whose life is a mess after the passing of his wife but maintains his popularity with the students.
You'd like this if you enjoyed: Catastrophe, Please Like Me
Runtime: 6 episodes, 30 mins each
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Schmigadoon! (Apple TV+)
What would you do if you suddenly found yourself in the midst of a musical after crossing a magical bridge in the woods? Well this just happens to be the premise of Apple TV+’s newest hit, Schmigadoon! This hilarious mini-series stars Cecily Strong (SNL) and Keegan-Michael Key (Key & Peele) as a New York couple who stumble across the magical town of Schmigadoon while participating in a marriage counselling hike. Once inside the town, they are confronted by townsfolk who regularly break into song and dance. Our protagonists discover that they cannot leave the town of Schmigadoon until they find true love (a revelation dropped on them by a leprechaun played by none other than Martin Short).
Written by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio (Despicable Me) and directed by Barry Sonnenfeld (The Men in Black trilogy), the show features an ensemble cast that strikes the right balance of manic joyfulness and absurd delight. The cast includes Alan Cumming (The Good Wife) as Mayor Aloysius Menlove, Fred Armisen (Portlandia) as Reverend Layton, Jaime Camil (Jane the Virgin) as Dr. Lopez, Ariana DeBose (The Prom) as the schoolmarm, and Dove Cameron (Descendants) as the farmer’s daughter, Betsy. However, the standouts are clearly Jane Krakowski (30 Rock) and Kristin Chenoweth (Wicked), the latter of whom was given a song that was 18 pages long and shot in a single take!
Schmigadoon! takes after classic Broadway musicals like Oklahoma! and Carousel. The name is also a parody of Brigadoon, which is about a Scottish town that only appears once every 100 years. The town of Brigadoon may also be fictional, but the name is a play on words of Brig o’ Doon which is a very real bridge in Scotland and literally translates to Bridge over the River Doon.
You'd like this if you enjoyed: Oklahoma!, The Sound of Music
Runtime: 6 episodes, 25-34 minutes each
Genre: Musical, Comedy
What If…? (Disney Plus)
If the content factory known as the MCU has proven anything over the years, it’s that they have a wealth of content to draw from and can make compelling movies and television out of just about any of their titles. Enter ‘What If..?’, the newest show streaming on Disney Plus, and their biggest animated project yet.
The premise of the series is pretty simple, each episode reimagines a noteworthy event from the MCU films in an unexpected way. What if Captain Carter were the First Avenger instead of Steve Rogers? What if T’Challa became Star Lord instead of Peter Quill? (It’s worth noting that this episode was one of Chadwick Boseman’s last projects before his death.) Those are just a couple of the alternate realities explored in the series through the eyes of Marvel’s The Watcher, voiced by Jeffrey Wright (Westworld), an extraterrestrial who simply observes these different timelines and presents them to us, the viewer. Wright has noted that The Watcher is best compared to Rod Serling from The Twilight Zone, introducing and concluding each episode.
The series is in the midst of its inaugural season, which is set to run until October 6th with nine episodes in total. The stories are each contained to their individual episodes, which makes for a perfect series you can drop in on whenever you please. A second season has already been given the green light which could reportedly be released as early as 2022. The goal, according to producer Brad Winderbaum, is to release a season of the show annually.
You'd like this if you enjoyed: Any Marvel movie
Runtime: 9 episodes, 32-33 minutes each
Genre: Animation, Superhero
Nine Perfect Strangers (Amazon Prime)
More and more A-listers are favouring the small screen lately as opposed to starring in movies, and Nicole Kidman (Bombshell) is seemingly leading the charge teaming up with her pal David E. Kelley for the third time after appearing in his other shows Big Little Lies and The Undoing.
Much like the aforementioned Big Little Lies, the show is an adaptation of a Liane Moriarty book of the same name. Kidman plays Masha, a mysterious woman who runs a health and wellness resort called Tranquillium House. Nine strangers gather at the resort for a ten-day retreat which promises to heal and transform the guests who take part, but the resort is not what it seems.
In addition to Kidman, the cast is absolutely stacked with talent featuring Melissa McCarthy (Thunder Force), Bobby Cannavale (The Irishman), Michael Shannon (Knives Out), Luke Evans (Beauty and the Beast), Regina Hall (Black Monday), and more.
While the plot can be kind of murky, every star on screen is giving a more than solid performance that makes the show worth a watch. The miniseries consists of 8 episodes that run until September 22nd.
You'd like this if you enjoyed: Big Little Lies, The White Lotus
Runtime: 8 episodes, 42-55 minutes each
Genre: Drama
Music Box: Woodstock ‘99 (Crave)
Coming at a time when the world is starting to attend concerts again, here is a documentary that may make you want to reconsider attending a live show. The first installment of the ‘Music Box’ docuseries that will be releasing follow-up films later this year concentrates on Woodstock ‘99, a concert that happened 22 years ago and makes Fyre Fest look like a walk in the park.
In the documentary, which is a sparkling piece of journalism, we are taken through the misguided attempt to recreate the magic of the original Woodstock music festival on it’s 30th anniversary. To say the organizers, who also organized the original festival in 1969, fumbled the bag is an understatement indeed. Instead of ‘Three Days of Peace and Music’ (which was how the ‘69 event was described) festival-goers were privy to three days of hate and rage. Set at a former Air Force base in Rome, New York, lovingly surrounded by a 12-foot fence to keep people from sneaking in, the festival chose not to embrace the ‘peace’ element that made the original a success and instead catered to a different and much more volatile demographic with acts that focused on heavy metal including artists like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Metallica, Rage Against the Machine and more. Mix in temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, overpriced water, overflowing portable toilets, and extremely lax security, and the resulting affair was a powder keg waiting to blow.
Like a train wreck, the documentary presents an ugly mess that is almost impossible to look away from. At the same time, the film does an excellent job contextualizing where society was at that particular moment in 1999, and why holding a music festival dedicated to nostalgia for an event none of its attendees cared about was a futile idea.
The debut of the ‘Music Box’ docuseries was a strong one, and there are five more installments coming this fall centered around pivotal moments in the music world including docs about DMX, Alanis Morrisette, Kenny G., and more.
You'd like this if you enjoyed: FYRE: The Greatest Festival that Never Happened, Summer of Soul
Runtime: 100 minutes
Genre: Documentary