My Favorite William Friedkin Film

I had to think long and hard about whether I wanted to write this post, because William Friedkin is one of those directors who has made some iconic films, but I think I'd keep my distance if I ever met him in real life.  He was an intense, sometimes maniacal artist by many accounts, a rule breaker and a risk taker who went to dangerous extremes to get what he wanted.  Some of his films would have been very different if he hadn't directed them - much safer, less shocking, and less impactful.  He wasn't afraid of controversial subjects like homosexuality, blowback from institutions like the Catholic Church, or an NC-17 rating.  

And then it happened.  Last year we got disturbing reports that many online copies of "The French Connection," the Best Picture winner of 1971, had been clumsily edited to remove two racial slurs.  The dialogue isn't important to the plot, but it is important to the whole tone and verve of the picture.  "The French Connection" is a suspenseful crime thriller about a racist, alcoholic, deeply unpleasant NYPD detective named Popeye Doyle, played by Gene Hackman in a porkpie hat, trying to break up a ring of French drug smugglers.  It's probably best known for the spectacular chase sequence where Doyle follows his suspects in an elevated train by car, which cinematographer Owen Roizman notoriously filmed parts of in real Brooklyn traffic.  

The first time I watched "The French Connection" was about twenty years ago on DVD, and I wasn't too impressed.  By then the film was noticeably showing its age and I found the sequence of events difficult to follow.  However, everything clicked for me when I watched the film a second time with Friedkin's commentary, which explained how the events were based on real drug smuggling cases, and highlighted the impressive amount of detail that went into every frame.  Friedkin began his career as a documentary filmmaker, and his work reflected what he observed in real life.  Popeye Doyle was a racist because the detectives in that era were often racists, and Friedkin saw no reason to whitewash this truth.

Of course, Doyle is more than this.  He's such a memorable figure, because he's so different from the portrayal of police officers we usually saw onscreen in the '60s.  As a detective, Doyle is not particularly smart, and he's certainly not noble, but he's doggedly fixated on getting the job done and will employ any means necessary to get his man.  He'll break the rules, employ unnecessary brutality, and endanger innocent lives without hesitation.  Like Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry who debuted the same year, Doyle is comfortable working outside the system and can be characterized as an anti-hero.  The difference, however, is that Doyle isn't cool, isn't ever framed as admirable, and exists in a much closer approximation of reality where his recklessness has more consequences.  I don't know if Doyle is how William Friedkin saw himself as a director, but the parallels are undeniable.  

The film's ending also reflects Friedkin's commitment to realism.  The drugs are discovered but the mastermind Charnier gets away.  Doyle is transferred out of narcotics.  The various criminals arrested during the film receive different fates, seemingly at random.  Some serve time in prison while there's not enough evidence to charge the others.  I didn't seek out the sequel, "French Connection II" for a long time because it changed the fates of Doyle and Charnier to conform to the more typical outcomes we'd expect in a cops-and-robbers story.      

As for William Friedkin, the success of "The French Connection" gave him the clout he needed to make his next picture, "The Exorcist" with the amount of creative freedom necessary to really shake up the status quo.  I'd have written this entry about "The Exorcist," but my superstitious mother would never forgive me.  Friedkin's run of commercial successes was short lived, but he continued to push boundaries for the rest of his career, and his influence on the filmmaking profession remains considerable.  It's sort of fitting he died right after the censorship of "The French Connection" was discovered last summer, his work becoming a focal point of controversy yet again.

What I've Seen - William Friedkin

The Boys in the Band (1970)

The French Connection (1971)

The Exorcist (1973)

Sorcerer (1977)

The Brink's Job (1978)

Cruising (1980)

To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)

Bug (2006)

Killer Joe (2011)

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023)

Catching up on "One Piece," Part I

Minor spoilers ahead.

I intended to watch some of the backlog of prestige miniseries and other older shows I've been putting off while we were in a content lull.  Instead, I've been bingeing "One Piece."  A lot of "One Piece."  In fact, I've watched so much that I want to put down some thoughts before I get any farther into this series.

The pirate adventure "One Piece" is notorious for being one of the longest continuous manga and anime series, with the anime running since 1999, and now having amassed over a thousand episodes.  This makes it very intimidating for newcomers to approach, but since the live action version of "One Piece" premiered over the summer, there's been a lot of renewed interest in the franchise.  I count myself as a casual fan of "One Piece," as it was the last anime that I regularly kept up with through fansubs, back in the era when the only legitimate releases of the show I could access were the severely edited 4Kids versions.  My memory's not great, but I'm pretty sure I made it through the "Thriller Bark" story, which would have been in 2008.  The show was less than 400 episodes at that point.

I stopped watching because I found out from the manga readers that there was going to be a big timeskip, and multiple story arcs where most of the regular characters were going to be benched for an extended period of time.  I figured I could take a break until the gang got back together in the anime.  However, this didn't happen for several seasons, and I lost track of the show.  Fifteen years later, hearing nothing but good things about the later part of the series, I was finally ready to pick up where I had left off.  The anime world is very different from what it was in 2008.  Anime is a lot easier to access. Netflix and Hulu have a couple of seasons of "One Piece" each, and Crunchyroll has all the episodes, many of them offered on a free ad-supported tier.  It has been very easy to binge a ton of the episodes, and I've churned through five major arcs in a little over a month - bringing me to the end of "Fishman Island," which seems to be the halfway point of the whole "One Piece" series.   

Those five arcs of "One Piece" cover one hundred and eighty episodes that aired over roughly three years.  They're very eventful and advance the series significantly.  However, the individual episodes don't cover a lot, and "One Piece" is notorious for filler, recaps, previews, long opening credit sequences (some run two and a half minutes!), and "Dragonball Z" style fights that last multiple episodes.  If you're good at skipping these (and I am) it's easy to blaze through a ton of episodes very quickly.  Frankly, I don't know if I would have had the patience to wait for weekly releases - which looking back probably contributed to me dropping the show back in 2008.  One of the biggest roadblocks to me picking up the show again was that I'd already learned most of what happened in these arcs - curiosity would get the better of me and I'd look up what the Straw Hat Crew were up to every few years.  However, I wasn't sure I wanted to invest all the time to watch the events play out. 

My perspective on "One Piece" has changed significantly.  I'm even more obviously not the target audience anymore for a "shonen" series aimed at older boys and male teenagers.  "One Piece" is better in handling female characters than many of these shows, but there's still a tendency to rely on bad tropes and sexed up character designs.  The immature humor and over-the-top melodrama can be grating, and some of our hero characters are turning into silly caricatures of themselves - and many are very childish to begin with.  The Sunny Go now has a nine person crew, and there's very little time for anyone to get the spotlight beyond Luffy and whoever he's trying to save at the moment.  So Zoro gets lost more.  Sanji's perviness is worse.  Usopp and Chopper are always panicking.  Most of the crew interactions are strictly comedic, which is fine, but this gets a little tedious as someone who loves "One Piece" for the ensemble. 

Then again, the five arcs I watched represent one of the roughest parts of "One Piece" for Luffy's crew as a crew.  They're only together in two of them - "Sabaody Archipelago" and "Fishman Island," with the two year timeskip happening in between.  Nobody gets a real subplot or side mission, the way you'd see in previous arcs.  "Fishman Island" is also one of the worst regarded "One Piece" stories, because it flubs an ambitious story about an oppressed community that had been set up in previous arcs of the show.  One thing that "One Piece" has always done well has been its worldbuilding.  It has a ton of interesting minor characters who keep coming back throughout the series, often changing and growing and revealing new sides to themselves.  "Fishman Island" does offer some new background information for certain characters and conflicts, but there's nobody to really get emotionally invested in.  The villains are dull, new friends like the Mermaid Princess are a bust, and the fights are nothing special.

But when the show is good, it's good.  The three arcs where Luffy goes solo - "Amazon Lily," "Impel Down," and "Marineford," are really one, long, epic quest to save his brother Ace from execution.  These have some of the best storytelling and payoffs in the whole show.  The scale and the scope that "One Piece" does so well is fully on display as Luffy ends up in the middle of a literal war between different government and pirate factions.  Tons of new characters are introduced, we learn much more about some of the familiar ones - including big chunks of Luffy and Ace's backstory - plus lots of future conflicts are set up.  Unfortunately, it was almost impossible to avoid the spoilers for the end of "Marineford" back in 2010 if you were anywhere near the anime and manga fandoms when it happened.

Yeah, so the last big roadblock for me getting back into "One Piece" has been the "One Piece" fandom.  I haven't seen too much really concerning behavior, but the "One Piece" fans are exactly what you'd expect for a series aimed at young male viewers.  It's actually a plus for me that I'm so far behind, so I'll have less of a risk of running across spoilers for future  arcs I know very little about, like "Dressrosa" and "Wano," and I can avoid the bulk of the insane hype and drama that seems to erupt on social media every few months.  I get to be a casual fan of "One Piece" this way, and that's vital.  I'm too old and too contrarian to deal with the die-hards anymore.  My timing has been very deliberate too. Now that so many people are getting into "One Piece" via the live action series, the fandom spaces are seeing a welcome influx of newbies, and we're all just going to have to learn to get along.

I want to emphasize that I really do enjoy and appreciate this franchise.  I love that "One Piece" has such a unique style all its own, that the heroes are so optimistic and spirited, and the series has been consistently fun to watch.  It never gets bogged down in personal agendas or love quadrangles, never seems to run out of interesting characters, and knows how to play the long game when it comes to storytelling.  I stuck with the show for years because I was so attached to the characters and it wasn't quite like any other anime running.  It's managed to maintain a wonderful mix of absurdity and sincerity for decades now, and its creator Eiichiro Oda isn't slowing down.  However, "One Piece" definitely has its rough spots, and is a challenge for even the most dedicated media fan to stick with.  

I'm looking forward to the rest of "One Piece," and I intend to watch the remaining arcs much more slowly.  Getting through this chunk of episodes was really me pushing to get the hard part done with, and hopefully I've managed to get across why this was the hard part for me.  "One Piece" is far from the only fandom I've had some of these problems with, especially as I've been getting older.  But "One Piece" is proving to be worth the effort - so I'm giving it another try.  It will never be the best show, or my favorite, but I remain very fond of it.

I'll be back with updates, and maybe even a few reviews of future arcs.  Stay tuned.

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A Film "Afire"

I've now seen half a dozen of Christian Petzold's contemplative melodramas, and it's remarkable how consistent they are.  His latest, "Afire," is set in the present day, but has a fable-like, portentous quality to it, similar to his previous "Undine."  Far too topical wildfires are a major thematic element, threatening the small tourist town on the Baltic Sea, where our story takes place.     

I'd classify "Afire" as a romance, but the film is really more of a character study of the protagonist, Leon (Thomas Schubert), a young writer in crisis.  He's agreed to come to the seaside, at the invitation of his friend Felix (Langston Uibel), intending to spend time working on his latest novel.  They arrive at Felix's parents' holiday home, only to discover that they'll have to share it with someone else - a young woman named Nadja (Paula Beer) is already living there for the summer, and frequently has her boyfriend Devid (Enno Trebs) over at night.  Felix is happy to cohabitate, but Leon finds this situation unbearable.  

I think everyone has met someone like Leon before.  Some of us have even been this guy.  He's one of those socially awkward, deeply insecure types who is constantly making excuses not to socialize.  His physical appearance and his background clearly have something to do with it, but the matter is never addressed directly.  The one thing Leon can do is write, which he uses as a justification to be arrogant and ungenerous, imagining himself as better than those around him.  He's so self-centered and thinks so much of himself that he inadvertently says hurtful things, gets jealous over anyone else getting attention, and fails to notice what's going on with the people closest to him.  All of the other characters around Leon are in the middle of stories we only get glimpses of, because our POV stays with Leon, and Leon isn't paying attention.  

However, that begins to change as Leon takes an interest in Nadja.  Self-reflection is not an easy process, and Leon flounders mightily before he starts to make an effort to recognize both what's wrong with his writing and what's wrong with his own way of seeing the world.  Nadja is perhaps kinder to him than she should be, but that's mirrored by the attitude of the whole film, which sees something in Leon worth reforming.  I greatly enjoyed Thomas Schubert's performance, which gives Leon a childishness and a sadness that keeps him sympathetic, even in his worst moments.  Paula Beer is lovely and enigmatic.  There's a fine balancing act going on between how Leon sees her, and the woman she actually is.  It's wonderful to gradually learn about her background and her situation - things that Leon is too dense to ask her about in a straightforward way.  

The film unfolds slowly, but deliberately, first acclimating us to this seaside community under the looming threat of disaster, then establishing all of the characters and their relationships, and then following Leon as he muddles through his attempts to connect with Nadja and work on his novel.  Petzold is always so adept at capturing these elliptical encounters, where things almost happen, or are about to happen.  The visuals are so evocative and their significance is so clear, even if the symbolism is murky.  The absence of someone has just as much impact as their actual presence.  The tone of "Afire" is more humorous and tragicomical than I was expecting, because Leon is such an exasperating mess of a person.  However, I don't think that Petzold is ever making fun of him for his pretentions, remaining remarkably empathetic to Leon throughout his bumpy journey to enlightenment.  

Finally, I want to take issue with some of the marketing I've seen for "Afire," which has erroneously described it as a gay romance or some kind of apocalyptic disaster story.  These elements are important parts of the film, but "Afire" is a thoughtful drama about a struggling writer, first and foremost, and the actual romantic relationships are largely happening in the background, along with the forest fires.  And this is a film that is so good at being what it is, I feel oddly defensive about it being mistaken for anything else.     

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My Top Ten Films of 1942

This is part of my continuing series looking back on films from the years before I began this blog. The ten films below are unranked and listed in no particular order. Enjoy.

My Favorite Blonde - Bob Hope's brand of zany slapstick comedy took me a little while to get into, but this team-up with Madeleine Carroll is irresistible.  The espionage hijinks, the staged fight scene, and the performing penguin are all highlights, but the rapport between Hope and Carroll is what really makes this screwball picture work.  Hope subsequently made two other "My Favorite" comedies, alas neither with Carroll.  

Yankee Doodle Dandy - James Cagney has a reputation as the ultimate screen tough guy, but my favorite of his roles is as songwriter and entertainer George M. Cohan.  Watch Cagney sing and dance and charm the pants off of everyone he meets in this patriotic biopic of the guy who wrote "You're a Grand Old Flag" and many other familiar tunes.  Watch Cagney act with unerring skill, tugging the heartstrings as deftly as he raises our spirits.  

Now, Voyager - One of the best Bette Davis films is a romance about a shy, unconfident woman who finally gets the opportunity to pursue life on her own terms.  Unfortunately, she falls in love with a man who isn't free to love her back.  It's a small scale, tender story about very adult characters and concerns, with a resolution that is beautifully bittersweet.  It also features one of the best final lines of dialogue to be found in any movie.

The Pied Piper - I adore Monty Woolley as an aging grump who doesn't like children, but somehow ends up shepherding a passel of small children through wartime Europe to safety in the UK.  Otto Preminger plays a Nazi officer who thinks our hero is a spy in disguise, but he isn't all that he appears to be.  Then Anne Baxter shows up in France to lend a hand.  All in all, this is one of the most unexpectedly charming war movies ever made.    

Casablanca - You must remember this.  Bogart and Bergman.  A murderer's row of great character actors in supporting roles, including Rains, Veidt, Hereid, Greenstreet, and even Lorre.  Some of the most quotable dialogue ever written.  The rousind Marseillaise sequence.  The oft parodied final farewell sequence on the runway.  Sam playing "As Time Goes By," which still serves as the Warner Bros. theme eighty years later.  Play it again, Sam.

Mrs. Miniver - One of the most effective WWII propaganda films ever made, making the conflict more personal as it depicts the effects of the war on British civilians.  Greer Garson plays the title character, the steadfast matriarch of a British family surviving the Blitz, serving as a stand-in for all victims of Nazi aggression.  The film was a smash hit and unapologetically used by the U.S. government to make their own case for entering the war.   

Bambi - The last of Disney's first wave of animated classics gives us the circle of life in a lovely paean to the natural world.  It's easy to forget that this is the film that both charmed audiences with the adorable baby animals, ice skating sequence, and April shower song, and then traumatized a generation of children with the death of Bambi's mother.  Actually, considering how well the film has held up, it's multiple generations of children now.

To Be or Not To Be - Everyone in WWII had to do their part, even a troupe of Polish theater actors who happen to include Jack Benny and Carole Lomabrd.  I keep forgetting that this is an Ernst Lubitsch film and not a Billy Wilder one, because this is about as satirical and political as Lubitch ever got.  However, the farce is excellent, the performances are a delight - especially Benny as the hammy leading man - and the Nazis got exactly what was coming to them.  

Went the Day Well? - More WWII propaganda - this time an extremely tense thriller that depicts a fictional infiltration of a British village by the Nazis.  The villagers are smart and resourceful, but so are the enemy, leading to multiple dashed plans to alert the authorities, slowly escalating hostilities, and eventually violent clashes.  The heroes are so ordinary, the losses hit very close to home, and the relative lack of melodrama makes it all the more sobering.

Random Harvest - However, I'm not one to turn down a good melodrama.  They really don't make enough of them these days.  Two of the brightest, and often forgotten stars of this era, Greer Garson and Ronald Colman, play a loving couple whose lives are upended due to amnesia - not once, but twice.  It's a ridiculous premise, but a sublime piece of cinema.  

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The 2024 Films I'm Anticipating the Least

I write this post every year to get some of the negativity out of my system about lousy current Hollywood moviemaking trends, and call out what I expect to be the worst examples in the coming movie year.  I want to tread very carefully this time out because the recent strikes have made a mess of the 2024 release calendar, things are still in flux, and we're lucky that some of these titles will be making it to theaters at all.  As always, please keep in mind that I hope that I am wrong about all the movies mentioned in this post, and that they turn out to be good cinema.  However, it is likely that this will be the last time you see discussion of any of these titles on this blog.  

Let's start with the superhero genre.  With the DCEU taking the year off, and Marvel looking at more delays, Columbia Pictures may end up dominating the year with three "Spider-man" adjacent films - "Kraven the Hunter" delayed from 2023, "Madame Web," and the third "Venom" movie.  "Kraven" made last year's list, so I won't repeat myself, but "Madame Web" has been saddled with the screenwriters from "Morbius," a first time feature director, and a February release date.  I like the stars, Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney, but the live action Sony Spider-man Universe films without Spider-man have all been pretty miserable to date.  The third "Venom" movie might end up delayed until next year because of production delays, and will be the directing debut of Kelly Marcel, who wrote on the first two "Venom" movies.  I didn't like either of them, and I have no reason to expect that the latest movie won't be more of the same.  

On to the children's films.  Some older franchises are coming back with some concerningly high numbered sequels.  In March, "Kung Fu Panda 4" is on the slate.  I loved the first "Kung Fu Panda," and thought the sequels were okay, but Dreamworks has been leaning on this franchise awfully hard.  There have already been three different spin-off series, two of them taking place in the gap between 2016's "Kung Fu Panda 3" and the newest movie.  Then there's "Despicable Me 4" which is actually the sixth film in the franchise counting the prequels.  I gave up on this series after "Minions" and have no interest in returning for more.  Finally, "Sonic the Hedgehog 3" is on the slate for a December release, but also ran into filming delays, so we're more likely to see it in 2025.  Jim Carrey is not expected to return, and Robotnik will be recast.   

Speaking of franchises, we're getting another "Godzilla x Kong" film from Adam Wingard in April, after the wildly unsatisfying "Godzilla x Kong" film from 2021.  Fede Alvarez is who ultimately got the job of making a new "Alien" film, and I am well past the point of caring about that universe.   I hold out some hope for the new "Garfield" reboot because they got Mark Dindal to direct it, and the new "Twisters" with Lee Isaac Chung.  I think it's also too soon to write off the new "Planet of the Apes" movie, which recruited  Wes Ball from the "Maze Runner" movies to direct.  At least that one still has the writers from the Matt Reeves films onboard. 

You may have noticed a lack of horror movies this year, because most of the big franchises are on hiatus, and the track record for original horror films has been very good lately.  The only one I'm preemptively ruling out is "Speak No Evil," an American remake of the Danish film from 2022, and that's because just hearing a synopsis of the original creeped me out so badly, I think I should keep my distance.  

 

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The Significance of "Scavengers Reign"

I love the recent run of adult-oriented animated shows we've had, and "Scavengers Reign" may be the most exciting title for a couple of reasons.  The biggest one is that where most adult-oriented shows have been taking their cues from American superhero media or Japanese manga and anime, "Scavengers Reign" is a hard science fiction series with roots in European bandes dessinées, and specifically the work of Jean "Moebius" Giraud and his fellow artists from the heyday of "Métal Hurlant." 

The plot of "Scavengers Reign" is simple.  The survivors of a crashed cargo spaceship, the Demeter, struggle to survive on the alien planet of Vesta Minor and find their way back to the ship.  We follow three groups of characters.  The gruff captain, Sam (Bob Stephenson), and a scientist, Ursula (Sunita Mani), form one duo.  A woman named Azi (Wunmi Mosaku) had the luck of escaping with some salvaged equipment, including a vehicle and a robot, Levi (Alia Shawkat), who is slowly evolving into something more sentient through its interactions with the planet.  Finally there's Kamen (Ted Travelstead), a haunted man who forms a mutually destructive symbiotic relationship with a strong, violent alien that uses telekinesis.  

"Scavengers Reign" immediately sets itself apart by plunging the audience into the world of Vesta with almost no explanation.  We don't learn the characters' names right away, or the particulars of what happened to the Demeter.  Instead, we just follow the characters as they navigate Vesta, a planet teeming with life, and all of it incredibly alien in a way that little science-fiction media bothers to be anymore.  It immediately reminded me of Rene Laloux's films, with their surreal, psychedelic imagery, and the unnerving level of impersonal violence and brutality.  The creatures of Vesta can be incredibly dangerous, with threats coming in the form of everything from the hulking beasts to completely innocent-looking pollen clumps floating on the breeze.  One minute, our protagonists can be completely fine, and the next minute they're fighting for their lives because a chance interaction with something seemingly benign has gone horribly wrong.  

However, there's also a sense of interconnectedness and harmony in the ecology of Vesta.  The show is full of these little vignettes of alien life cycles and demonstrations of how the various life forms are linked to one another.  Ursula views Vesta as a puzzle, where working out how everything fits together gives them a better chance at survival.  Azi is initially worried by the organic matter that invades Levi's systems, but eventually realizes that they're beneficial, allowing the robot to grow beyond its original limitations.  There are scenes of incredible beauty and strangeness, and I honestly would have been perfectly happy if "Scavengers Reign" never bothered to do any of the standard stuff of setting up a larger storyline or creating interpersonal conflicts among the survivors.  

Originally, "Scavengers Reign" was an eight-minute short film created by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettners for Adult Swim, which followed other visitors to Vesta interacting with the planet's life forms.  The short is totally dialogue free, and the early parts of "Scavengers Reign" are similarly light on conversation, heavy on visual storytelling.  Kamen's segments in particular are trippy and difficult to parse at first, because we don't know who we should be rooting for.  Fortunately, he's also the character who has the trippy flashbacks to a troubled relationship with his girlfriend Fiona (Shawkat), and hallucinatory visions that eventually reveal what happened to the Demeter and the rest of its crew.  

There are additional human characters introduced later in the season that push "Scavengers Reign" into a more recognizable action thriller mold.  This is done well, and I was perfectly happy to watch Sam, Ursula, Azi, and Kamen reach conclusions to their stories.  However, the more experimental, more existential early episodes are what the series is really worth watching for.  It's been such a long time since I've seen any animation that felt like it had the DNA of "Fantastic Planet," "Heavy Metal," "Aeon Flux" and the weirder Western animation of my youth.  The fact that "Scavengers Reign" seemed to come out of nowhere was such a wonderful surprise.  

And it makes me hopeful for more animation like it getting a chance to exist in the future.      

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My Most Anticipated Television and Web Series of 2024

Only three of the eight series I listed on my last anticipation post actually made it to air in the year I made the post for, but that doesn't bother me much.  The idea here was always to get myself to take a closer look at projects working their way through the production pipeline, and remind myself that there are titles I'm looking forward to.  Still, this time around I'm putting down fewer titles and being a little more careful about timing.

This year in particular is going to see even more scheduling chaos because of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.  The entries below are listed in no particular order, and I'm doing away with my prior rule to limit picks to only one title per streamer or network.  After all, I'm not subscribing to all of these services anymore for the foreseeable future.

True Detective: Night Country (HBO) - Jodie Foster will lead this latest installment of HBO's crime anthology series, centering around an investigation into why all the scientists at an Arctic outpost were found dead.  John Hawks, Christopher Eccleston, and Fiona Shaw are part of the ensemble.  I'm especially interested in the showrunner being Issa Lopez, who made the wonderful "Tigers are Not Afraid" a few years back.  Since this was delayed from 2023, the trailer has already been in circulation for a long while.  

Anansi Boys (Prime) - This one's been in post-production since 2022, so I'm hoping it pops up sometime this year.  Based on a Neil Gaiman novel, and technically part of the "American Gods" universe, this is a fantasy series about a man who discovers that he has a double, as well as family ties to some powerful, and incredibly aggravating magic users.  Malachi Kirby and Delroy Lindo will head an all-star cast.  I'm a Gaiman fan who liked reading "Anansi Boys" much better than "American Gods," and I'm hopeful that this comes off well.

Skeleton Crew (Disney+) - I skipped "Ahsoka" because I wasn't keen on navigating a "Star Wars" show that functioned as a sequel to all the animated series I hadn't watched.  "Skeleton Crew," however, is reportedly designed to be an entry point for younger viewers new to the "Star Wars" universe.  The guys behind "Spider-man: Homecoming" are creating a show about four lost kids just trying to get home, and Jude Law will be in the mix somewhere as a "Force user."  I have no idea who any of the characters are, and neither does anyone else.  Perfect.  

Zero Day (Netflix) - This one had its filming interrupted by the strikes, but is shaping up to be a pretty high profile prestige title.  Described as a limited-series conspiracy thriller about an unfolding world crisis, "Zero Day" follows characters played by Robert DeNiro, Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons, Joan Allen, and more as they try to untangle the truth about a situation spinning out of control.  The script is co-written by Eric Newman from "Narcos," and Lesli Linka Glatter, best known for her work on "Mad Men" and "Homeland," is directing.  

The New Look (Apple TV+) - Here's an interesting one.  I have no idea if Ben Mendehlsohn playing Christian Dior will work, but I certainly want to see him try.  Juliette Binoche and John Malkovitch appearing in supporting roles as Coco Chanel and Lucien DeLong doesn't hurt either.  The series will focus on efforts to revive the French fashion industry post-WWII.  A first season has completed filming, and a second was planned before the SAG-AFTRA strike delayed it.   

Shogun (FX/Hulu) - James Clavell's popular Japanese historical fiction novel is one of the few properties out there that can actually be accurately described as being like "Game of Thrones," and it sure looks like FX has committed the resources to adapt it properly.  Hiroyuki Sanada is in the role of Toranga, originally played by Toshiro Mifune in the 1980s miniseries.  Justin Marks, formerly of the gone-too-soon "Counterpart," and Rachel Kondo will be showrunning.

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