"The Apprentice" and "A Different Man"

Let's talk about  the Sebastian Stan double feature today.

"The Apprentice" is a villain origin story for Donald Trump, taking place in the '70s and '80s, mostly in New York City.  It's largely unflattering toward Trump, but often more sympathetic than I was expecting.  The ambitious younger Trump at the beginning of the movie is shady but tempered by recent failures and the influence of his father Fred Trump Sr. (Martin Donovan).  It's when Donald Trump hires the notorious Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) to represent him in a discrimination suit, and comes into his circle of influence that he learns to really play dirty in his business dealings - blackmailing, bribing, and cheating his way to the top.  

Sebastian Stan is excellent in the movie, gradually transforming Trump from golden boy to unrepentant monster, adding his familiar physical and vocal  tics one by one.  He's charming in his scenes romancing a young Ivana (Maria Bakalova), and terrifying when the relationship turns sour.  Power and success corrupt him utterly, and it's to Stan's credit that this process is made to feel so tragic and feel like such a loss.  I don't think I've ever seen a more humanizing portrayal of Roy Cohn (with all my love to Al Pacino), whose later years are shown in counterpoint to Trump's rise.  He's introduced as this remorseless, venal, seemingly untouchable devil figure, and his downfall is well deserved.  However, it's also hard not to feel sorry for Cohn at the end of the film, who has to face the vile version of Trump that he helped to create.

For those of us who remember the era, "The Apprentice" also does an excellent job of capturing the feel of New York in the '70s and '80s, and reminding us of how Donald and Ivana Trump were viewed as aspirational figures and celebrities at the time.  Abbas resurrects and recreates a lot of '80s media, so we can compare the glossy coverage with the ugliness of the reality underneath.  For those viewers who are not familiar with the relevant events, please be warned that there is sexual violence in the film along with a lot of slurs being thrown around.  "The Apprentice" often feels like a crime or gangster picture, but with the crimes taking place on a scale that your traditional organized criminals couldn't imagine.  I was initially very reluctant about watching the film, but I'm glad that I did.  I can't say that I was very entertained, but I came away feeling much better informed, and appreciative of all the work that went into painting this disturbing portrait of Donald Trump.  

Now on to "A Different Man," a very personal, surreal black comedy about Edward Lemuel (Sebastian Stan), an actor who has extreme facial disfigurement due to suffering from neurofibromatosis.  Edward initially leads a very quiet, lonely life until a playwright named Ingrid (Renate Reinsve) becomes his neighbor.  When a new drug cures Edward and removes his deformities, he decides to become an entirely different person, Guy Moratz, and tells everyone that Edward died.  However, he can't forget about Ingrid.  She's created a new play, "Edward," about her brief relationship with his former self.  Guy tries to connect with her by winning the lead role and performing in a mask.  Ingrid, however, is dissatisfied.  And then another man with neurofibromatosis named Oswald (Adam Pearson) shows up in their lives, quickly becoming Guy's rival.                

Written and directed by Aaron Schimberg, "A Different Man" presents an insightful fable about identity and self-image, making great use of the talents of Adam Pearson, an actor it's impossible to take your eyes off of.  It's not often that you see a film so centered on a differently abled character that isn't the usual uplifting, feel-good film about them overcoming their disability.  "A Different Man" argues that Edward/Guy's deformity isn't what's holding him back in life, but rather his attitude.  And as the film goes on, it's his self-hatred and his unwillingness to share the truth with Ingrid that become his undoing.  Sebastian Stan is having a lot of fun playing a complicated character with all of these different layers and facets, whose deformity turns out to be as much internal as it is external.  And I love the decision to have the actor with the real deformity playing the happy, self-confident version of the main character.   

I admire the writing here more than the performances or the direction.  I like how acerbic the humor is, and the way that the relationships develop.  Edward's disfigurement is treated with minimal sentiment or schmaltz, and most of the people he interacts with either treat him normally or ignore him.  "A Different Man" is careful to portray Edward sensitively, and never makes light of his deformity, but at the same time it doesn't treat him with kid gloves either.  This makes him a far more compelling character than I was expecting at the outset.  The film won't be for everyone, existing in a very specific, very artsy New York milieu, but I was thoroughly impressed with what it accomplished.    

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My Favorite Steven Soderbergh Film

I put off writing an entry about Steven Soderbergh for years because for the longest time I wasn't convinced that he was a great director.  I understood that he was an important, influential, innovative and unusually prolific director, but there was no single film of his that I could point to as a great film.  I watched an awful lot of his eclectic output over the years, but most of the individual films didn't stick in my memory.  I regularly forgot that he directed certain titles, because he worked in a similar style to Richard Linklater and Quentin Tarantino during the '90s indie boom. 

However, after rewatching some of his early work, I found the movie I knew I had to write about for Steven Soderbergh.  Based on an Elmore Leonard novel, it's a stylish ensemble crime comedy about a serial bank robber and a federal marshall who fall in love despite their conflicting goals.  There are some parts of "Out of Sight" I don't enjoy - certain characters, certain scenes, and certain choices do not work for me at all.  However, when the movie hits its stride, it's undeniable how cool and how sexy and how much fun it is to watch.  When I think of George Clooney as a movie star, it's George Clooney as he appears in Steven Soderbergh movies like "Out of Sight" and the "Ocean's Eleven" movies - this wry, charming, rough-edged trickster who will have you hanging on every word coming out of his mouth.  I love Jennifer Lopez just as much here - capable, persistent, and almost always perfectly placid in the face of constant disrespect.   

Amidst all the crime capering and cat-and-mouse games, "Out of Sight" is a movie about relationships, where the best set pieces involve conversations - some tense, some funny, and some very, very sexy.  The key scene is where Clooney's Jack Foster and Lopez's Karen Sisco are stuck in the trunk of a car together during a getaway, and get to know each other through lighthearted banter during what should be an unpleasant situation.  And when I think about the characters in this film, it's always in relation to other characters.  Steve Zahn's hapless Glenn works best in conjunction with Jack or Snoopy or Karen.  Dennis Farina, playing Cisco's father, has a small part but gets that one great conversation where he spars with Michael Keaton.  Many Soderbergh films have these big, sprawling casts with indelible actors who might only be there for a scene or two.  I couldn't believe who showed up here - Samuel L Jackson, Octavia Spencer, Albert Brooks, Luis Guzman, Catherine Keener, and even Nancy Allen in the third act.

I appreciate the lengths that Soderbergh went to in order to capture a particular mood and tone for the film.  He shot on location in multiple states - Louisiana, Florida, and Michigan most prominently.  The score is a seductive mix of Motown, soul, old Rat Pack standbys, and Latin music, with the romantic scenes wonderfully supported by slow, patient piano and bass compositions.  This unusual degree of authenticity and attention to detail is what really helps to set "Out of Sight" apart from the other stylish crime films of the era.  It's bombastic when it needs to be, and uses violence well, but we're meant to leave with the scintillating romance on our minds, and this is accomplished beautifully.       

Looking back through all of Steven Soderbergh's considerable filmography, I marvel at how many different kinds of movies he's made over the years, from slick studio fare to oddball experiments in form.  He tends to work with smaller budgets, character-driven stories, and interesting combinations of old and new talent.  "Out of Sight" had one of the first soundtracks by Irish composer David Holmes, and nabbed legendary editor Anne V. Coates her final Academy Awards nomination.  What I keep coming back to, however, is how well his films serve its actors - showcasing full-fledged, interesting performances in a way that is increasingly rare.  

In "Out of Sight," Soderbergh doesn't just let George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez make their case for being A-listers, but makes room for Farina and Cheadle and Zahn and Brooks to show their stuff.  And Michael Keaton as Ray Nicolette, popping in from Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown."  I have more to say about Ray Nicolette if Tarantino ever makes his tenth movie and I get to write up "Jackie Brown" for this series.  Fingers crossed.          

 

What I've Seen - Steven Soderbergh

Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989)

Kafka (1991)

Schizopolis (1996)

Gray's Anatomy (1996)

Out of Sight (1998)

Erin Brockovich (2000)

Traffic (2000)

Ocean's Eleven (2001)

Solaris (2002)

Ocean's Twelve (2004)

The Good German (2006)

Ocean's Thirteen (2007)

Che (2008)

The Informant! (2009)

And Everything Is Going Fine (2010)

Contagion (2011)

Haywire (2011)

Magic Mike (2012)

Side Effects (2013)

Behind the Candelabra (2013)

Logan Lucky (2017)

Unsane (2018)

High Flying Bird (2019)

The Laundromat (2019)

Let Them All Talk (2020)

No Sudden Move (2021)

Kimi (2022)

Magic Mike's Last Dance (2023)

Presence (2025)

Black Bag (2025)

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"The Devil's Hour" Year Two and "Only Murders in the Building" Year Four

I have quick reviews of the newest seasons of two very different series from two different streaming services today.  I'm trying to clear out my backlog of shows that I've been waffling over whether to write reviews for, so these are both a little late and not nearly as in-depth as the previous reviews of their earlier seasons.  Oh well.

Let's start with "The Devil's Hour," which released a five-episode second season on Amazon Prime in October, with a third on the way.  It's been a while since the first season, so my memory of it was pretty fuzzy.  Fortunately, it only took me about an episode to get myself properly reoriented, even though "The Devil's Hour" is one of those twisty genre stories where people are keeping track of multiple realities and chronologies.  The second season, fortunately, has drastically simplified its narrative so there's one big goal that everything is driving towards: identifying a mysterious psychopath who Lucy and Gideon know will plant a bomb in a toy store.  The opener does happen out of sequence, but it's also aiming at filling in a lot of the story gaps left over from the first season.  

We get a lot more Peter Capaldi this year, which is great, because Gideon is a really effective agent of chaos, and Capaldi's performance is highly entertaining.  There's really only one major addition to the cast, Saffron Hocking as Sam Boyd, who works with Ravi in law enforcement and becomes a major obstacle.  Other characters are much improved as they become more important to the story.  Isaac is slowly turning into a real boy and revealing strong attachments, even if true emotions aren't quite there yet.  His arc also benefits significantly from Lucy's mother Sylvia forming a connection with Isaac, and helping to voice some of the things that he isn't able to express.  Lucy remains a good lead character, and I appreciate that she has to deal with a steep learning curve and is clearly not good at being a badass.  She screws up several parts of the investigation and is woefully outmatched in almost every confrontation.

All in all "The Devil's Hour" is moving toward a more straightforward crime procedural model, and loses a lot of the atmospheric creepiness and existential dread that the first season had.  I don't think this is a bad thing, but horror fans might be disappointed if they came into "The Devil's Hour" for a certain kind of story, and ended up getting something different.  There is still a good deal of uncomfortable serial killer material in the story and the supernatural elements are retained, but I found "The Devil's Hour" altogether more watchable this year, even if the payoff wasn't as great.  I look forward to the third season wrapping up this story.       

On to our friends at the Arconia, who have come across their latest case just as Hollywood has come calling.  Charles' stunt double and dear friend Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch) goes missing, likely the victim of foul play.  At the same time, "Only Murders in the Building" is going to be turned into a movie, produced by executive Bev Melon (Molly Shannon) and written by Marshall P. Pope (Jin Ha).  Charles, Oliver, and Mabel are going to be played by Eugene Levy, Zach Galifinakis, and Eva Longoria (all gamely playing themselves).  There are a lot more guest stars in the mix this year, including suspects played by Richard Kind, Daphne Rubin-Vega, and Kumail Nanjiani, Melissa McCarthy as Charles' sister, and Ron Howard as himself.  Meryl Streep is back as Loretta, to continue the romance with Oliver, and so is Paul Rudd, despite being killed two seasons ago, via a new character I will not spoil.  

It's a great season of "Only Murders in the Building," this time aiming its satirical barbs at the movie industry.  There are some diverting form-breaking episodes, including one that uses found footage and mockumentary techniques.  All the guest stars are great, though I'm sad that Melissa McCarthy only made it into one episode.  Her brawl with Meryl is one of the high points of the season.  In addition, each of the three leads gets their own subplot that mostly works this time around.  Charles is out to avenge Sazz, Oliver is struggling in this long distance relationship with Loretta, and Mabel is a little depressed and considering her future.  I don't think the season as a whole is quite as good as season three, because there isn't anything to match the joyous insanity of "Death Rattle Dazzle," but the pacing never dragged and I was more than satisfied with how everything played out.

Four seasons into any show, things tend to slow down, but "Only Murders" is still very much at the top of its game.  I love the humor this year, especially the movie production providing a chance for the writers to get introspective and acknowledge their own plot holes.  I love that there's a whole western section of the Arconia that nobody really interacts with, and a completely plausible explanation for why that is.  I love that the stunt community is portrayed as a bunch of deeply committed wackos living in a perpetual barfight.  Bring on season five!

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The News is Bad

So, two years ago I wrote briefly about the regime change over at Warners, which also coincided with the rightward shift of CNN, and an exodus of their talent.  Then came the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post failing to make endorsements in the 2024 presidential election, directly due to the interference from their billionaire owners, which made headlines.  However, perhaps no single individual had as much impact as Elon Musk, who still owns Twitter, and decided to throw all his support and $277 million behind Donald Trump.

I'm not surprised that the major media platforms are shifting rightward, but I am surprised at how fast it's happening.  Part of this is probably due to the understandable jitters about the incoming Trump administration.  Trump is spiteful, bad at impulse control, and has a habit of lashing out at his perceived enemies.  I don't blame any of the presenters on MSNBC trying to play nice all of a sudden, or the New York Times resorting to headlines full of weasel words, to avoid being in his crosshairs.  However, more often than not the editorial changes are the result of more and more media companies losing their independence.  Most of the smaller regional papers across the country have either folded or been snapped up by media conglomerates.  As cable news viewers get older and more Conservative, the tone of the coverage has followed suit to pander to them.  All of what we used to consider the "mainstream media" - really whatever isn't social media these days - has become consolidated and corporatized to the point where it's really becoming difficult to distinguish the few remaining sources that place much importance on journalistic integrity.   

What's scariest to me is that these older media platforms are generally viewed as loss leaders.  Nobody is getting in the newspaper or cable news business in 2024 to make money.  They're getting in to control the discourse to benefit their other corporate interests.  While there are only a few outlets I'd point to as outright fear-mongering propaganda, I'm deeply unsettled by the degree to which most of the media will avoid some of the elephants in the room, and I don't just mean the Republicans.  A really stark example happened in December with the killing of UnitedHealth Group CEO Brian Thompson.  Nearly all the major news sources were very surprised and perturbed by the popular sentiment that the killing was justified.  Many column inches and hours of screen time were taken up by analysts with dubious credentials arguing why Thompson's death was a tragedy.  You could feel the increasing desperation as public opinion refused to be swayed against the shooter, and rumblings about potential copycat crimes spread.

Simultaneously, the news started running a few stories about how terrible American healthcare insurance was, a topic they had studiously ignored for years, as prices ballooned and coverage denial rates soared.  Suddenly, it was a topic worth covering because somebody had killed a CEO over UnitedHealth Group's notoriously inhumane treatment of its subscribers.  Whatever your thoughts o  the killer's actions, he'd finally gotten the media to acknowledge a horrific social wrong that was brushed aside for years because people with finance degrees had figured out how to legally capitalize on it.  And the lesson here is that nothing short of a high-profile killing would have gotten the wider American public to notice or the media to care.

I watched more cable news during the election - not much, but enough to keep myself informed of what the FOX News and CNN headlines were on most days.  I quickly learned that they were pretty bad at giving me any actual useful information, but pretty good at keeping me updated on what their owners wanted me to think about any particular piece of news.  I want to be clear that I don't think that things would be necessarily any better if we saw a leftward shift in any of the major media coverage, because that still doesn't solve the accountability issue, and everything is still owned by out-of-touch billionaires.  However, it does not bode well that the 1%'s control over our news has gotten this obvious, when Americans' access to trustworthy information is more important than ever.

  

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Meet "The Serpent Queen"

I was not planning to write anything about "The Serpent Queen" for this blog.  I only started watching the STARZ historical drama when the first season showed up on Prime, and dropped it after a few episodes.  However, learning that it had been canceled after two seasons, I went ahead and finished it, and found myself disappointed that we weren't getting more.  The second season doesn't end on a cliffhanger, but there is definitely room for  continuation if you know your European history.  "The Serpent Queen" of the title is Catherine De' Medici (Liv Hill as a teenager, Samantha Morton as an adult), wife of King Henry II (Lee Ingleby), and eventual mother of three other French kings.  She was one of the most powerful women of her era, and thoroughly embroiled in plots and machinations both in and out of France.

"The Serpent Queen" has a lot in common with "The Great," another series about a famous Catherine, which made a point of straying wildly from actual history.  "The Serpent Queen" sticks closer to the facts, but uses many of the same storytelling devices - modern profanity, color-blind casting, and plenty of invented characters.  Catherine's maid and confidante Rahima (Sennia Nanua in season one, Emma McDonald in season two) gives us an outsider's POV.  When tackling the wars of the religion between the Protestants and Catholics, an ambitious religious leader named Edith (Jesper Jones) is created as a figurehead for the Protestant Huguenots to give Catherine a more prominent adversary.  Also, where "The Great" is a comedy, "The Serpent Queen" is a fairly straight historical drama with the occasional vein of black humor.  The first season is about the older Catherine dealing with a succession crisis while telling Rahima about how she first came to France as a teenager, and had to fight for her place at court.  The second covers Catherine's relationships with her adult children and the progress of the religious wars, leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in the finale.    

The first and second seasons often feel like different shows.  Because of the time gap, hardly any of the cast carries over between seasons, and several prominent roles are recast in the latter half.  The flashbacks and parallel stories are only a device in the first season.  However, both sets of episodes are well-written and well-executed, and I enjoyed both seasons equally.  It's a little disappointing that Catherine and Rahima have smaller roles in the second season, in order to make room for characters like King Charles IX (Bill Milner), the Duke of Anjou (Stanley Morgan), and the members of the eternally scheming Guise and Bourbon families.  The series boasts a great supporting cast, with Ludivine Sagnier as a particular highlight playing Catherine's chief rival, Diane de Poitiers.  Guest stars include Charles Dance, Rupert Everett, and Minnie Driver as Queen Elizabeth I.  

 However, Samantha Morton's performance as Catherine is the primary reason to watch the show.  Catherine is everything we want a secret mastermind to be - seemingly cold and uncaring, but deeply invested in the lives of her loved ones, and brilliantly capable of pulling off some really dramatic, entertaining manipulations and stratagems.  In this universe, she's a subtle character surrounded by very emotional ones, and she's always the least showy and most controlled.  It's fun to watch the younger version work her way up from underdog to power player, and poignant to see the older version struggle with the personal cost.  We don't see enough of Morton onscreen these days, and she was a big reason why I was interested in this series in the first place.

I don't know enough about the time period to say much about the accuracy of "The Serpent Queen," but there have clearly been a lot of artistic liberties taken.  There are no obvious anachronisms, but the production design and costumes look far too pristine for any of this to remotely pass muster with the history buffs.  However, I think it's to the show's credit that I completely bought into all of it.  The larger than life approach fits a modern retelling of history that gives Catherine her due - as the ugly duckling who doesn't grow up to be a swan, but the most powerful woman on all the land.  

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The Winning "Wild Robot"

I should not have let myself be overhyped for "The Wild Robot," the new Dreamworks animated film directed by Chris Sanders, based on a book by Peter Brown.  My expectations were entirely too big going into a small, charming film about a lost helper robot.  Being a fan of other animated robots like the heroes of "The Iron Giant" and "Astro Boy," I was expecting something big and bombastic with weighty existential themes.  Instead, I got a much sweeter, smaller scale story about parenthood and community-building, with a heroine like no other.  

The robot, eventually named Roz (Lupita Nyong'o), finds herself on a remote island populated by wild animals.  The animals initially want nothing to do with this "monster," but Roz learns to communicate with them, and finds a creature in need of her help - a tiny gosling named Brightbill (Kit Connor).  Even though Roz has all kinds of special skills and gadgetry, she is not a good surrogate mother at first, and needs lots of advice from characters like the opossum mom Pinktail (Catherine O'Hara), surly beaver Paddle (Matt Berry), and even the local troublemaking fox, Fink (Pedro Pascal).    

Written and directed by Chris Sanders, whose previous credits include "Lilo and Stitch" and "How to Train Your Dragon," "The Wild Robot" is once again about cross-species found family relationships.  However, the focus here is on Roz experiencing all the joys and tumult of motherhood.  We also get plenty of Brightbill's POV as he gets older and prepares for his first migration, but watching Roz tackle parenting challenge after parenting challenge had me mentally drawing connections to "Bluey" rather than other cinematic portrayals of robots learning to be human, like "A.I." or "Bicentennial Man."  Roz has her foundational programming giving her traits like protectiveness and curiosity, but she has to learn a lot on the job.  And when she starts developing things like emotional connections and rebelliousness, they feel earned.  Even her gender expression feels like an outgrowth of her chosen caregiver role rather than the other way around.  

I like that "The Wild Robot" is kept small in scope, telling a story about one little community of animals in terms that even very young children can understand.  There are hints of larger worldbuilding, but the lives of the barely-glimpsed humans who built Roz are kept offscreen.  Instead, we spend our time in nature, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, watching gorgeously animated flocks of geese, river otters at play, and the seasons changing in unusually painterly CGI.  The animals are initially a contentious lot, not inclined to be friendly, and a bit more cynical than the usual storybook critters.  Pinktail's brood of children are the source of some especially morbid humor (though still kid-appropriate).  Death is a fact of life in the wild, and treated matter-of-factly.  

The movie has all the earmarks of an enduring classic.  It's heartwarming, accessible, beautifully made, and feels like someone's passion project.  However, I want to caution that it is still very much a film following the template of a mainstream animated entertainment for children.  There's a much better, hour-long version of "The Wild Robot" somewhere in here that doesn't feel the need to orchestrate a big action sequence in the third act and spell out its messages quite so pointedly.  I tried to ignore it when somebody is maneuvered into the exact wrong place at the wrong time thinking the wrong thing, so we can have a frantic chase scene.  There's also a totally unnecessary villain and a few characters who are probably only there because they were in the book.

And that's all perfectly forgivable, but I've been watching animated films for long enough that I know this sort of desperate effort to keep the audience's attention isn't necessary.  "The Wild Robot" gets the important things right - its relationships, its depth of feeling, and its commitment to its themes - and it's the best movie I've seen out of Dreamworks Animation in over a decade.  However, deep down I know it could be better.  It's in the same category as a movie like PIXAR's "Up," which has a few absolutely magical scenes, but is mostly just a pleasant adventure movie.  "The Wild Robot," similarly, has its moments of transcendence, and is already attracting adoring fans, but I can't quite put it up there with the animation greats.

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A Fantasy of "My Lady Jane"

Spoilers for the first episode ahead.

I'm generally less interested in costume drama romances like "Bridgerton," and more interested in historical dramas, especially if they're funny ones like "The Great" or "The Serpent Queen."  "My Lady Jane," an irreverent reimagining of the brief reign of Jane Grey in Tudor era England, is trying to be both.  Lady Jane Grey (Emily Bader), cousin to the sickly King Edward VI (Jordan Peters), wants to be independent and pursue her knowledge of horticulture and medicine.  Unfortunately her scheming mother, Lady Frances (Anna Chancellor), insists on marrying her off to the dissolute Guildford Dudley (Edward Bluemel), son of the wealthy Lord Dudley (Rob Brydon).  

The narrator (Oliver Chris), who is simultaneously sassy and snooty, informs us from the outset that we're deviating from history.  The show has color-blind casting and modern vulgarities being thrown around left and right, which is pretty common these days.  More significantly, "My Lady Jane" has also decided to dump the Protestant/Catholic divide, and introduce Ethians as a persecuted minority instead - Ethians being people who can magically turn into animals at will.  Jane's bestie Susannah (Máiréad Tyers) is revealed to be one.  Several other major characters turn out to be Ethians over the course of the season as well, but I'll leave you to figure out which ones.  Jane, of course, is on the side of the Ethians, and when she becomes embroiled in the battle for the crown, this pits her against Ethian-hating Princess Mary (Kate O'Flynn) and her devious lover Lord Seymour (Dominic Cooper), the chief villains.

Created by Gemma Burgess, "My Lady Jane" is juggling a lot.  Simplifying real history to the bones, some of the material can come across as very watered down and pandering.  "My Lady Jane" is a lot lighter on the satire than something like "The Great," and content to stick to pretty pedestrian girl-power themes and feel-good fantasy scenarios where love conquers all.  However, the writing takes pains to avoid getting too cute.  The narrator cattily mocks everyone, including Jane, for their bad decisions, and drops regular self-aware, metatextual quips - maybe too many depending on your taste.  The show is also not scared of being a romance.  I like that there's a lot of sex and relationship drama going on.  Jane and Guildford take the slow burn approach, with a lot of the usual longing looks and steamy close-ups.  It's the most trite part of the show, but it works because the lead actors have plenty of chemistry.  Meanwhile Guildford's idiot brother Stan (Henry Ashton) is smitten with Jane's mother, and Jane's sister Katherine (Isabella Brownson) and King Edward get their own romantic subplots.  Because of the Ethian business, we also get some "Ladyhawke" scenarios, which I find irresistible.    

Best of all, the show is consistently funny.  Many of the performances are positively cartoonish, with the scenery frequently getting chewed.  I particularly enjoyed Jane's youngest sister Margaret (Robyn Betteridge), a little girl who is developing worrying psychopathic tendencies.  Rob Brydon, Kate O'Flynn, Dominic Cooper, and Jim Broadbent as the nasty Duke of Leicester skillfully shoulder a lot of the farce.  Then there's Anna Chancellor as Jane's mother, who is probably my favorite of the cast, for embodying a very shrewd, very unsentimental power player who tends to show her love by repeatedly ruining her daughters lives.  

The production values are good - not great, but good enough.  The fight scenes and the special effects are pretty limited but strategically handled, and the best thing I can say about the Tudor-era setting is that it's obviously exaggerated, but much less distracting than what we usually see in these kinds of comedic alt-historical shows.  One creative choice that I do take issue with is the use of a lot of classic rock covers on the soundtrack, because it's been done far too often and frequently better.     

"My Lady Jane" was  canceled after its first season, but it wraps up nicely and works fine as a miniseries.  Frankly, I don't think a continuation is needed at all.  It's definitely worth a watch if you like this kind of lighter, fluffier genre show.  History buffs, however, are warned to approach with caution.  

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