Industry, Crave
Myha'la in Industry.Crave
This London-set financial-sector thriller – a transatlantic co-production between HBO and BBC – finally started pulling in serious audience numbers in its third season before blowing up its initial premise in the finale. A fourth season begins on Sunday almost as a reboot – a perfect opportunity to jump on the bandwagon. Harper Stern (Myha’la) is now managing a Short Opportunities Fund – and senses opportunity in shorting porn when the British government introduces its Online Safety Act. That same legislation inspires Whitney Halberstram (newcomer Max Minghella), CFO of a payment processor called Tender, to move his company away from its sordid reputation, as one character puts it, as “the PayPal of bukake.”
Another new cast member is Kiernan Shipka – Mad Men’s Sally Draper, all grown up – who plays Whit’s assistant and makes her first impression in a gripping opening scene that sums up the show’s intoxicating mix of sex, drugs and techno remixes.
The Pitt, Crave
Noah Wyle in The Pitt.Warrick Page/Crave
While I feared that The Pitt’s real-time concept would seem contrived in a second season, I quickly became reobsessed with the Pittsburgh-set medical drama upon receiving a half-dozen episodes for review and binging them at once.
In the first, now available on Crave, my concern for Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) and his mental state began with the initial images – which see the traumatized attending physician riding his motorcycle without a helmet to his last shift in the ER before going on sabbatical. My anxiety only mounted when he told his medical colleagues that his plan was to ride to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta. I really hope we’re not going to lose him or any of the other complexly written doctors and nurses to tragedy in this compulsive, humane series created by Ontario’s R. Scott Gemmill.
Saint-Pierre, CBC Gem
Allan Hawco and Joséphine Jobert in Saint-Pierre.DERMOT CARBERRY/CBC GEM
The national public broadcaster’s full slate of Canadian cop shows – it currently offers no other form of drama – returned this week with new episodes of Murdoch Mysteries, Wild Cards, Allegiance and Saint-Pierre, now all available to stream on Gem.
I gave Saint-Pierre, Allan Hawco and Robina Lord-Stafford’s show set on the odd little French islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland, another chance and found it improved. It’s settled in style even if it remains a paint-by-numbers procedural.
The first episode of the new season sees Newfoundland cop Fitz (Hawco) and his French partner Arch (Joséphine Jobert) investigating the return of a paint-dripping serial killer – a Riopelle rip-off ripper – to the overseas collectivity with a population of just under 6,000. “It’s so weird that we even had a serial killer in Saint-Pierre,” says Arch – at least acknowledging the absurdity of its murder rate.
The linguistic ludicrousness remains – with everyone speaking in English (cliché) almost all the time. In the second episode (Monday), Fitz’s inability to speak French becomes even more comical when we learn that he once worked undercover in a Montreal biker gang. At least Kathleen Munroe of Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent shows up in that one to provide a bit of chemistry that’s lacking between the two leads. Recommended for the scenery, Death in Paradise alum Jobert’s fun central performance and laundry folding.
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, Prime Video
Laura Carmichael and Michelle Dockery in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale.Rory Mulvey/Focus Features
Successful franchises never die; they are revived and rebooted and revived until the last dollar. But, for the time being, let’s take the title of this third movie spin-off of Julian Fellowes’s period soap at face value and assume it marks the end of his upstairs/downstairs story.
Set in 1930, The Grand Finale sees Lord and Lady Grantham (Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern) cross paths with playwright Noël Coward (Arty Froushan) as they deal with downsizing their London residence and a divorce in the family. “The stakes are manageable (even, frankly, low),” Nathalie Atkinson wrote in her critic’s pick review for The Globe and Mail. “Downton Abbey’s class-based period drama was always more popular than critically celebrated, and this third and final act feels like an epilogue.” On Prime Jan. 10.
Blue Velvet, Pluto
American actor Dennis Hopper and Italian actress Isabellla Rossellini on the set of Blue Velvet, written and directed by David Lynch.Sunset Boulevard/Getty Images
The American filmmaker David Lynch, who died one year ago this month, released his magnum opus metaphysical mystery 40 years ago. Blue Velvet, which premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival in 1986, follows college student Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) from his discovery of a severed ear in a field in the small town where he grew up into a seedy, surreal underworld.
The film divided critics at the time but The Globe and Mail’s Jay Scott immediately recognized its greatness – writing that it outdid Alfred Hitchcock. “Hitchcock never asked his fans to think about the reason they wanted to witness the horror of other human beings. In Blue Velvet, which owes an incalculable debt to Hitchcock but intellectually transcends him, David Lynch does. The ‘mystery’ is never solved on any real level: the entire film exists in fantasy, in a place Lynch would no doubt argue is the most real level of all, the interior of the human mind.” It’s just been added to the free streamer Pluto.