A most blessed Monday to you all!

It is the final week of July, which means it’s time to begin thinking about retrieving your cardigans and poodle skirts and saddle shoes from their boxes in the attic, as another school year swiftly approaches. Soon the streets will no longer be filled with the sound of children’s laughter, replaced by the dull shuffle of their feet as they trudge to and fro this nation’s decaying indoctrination centers. The air will take on a sudden crispness, metallic with the smell of encroaching high-season hurricanes. Honestly, I’m kind of excited. 

This summer has grown a bit dreary. This week, all that’s really coming out in theaters is the 307th Spider-Man film, the fourth in the series starring Tom Holland, the non-alcoholic beer baron who took a bride from Arrakis in a secret ceremony. I’m not very excited about that one, and if my internal metrics about the Supergirl letter I wrote are any indication, neither are you. Whoo boy did that one bomb. So maybe superhero stuff is not to your liking, which is just fine. It’s really not to mine anymore, either. So there will be no coverage of Spider-Man: At Long Last I Die in these pages, unless the movie really tanks and then we can talk about that next week. 

This week will be a bit of a grab bag. There’s the new Liz Meriwether/Emmy Rossum show Furious, which I’ll write about on Wednesday. Three episodes drop today (Monday), so give it a watch if you’re curious and meet me back here. Or, y’know, wait until I tell you if it’s worth watching. I hear good things! Other than that, I want to try to recommend some older titles that are floating around on streaming. Any particular kind of genre or format or platform you’d be interested in? Let me know: [email protected]. 

Okay, here are some items. 

The other day online, I saw someone commenting that an MGM+ series called From (that’s what it’s called: From) had been renewed for a fifth and final season, which was surprising to this person because they’d never even heard of the show. Reader, neither had I, and it is sort of my job to know about TV shows. 

From is a horror sci-fi about people stuck in a cursed village that’s been airing since 2022, created by a guy named John Griffin, produced by the Russo Brothers and, perhaps most tellingly, Jack Bender. The latter fellow was an instrumental part of the series Lost, with which From shares a lot of DNA. It’s a mystery box series that involves characters with murky backstories trying to navigate a strange new place while sinister entities lurk in the forests that surround them. 

Rather than feeling derivative, though, From is instead a cozy (albeit occasionally frightening) throwback to a past era of television. I decided to check the show out for myself over the weekend, and before I knew it I’d watched six episodes in one sitting. The writing can be clunky and over-ambitious in its wrestling with heavy themes—there are metaphor-laden monologues that badly bring to mind the more pretentious soliloquies of Mike Flanagan’s vampire series Midnight Mass—and not all the performances are Emmy worthy.

Though, they could be Gemini Award-worthy, given how Canadian almost everyone is. (And yes, I know the Gemini Awards don’t exist anymore.) The main non-Canadian is the great Harold Perrineau as the town’s weary sheriff, played with a disarming calm and resignation. It’s also nice to see Maria Full of Grace breakout Catalina Sandino Moreno steadily employed, even if she is, in one episode, forced to say the phrase “hobo eggs.” The Canadian melange is mostly solid enough, minus a few flat performances, and their relative anonymity does, in a fashion, evoke the great discoveries of the Lost ensemble. (Of which Perrineau was a part, though we already knew him well by the time the show premiered.)

But one can mostly look past the show’s shagginess because the mystery—about monsters, memory, time, and space—is compelling, and the world-building is pleasingly thorough. Well, okay, I do wish they’d address how this community of people trapped forever in a small town feed themselves, but maybe they will eventually. I’ve got seasons more to watch, which means the show could grow ever more pleasingly dense, or it could devolve into illegible nonsense much the way that Lost did in its final seasons. (From what I can tell, though, affection for From has only grown as the seasons have progressed, so that’s a good sign.) For now, I’m more than a little hooked. It’s kind of the perfect program to watch during this barren television season, engaging and available in ample supply. Caveat: you will have to subscribe to MGM+ (née Epix) to watch it. 

I really do wish they’d rethought that title back in 2022, though. “From” is, I think, an attempt at ominous vagueness, but instead feels like someone lopped off half the title. Does SEO mean anything anymore? Is there some sort of modern-day Ethan Fromme thing happening that I’m missing? It’s a bafflingly bad title for what is, it turns out, perfectly serviceable TV. Other than Lost, From most closely reminds me of the French series Les Revenants, another scary-sad show about small-towners confronting the supernatural. I did ditch Revenants after season one, but I have a hunch that the rest of my summer might be devoted to finding out what secrets lie buried in earth of the Maritimes. Maybe these lost souls will find a magic pond used for time travel? Crossover alert!

On Saturday, my partner Andrew and I went to see Les Misérables: The Arena Concert Spectacular, a production of the classic musical that is pared down in some ways—very little dialogue, not a ton of sets, no rotating stage—but huge and bombastic in other ways. Saturday was a beautiful day in New York City, warm but not hot with a nice breeze and very low humidity, so spending three hours in the dark watching a concert version of Les Miz sounded like a complete waste of that meteorological rarity. 

Les Miz was not one of My Shows growing up. My dad inculcated us with older musicals: Carousel, West Side Story, Oklahoma!, Rent. Okay, that last one I discovered on my own, when the first national tour came to Boston and blew my head off. But for whatever reason, my dawning love of musicals never extended to Les Miz, or Phantom, or any of the mega-hits of the 1980s that came to define the art form until, well, Rent went and changed things. (At least that’s sort of how the argument went at the time; theater historians might beg to differ now that we’ve 30 years of hindsight.) 

Anyway, the movie version of Les Miz was only the second time I’d really seen the show, though I’d certainly heard a lot of the songs through cultural osmosis (meaning: I heard Joey Potter sing “On My Own” in one of Dawson’s Creek’s most jaw-droppingly insipid moments.) Which is all to say, I don’t really have nostalgia for Boublil and Schönberg’s grandly melodramatic adaptation of the Victor Hugo novel. 

And yet, you’d think it was a foundational part of my consciousness from the way I reacted to the concert on Saturday. Reluctant as I was to go, I was shocked to be so giddily subsumed by the vastness of Radio City Music Hall and the towering voices of the performers. I cried at multiple points—the “One Day More” act one finale and “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” in particular—and was wholly charmed by the absolute sincerity with which the whole thing is mounted. It’s a glorious wall of noise that comes blasting at you from that iconic venue’s enormous stage, demanding your submission to both the cheesiness and the genuine artistry. 

I shouldn’t say any more lest this become an official review, but if you think such a production would work on you, I heartily recommend it. 

I watched this trailer for the Matchbox movie—Matchbox like the Mattel car toys—and thought about something I wrote here last week, that the direct-to-streaming action-comedy is perhaps the worst genre in movies today. It’s worse than clunky music biopics, it’s worse than dumb Get Out riffs like Ready or Not (though, not much worse), it’s worse than movies about how single people can only have sex one night a year. John Cena is fine, though his charm is wearing off. I like Sam Richardson. I feel bad for Teyonah Parris. The little gay guy from Broad City should be working, so I’m glad to see him. Jessica Biel? For this to be her first movie in almost a decade is really something (she’s done plenty of TV in recent years, to be fair).

Cars flipping over and stuff is fun, sure. But every joke in this trailer has been made a hundred times already in movies pretty much exactly like this. We need to find and destroy the mimeograph machine that keeps churning these copies out. Or we need a new Shane Black, who can bring invention and edge to the genre. Something needs to happen! I swear there used to be good action-comedies. Or maybe I was just a teenager who liked dumb stuff. We can’t even watch this on a plane, where it is meant to be watched, because it’s Apple! How silly, how pointless.