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Happy Oscars weekend! Of course, that is the main event you should be focusing on for the next few days—limbering up, watching the nominated shorts if you dare, revisiting your favorite moments from Oscars past. But if you happen to have any spare time before the awards, here are some new things that you could watch, in theaters or at home. (But mostly at home.)

The Madison (Paramount+, March 15)

The marketing ballyhoo for this series is that, at long last, mega-creator Taylor Sheridan (the Yellowstone franchise of stories for boys) has made a TV show that’s all for the ladies. Finally Sheridan will filter his particularly lacquered, reverent, macho-minded view of the American West through a female lens. And what a woman he’s got to lead that charge: Michelle Pfeiffer stars in The Madison, a drama about a rich New York City socialite who journeys to a picturesque Montana ranch following a family tragedy. 

Here is an opportunity for Sheridan to make his women more than incompetent naifs (see: Sicario and Wind River), dizzy hyper-sexualized floozies (Landman), or male characters simply repurposed (arguably Yellowstone, definitely Lioness). There will be no shooting, no gruff talk of cowboy economics or geopolitics. or really any rough stuff. This is a humane series, about feelings and family, like what the ladies enjoy watching. How nice—how generous, really. 

Except on The Madison, most of the women and girls are shrill, bratty, woke-scolding nightmares, hideous caricatures of the supposed frivolity, helplessness, and irrationality of their gender. Sheridan has made a handful of grotesques and called it representation. Only Pfeiffer, as an outwardly chilly matriarch with a new passion stirring within her, gets to have a little dignity. Even then, though, most of what her character, Stacy, does on the show is in response to a man, coming to understand his perspective on life and the world as the truer, better, purer way of being. 

Stacy’s adult daughters, Abby (Beau Garrett) and Paige (Elle Chapman), are mercilessly drawn. Abby is a divorced, needy, aimless mess constantly in need of rescue from her wealthy financier father, Preston (Kurt Russell). She’s got two kids whom she’s raised to be spoiled, nagging little shits, always correcting people’s un-PC language and scoffing at the simple pleasures of un-citified life.

But she’s Gloria Steinem compared to Paige, one of Sheridan’s most galling female characters to date. A jumble of illegible stupidity and hostility, Paige is a baby-doll sexpot who’s also a complete asshole. 

We first meet Paige, a celebrity publicist, when she is walking up 5th Avenue in Manhattan carrying bags of luxury fashion items for a client. (Idiot.) She is then punched hard in the face and robbed, no one on the mean, indifferent streets of New York stopping to help. When she seeks aid from nearby police officers—one white, one Black—she refuses to say the race of her assailant, because she doesn’t want to appear racist. Here we go, Sheridan seems to grumble from behind the camera, yet another example of woke politics getting in the way of common sense. Look at this stupid bird-brained woman who thinks she’s all moral, all high and mighty, when she’s really just behaving like a fool, a misguided white woman who is ensuring her own imperilment at the hands of the other out of some kind of mind-virus, lefty performance of tolerance. 

New York City is spoken about as a crime-ridden hell-hole where you’ll get brutally attacked just for riding your bike down the street. Several characters repeatedly question why anyone, including themselves, would ever live there. That is all to contrast the peaceful, mostly homogenous majesty of Preston’s beloved ranch, shared with his brother Peter (Matthew Fox), in a secluded valley in Montana. There, life reveals itself as how it was meant to be lived, which these dodo city women gradually come to realize after reluctantly traveling there en masse. 

But first Paige must suffer. There’s only an outhouse on the property, and when trying to use it for the first time, Paige gets wasp stings all over her buttocks and vagina—the latter of which she and her beta-male college-boy husband, Russell (Patrick J. Adams, willing to debase himself for the cause, I guess) grimly refer to as her “kitty.” Paige spends the bulk of one or two episodes saying “owie” about her poor perky butt, while everyone rolls their eyes about what a hot little moron she is. Oh, and she freaks out about eating elk meat (it’s murder!) and gets in an inane argument with her mother about how polenta and grits are not the same thing. It’s truly astonishing stuff. 

Meanwhile, Stacy is learning why her husband has long been drawn to this idyll, its quiet earthiness, its fly fishing (a major theme in the show; don’t worry, Sheridan at least cites A River Runs Through It as an inspiration), the way it shrinks human purpose down to the bare essentials. Preston imparts all his wisdom onto his wife and by extension their children, all these women, long so deaf to what their sagacious patriarch was trying to teach them, now finally absorbing his teachings. Taylor Sheridan’s much-anticipated series for women is all about what they could learn if they would just shut up and listen to a man of the woods. (Who also had an enormously successful Wall Street career and owns an Upper East Side mansion, but whatever. Perhaps Sheridan is thinking of his own cardiologist father, or his mom who bought a ranch so he and his brother could learn to ride horses. Real cowboy stuff!) 

It’s not just Preston doing the imparting. There are, of course, local men there to show them the way, too. Kevin Zegers, settling handsomely into denim and a twangy accent, plays a kindly neighbor who patiently waits for the girls to stop their hissy-fitting. And Ben Schnetzer (who, it must be said, looks hot as shit) is a kindly cop with a sad backstory. He is, in Stacy’s estimation, the kind of man—sensitive but strong, polite in an old-fashioned, laconically chivalrous way—they just aren’t making anymore. It’s a gross sentiment, but good god does Schentzer just about sell it, I’m sorry to say. 

This is all high-grade red-meat fantasy slop for Real America truthers, those who almost erotically (or, sometimes, entirely erotically) venerate the kind of carefully polished rural life this show tells them exists somewhere out there. (Meanwhile they’re all living in exurban housing developments and cosplaying as ranchers via pickup truck purchases and a particular strain of country music.) These people might scoff at, say, Heated Rivalry, but both shows stimulate the exact same part of the brain. 

The Madison is cognizant of this family’s boggling wealth, and yet it still earnestly seems to implore its audience that probably the best thing for all of us to do is buy a ranch somewhere. (Yes, there is a little monologue of sorts about the beauty of owning land—not an apartment or a building, but land.) Sheridan is peddling snide, aggressive, deceptively elitist bullshit as he always does, but this time it is wrapped in the packaging of a gauzy (and repetitive) grief drama, made for people I think it kind of despises. (Namely, women.) It’s not quite as sinister as the oil lobbying of Landman, perhaps, but it’s worse, I think, than the naked pulp and melodrama of Yellowstone. 

But here’s the thing: there is something awfully compelling about it all. Sheridan has terrible ideas, and yet he articulates them in often satisfyingly verbose, heavy-handed fashion. There is a corny musicality to his writing that often proves alluring. And there is familiar comfort of The Madison’s main trope—this is by no means the first city-slicker-learns-a-lesson story to exist, and the enduring appeal of that fable structure is also to be found, perhaps guiltily, here. 

The real strong point, though, is Pfeiffer, who gives a commanding, multi-layered performance that is probably the most robust work she’s done in years. Let me stress that I do not like a lot of what her character’s arc represents before saying that Pfeiffer attacks Stacy’s grand realignment of her priorities with full, compelling vigor. It’s a joy to watch her cook, as they say, and that’s what mostly kept me pressing play on the next episode. Her work is worth a look, as is the borderline psychosis of Sheridan’s sermonizing. It’s instructive, in a sick sad way, to see what is being sold to his massive audience. Watch an episode, say a hearty “fuck you, dude,” and then go enjoy a night out in the big bad city with your smart and capable girlfriends. I guarantee you’ll at least talk a little about Ben Schnetzer, because damn.

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Sunny Nights (full season on Hulu now)

For something completely different, you could venture down to Sydney, Australia, where Will Forte and D’Arcy Carden have found themselves playing siblings in this offbeat crime series from Nick Keetch and Ty Freer. The setup is familiar: two fuck-ups with a dream (starting a self-tanner business, in this case) find themselves caught up in a comically dark odyssey of murder and deception. But Sunny Nights strikes an individual cadence within that well-worn genre; it’s amusing, suspenseful, refreshingly humble. 

Forte’s character, Martin, pretends he has moved to Sydney to start his business, but he’s really there to win back his estranged wife, frustrated journalist Joyce (Ra Chapman). Carden’s Vicki has followed him there and is trying, yet again, to get her life started after some embarrassing legal setbacks in the States. She’s the ne’er-do-well party girl loose canon to her brother’s pinched and hapless nerd. Again, something we’ve seen before. Forte and Carden, though, find an idiosyncratic way to play that dichotomy, both avoiding stereotype by flying under it. Their performances are admirably low-key, when they could so easily have gone big. 

The true draw of the series is the locals, played by an array of interesting actors mostly new to me. The great Kiwi star Rachel House is an appropriately fearsome (but still likable?) crime boss antagonist, former rugby player Willie Mason gives intriguing shading to what might otherwise be a stock enforcer character, and Jessica De Gouw plays a complicated con-woman sympathetically caught in a tight spot. They’re surrounded by a rich supporting ensemble, all graciously allowing two Americans into their midst while making a strong case for homegrown talent. 

Sometimes the quirk of Sunny Nights is a little too aggressive, but for the most part it maintains a tricky balance, between arch, absurd, and grounded. This is the rare case when I’m glad that an entire season is available at once; Sunny Nights works quite well as a binge, with its steadily accruing plot twists and reveals and ratcheting tension. Watching the show, I felt nostalgically carried back to the sweeter, more golden days of Peak TV, when it was such a thrilling novelty that there was so much divergent television being made all over the place, waiting to be discovered. What a time of American possibility that was! Now ceded, I guess, to the Australians. 

Saipan (in limited US release March 13, also available on demand) 

A handsome athlete spends lonely, frustrated time at a hotel, waiting for a big match. But for some reason he . . . doesn’t end up having hot gay sex with a rival? No, instead this based-on-a-true-story drama—from directors Glenn Lyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa and screenwriter Paul Fraser—is about an altogether different sort of conflict in the world of sport. 

The film concerns the so-called Saipan incident, in which star Irish footballer (who had a lucrative career playing for Manchester United) Roy Keane was booted, or walked away, from the Irish national team just before the 2002 World Cup. The team was going to the final round, a rarity for a country that was, at the time, experiencing what is often referred to as the Celtic Tiger economic boom. It was a heady time for a long beleaguered and discounted nation, and thus a great heartbreak that the team seemed to fall apart right at the last minute. 

Sharply directed and beautifully performed, Saipan is an arresting, economical drama about pride—both of the male and national varietals—and its ability to both ennoble people and thwart them. Steve Coogan plays the team’s well-meaning if somewhat bumbling manager, Mick McCarthy, who has a distressingly laidback approach to World Cup prep and is eyed a little suspiciously as an English-born man who nonetheless represented Ireland as an athlete for his entire professional career. He clashes badly with Keane, who is exacting in his standards and finds the pre-Cup staging ground, on the titular island in the Northern Mariana islands, woefully insufficient. 

The film is a study of ego, yes, but it’s a softer thing than that description might imply. Lyburn and Barros D’Sa deftly blend a wistfulness into the mix, subtly evoking a much larger story of Irish identity that richly underscores and elevates the smaller-bore drama of a sports team’s struggles. Coogan gives his most level-headed, inviting performance in a long time (there’s barely a trace of his usual haughtiness) while rising star of stage and screen Éanna Hardwicke, a lankier even more saturnine Paul Mescal, is a quiet-storm wonder. 

I knew nothing about the Saipan incident before watching this movie, and know barely any more about football or, honestly, the intricacies of Irish sociopolitical thought. But I was captivated by this trim, artful, surprisingly poignant film all the same, and I think you might be, too.

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