TV: Minx (2022-2023)

Comedy; two seasons/18 episodes. Streaming on Netflix.

It's the early 1970s, and Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond) wants to start the first magazine devoted to the growing feminist movement. She heads to the magazine publishing convention to make her pitch to publishers. The only taker is Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson), whose Bottom Dollar Publishing is devoted to cheap porn magazines with titles like Naughty Nurses; he sees Joyce's magazine as a vehicle to target a still untapped market for porn: women.

The era is right for both ideas. The first issue of Ms. was published in 1971, and the first issue of Playgirl in 1973. What would have happened, this show asks, if the two had been combined in one magazine?

Joyce and Doug are optimistic as they launch Minx, but even they are taken off guard by its success, and it causes problems for both of them. Joyce isn't used to being in the spotlight, and isn't really prepared to be a guest on The Dick Cavett Show. Doug is used to scraping by, barely meeting budgets each month; keeping up with the demand for Minx is a logistical nightmare. And while the success is a thrill, neither of them knows how to cope with the controversy the magazine is generating.

Lovibond and Johnson are a solid pair of leads, and the show gets a lot of crisp comic energy from their  contrasting personalities, as her slighly prissy academic feminism clashes with his cruder street smarts.. Elizabeth Perkins joins the show in the second season as a wealthy widow who provides financial backing for the magazine, and the rest of the supporting cast is terrific. Jessica Lowe was the standout for me, playing Bambi, the centerfold coordinator for all of Doug's magazines, whose intelligence and people skills are too often overlooked by co-workers who only see a perky bimbo. 

The show was originally made for cable/streaming; HBO Max was the original home for season one, and after they cancelled the show, Starz picked it up for the second season. But even by cable/streaming standards, there is a lot of nudity here -- the show is set in the porn industry, after all-- including full frontal male nudity, still a rarity on TV. You'll see more penises in the first episode than you've probably seen in your last decade of TV watching.

For the cliffhanger-averse among you, the end of the second season does leave the next step for most of its characters somewhat up in the air, but the major plotlines of that season are pretty well wrapped up. The suspense is more in the nature of setting up stories for a potential third season instead of leaving second season stories unresolved.

Cheerfully raunchy, with memorable characters, witty dialogue, and a few thoughtful ideas hiding beneath it all.

TV: You're Killing Me (2026- )

One six-episode season is currently streaming on Acorn, with a second arriving sometime in 2027.

In a quaintly charming Maine village, a 60-ish mystery writer uses her professional skills to help solve the shockingly large number of murders that take place around her. You could be forgiven for thinking of Murder, She Wrote; it's an obvious inspiration for this show. Our heroine, though, is not Angela Lansbury's Jessica Fletcher, but Brooke Shields's Allison "Allie" Chandler, and our quaint village isn't Cabot Cove, but Founder's Cove.

(Take a moment to picture Angela Lansbury at the beginning of Murder, She Wrote. Now picture Brooke Shields today. Shields is about three years older than Lansbury was.)

As the first episode opens, the annual mystery awards convention has come to Founder's Cove to honor Allie for her many (many, many, many) award-winning romantic mysteries. The convention is disrupted by the murder of one of the other authors, one of Allie's dear friends. Allie is drawn to investigate, as is Andi Walker (Amalia Williamson), a local true-crime podcaster some decades younger than Allie. They reluctantly team up to solve the crime, and agree to continue their partnership to write a true-crime book about the case.

Murders keep coming to Founder's Cove, and Allie and Andi keep investigating them, to the annoyance of the town's new sheriff, Jack Kerrigan (Tom Cavanagh). Lurking in the background is the mystery of Andi's mother, who mysteriously abandoned Andi and her dad 15 years ago and hasn't been seen or heard from since.

Everything is gentle and cozy and comfortable. The bickering banter between Allie and Andi is entertaining enough, as is the tastefully polite flirting between Allie and Jack. The audience is likely to have more success spotting the murderer than most murder shows allow, as the cases aren't that complicated.

No one's going to be surprised or blown away by anything that happens on You're Killing Me. It's not an exciting show, and it's content to rework familiar territory. But if you like that territory, this show will take you there and give you precisely what you're looking for. The acting and writing isn't likely to win any awards, but it's a notch or two above mere competence.  It's a good enough light comic murder-of-the-week show; it aspires to nothing higher than that. That may not be the most ambitious target, but the show hits that target squarely in the bullseye.

TV: I, Jack Wright (2025- )

Family drama/murder mystery. One six-episode season, with a second in the works. Streaming in the US on BritBox.

Jack Wright (Trevor Eve) has died, in what initally seems to be a suicide. The officer assigned to the case (Harry Lloyd) is suspicious, though; "very few people shoot themselves in the chest," he notes.

And his family is large enough to provide plenty of suspects. First wife Rose (Gemma Jones) has cancer, and the inheritance she's expecting could pay for top-quality treatment. Her older son, Gray (John Simm), is an addict who's deeply in debt to some violent thugs; second son John (Daniel Rigby) is tired of playing second banana at the family business. Gray's daughter, Emily (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), could use some extra money for the tech business she's trying to get off the ground.

Third (and current) wife Sally (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is two or three decades younger than Jack. She claims they were entirely devoted to one another, but might she be more interested in the dashing French businessman (Jalil Lespert) who's been negotiating some sort of deal with Jack? Her son, Josh (Samuel Small), is so grumpy and sullen a teenager that nothing seems too extreme as a possible expression of angst.

And what are we to make of the occasional references to a deceased second wife, and the daughter who no one has seen or heard from in years?

The family drama gets kicked up another notch at the reading of the will -- and we're still in the setup phase of the first episode! --when Rose and her sons get pittances, Sally and Josh get nothing, and the bulk of the money goes to Emily, along with the top job at the business. All of the family's buried resentment, anger, and jealousy come roaring back to life.

Each episode begins and ends with a few short moments of the characters addressing the camera, apparently being filmed for a documentary (a true-crime series, perhaps?) sometime after all of this drama has played out. We can get some clues from those moments -- one of the characters appears to be wearing a prison uniform -- but they are mostly cryptic teases that will only really make sense in retrospect.

It's a grandly over-the-top soap opera, with performances precisely calibrated at just the right level of too much-ness. Amuka-Bird, the closest thing to a lead character in the large ensemble, is a standout as Sally, whose inherent icy reserve makes it difficult to believe her protestations of love, even if they are sincere. Jones does lovely work as the self-sacrificing Rose, and Simm is an impeccable sniveling weasel as the man trapped by his own vices and addictions.

Be warned, if you are wary of such things, that the first season ends on a giant cliffhanger, resolving very little. The answers to the mysteries of who killed Jack, why he changed his will, and whether he was of sound mind when he did so will have to wait for season two.

MOVIES: The End of Oak Street (2026, David Robert Mitchell)

We open in a Michigan suburb in 1982, where the Platt family is under a lot of stress. Denise (Anne Hathaway) is writing a novel, obviously more autobiographical than she'll admit, about a woman trapped in an unhappy suburban marriage; Greg (Ewan McGregor) hasn't told the family that he's been fired, and that his "side job" of pizza delivery is actually his only job. The kids aren't much happier. Audrey is realizing that her dream of going to Cornell to study with Carl Sagan is financially out of reach, and Brian is a second-tier bully who's recently broken another kid's arm, and now lives in fear of that kid's big brother, the neighborhood's first-tier bully.

But the family's going to have to work together when they wake up after a strange electrical storm to find that a two-mile chunk of their neighborhood has somehow been transported back to the age of dinosaurs, and there are killer beasts everywhere. It's an inverse Jurassic Park; instead of bringing the dinosaurs to our world, the movie sends modern people back to theirs.

Mitchell does a terrific job of building suspense in the opening of the movie, hinting at the lurking monsters in clever ways before finally revealing them to us. The movie is a tight 99 minutes, and there's not a wasted minute in it. Deaths are both gory -- this one is definitely not for the smallest kids, or for the most squeamish adults -- and funny; action sequences and chase scenes are thrilling; and the characters are more rounded and better developed than you expect from this sort of movie.

We already know that Hathaway can cry on cue, and she gets plenty of chances to do so here; what is less expected is what a great scream queen she makes. She delivers perfectly calibrated terror and determination, and it is Denise who is the most practical and realistic about what it will take to survive this ordeal.

This is a excellent family adventure thriller. The jump scares work, and never feel as cheap and desperate as jump scares often do. There are enough jokes to leaven the suspense and fear. There is one narrative choice late in the movie that I thought didn't work; it cheapens the most consequential moment in the movie. But that's a small flaw in an otherwise delightful movie.

And for those who particularly worry about such things, the family dog will be just fine.

TV: Line of Duty (2012- )

I've recently added BritBox and Acorn to my roster of streaming services, so I'll likely be catching up with a lot of British TV over the next several months.

This is an excellent crime drama, with six seasons (36 episodes), and a seventh due in 2027. It's streaming in the US on both BritBox and Acorn, though BritBox is missing season 5. That's an important season to the show's overarching story, so if you're a BritBox subscriber, you will want to do a free trial subscription to Acorn in order to binge that season there.

The setting is AC-12, one of several offices in the London police department devoted to investigating cases of possible police corruption. (I think in the US, we'd more often refer to it as an "internal affairs" department.) Our central characters are officers Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) and Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure), and their commanding officer Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar). 

Each season features a fourth top-billed actor, playing the officer who's being investigated that season; not all of those actors are well-known in the US, but they're well-known to British TV audiences, and they are surely a big draw. They are, in order: Lennie James, Keeley Hawes, Daniel Mays, Thandiwe Newton (still using the name Thandie back then), Stephen Graham, and Kelly Macdonald.

Over the course of the six seasons, there's also a larger throughline being developed. We come to realize that the individual investigations into these possibly corrupt cops are tied into the same organized crime group, and the officers of AC-12 find themselves in search of the officers even higher up the ladder who are running the network of organized crime and corrupt cops.

There have been a lot of TV shows -- Burn Notice comes to mind -- that have gotten too caught up in an overly elaborate backstory that came to dominate the show, slowly strangling it to death. Line of Duty avoids that peril, doing an impeccable job of balancing each season's primary investigation with the increasing revelations about the identity of the ringleader(s).

The show does everything you want a police drama to do, and does all of it well. Chase scenes and heists are thrilling; office politics feel realistically frustrating; the dangers of the job are neither exaggerated for melodrama nor downplayed to make the audience feel comfortable.

Best of all are the show's interrogation scenes. Dunbar particularly shines in these scenes, especially at the end of a season, when it's all that Hastings can do to keep his anger in check as he faces down the officers who have betrayed their duty to the public, which Hastings views as a sacred trust. And when Hastings himself comes under suspicion in one season, it's a delight to watch him on the other side of the interrogation. (Guest star Anna Maxwell Martin is terrific as the officer tasked with questioning him, a coldly collected bundle of passive aggression, always offering precisely the amount of polite respect that is required of her, but no more than that.)

This is police drama at its finest, and unless you are allergic to the genre -- some are these days, and I can't say I blame them -- it's absolutely worth the time.

MOVIES: The Rivals of Amziah King (2025, Andrew Patterson)

Patterson's first movie, The Vast of Night, had the bad fortune to be scheduled for release in the spring of 2020, so like a lot of movies that year, it wound up with a graceless dump onto streaming and never found the audience it deserved. Not that it would have been a massive box office hit, but it was a smart take of 50s SF paranoia that did a lot on very limited resources. (Sadly, it doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere at the moment.)

Six years later, he's back with a bigger budget and a couple of actual movie stars. Matthew McConaughey is Amziah King, a widowed Oklahoma beekeeper. As the movie opens, he and some friends are jamming in the parking lot of the local fast food place when a state cop asks for his help. They've intercepted a shipment of stolen honey, and they hope Amziah can help them figure out whose honey it might rightfully be.

The first half of the movie is shaggy and rambling, never sticking to any particular plotline or moment for very long. Amziah is reconnected with Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass, making an impressive film debut); fifteen years ago, she was one of many children for whom he and his late wife served as foster parents. He has more jam sessions with friends; there's a good amount of music here, all of it great fun in a sort of amateur Mumford & Sons style.

But the long chain of digressions is entertaining, and a couple of them are spectacular set pieces. McConaughey has a delightful monologue (Patterson also wrote the film; he's credited under the pseudonym "James Montague") in which he introduces Kateri to her new neighborhood by explaining the backstory of every casserole at the church potluck, and a bee emergency at the local elementary school is the movie's comic highlight.

A sharp narrative turn brings the back half of the movie into tighter focus, and moves Kateri into the spotlight. It also introduces Kurt Russell (with an unnerving resemblance to Steve Bannon) as the local industrial agriculture tycoon.

This is McConaughey's first on-screen role in six years (he's done some voice work), and Patterson makes impeccable use of his laid-back charm. It's a strong enough performnce to carry us through the meandering first half of the movie, and when the turn comes, we realize just how sharply he's used those seemingly random scenes and moments to define Amziah's character. LookingGlass matches him at every turn, and as Kateri is forced to draw upon the strength that Amziah helped her to find, LookingGlass gives a performance of sly resilience and determination.

Russell isn't asked to do much more than be a hissable villain, but he does that with enthusiasm and crisp comic timing. The assorted locals to whom Amziah and Kateri turn for friendship and aid are played by a fine assortment of character actors -- Scott Shepherd, Cole Sprouse, Rob Morgan, Tony Revolori.

Currently in limited release; opens wide on the 21st. Well worth the time if it's playing near you.

MOVIES: Six: The Musical Live! (2026, Liz Clare)

The musical proshot seems to be turning into more than just an occasional novelty; this is at least the third one to play in theaters in the last year (Merrily We Roll Along came out at the end of 2025, and Hadestown just a few weeks ago). It was filmed in 2022, and reunites the 2018 West End cast.

The show begins with the entrance of six women, who announce that they are the wives of Henry VIII. They wear magnificent costumes, designed by Gabriella Slade, that fuse the style of a Renaissance royal court with the sparkle and short skirts of a modern pop diva. At the back of the stage are Ladies in Waiting, their four-woman band. The wives are getting ready for a tour, and they want the audience to choose their lead singer by deciding which of them had the worst marriage.

From there, Six becomes essentially a rock concert, with each wife getting a solo number (the other women sing backup) telling her story. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss have written pop songs, each loosely inspired by one or two specific divas; Catherine of Aragon (Jameia Richard-Noel) is a Beyonce/Jennifer Hudson type, Katherine Howard (Aimie Atkinson) is a mix of Britney Spears and Ariana Grande, and so on. (I am mildly surprised, given the success of the show, that the producers have never put together some sort of EP in which the songs are sung by the pop stars who inspired them; it'd be a terrific charity fundraiser.)

Most of the songs are tightly tied to each character's history, which makes it difficult to imagine them having any sort of independent life outside the musical. The exception is "Heart of Stone," a ballad for Jane Seymour (Natalie Paris). Seymour tells most of her story in pre-song dialogue, and the song is an emotional response to those events.

Marlow and Moss wrote the show while they were still university students, and there's an "aren't we clever young things" attitude throughout, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. That sort of winking attitude is entertaining for a while, but it can wear thin; they were probably wise to keep the show short, coming in just under 90 minutes.

The history is often framed in very contemporary terms. Anna of Cleves (Alexia McIntosh), for instance, explains that Henry sent for her from Germany after being impressed by her portrait, but he was disappointed when she arrived, as the portrait had exaggerated her beauty. In her song, "Get Down," Anna explains that "you thought that I tricked you / cause I didn't look like my profile picture." McIntosh is terrific in this number, a Nicki Minaj-inspired rap/song hybrid, and it's the highlight of the film.

By the end of the show, it's clear that Marlow and Moss are less interested in getting all of the historical details precisely right than they are in using the wives as a way to explore the broad (and limited) types into which women are sorted, both by history and by musical theater. The final moments pound the feminist message home with a little too much clunky enthusiasm, but there's a sense of humor that is strong enough to keep that message from derailing the show.

Is Six an important musical that's likely to endure for decades? No, I don't think so. But the cast is superb, the songs are skillful pastiches of modern pop styles, and it's a terrific calling card that marks Marlow and Moss as composers to watch. Not a movie you need to rush right out to theaters to see, unless you're a massive fan of the show or of musicals in general, but worth watching for when it comes to streaming.

MOVIES: One Night Only (2026, Will Gluck)

Alternate titles: The Sex Purge; After Hours: Fascism Edition.

Opening titles tell us that three years ago, the Mandate was panned, banning premarital sex. All Americans now wear implanted wrist monitors that measure vital signs and hormone levels; whenever two people are in the same place and their levels both spike in just the right technobabbly way, the sex police are alerted and sent out to make an arrest. But for one night every year, twelve glorious hours, the Mandate is suspended and all of the singles get to go wild and fuck like rabbits. This movie takes place on that night.

As the night begins, pizzeria owner Owen (Callum Turner) is planning to propose to his girlfriend (Maya Hawke, in a role so underwritten that I didn't know the character had a name until I checked IMDB), who cuts him off by announcing that this year, she thinks they should screw other people. That sets Owen off on his quest for Ms. Right Now, during which he keeps running into Allie (Monica Barbaro), a studio singer whose career is made up almost entirely of singing old pop songs that have been rewritten as pharmaceutical jingles. (That's a pretty good running joke; sadly, it's the best one you're going to get.)

Allie and Owen keep running into one another as increasingly contrived circumstances keep them from acting on their obvious mutual attraction, and we cut back and forth between the two as they have a long series of pathetic/desperate/ostensibly comic encounters with potential sexual partners.

Considered only as a rom-com, this is a B-minus at best. Barbaro is charming, and I look forward to seeing her in better movies, but as hard as she's working, she does not have the power to singlehandedly drag any personality out of Callum Turner, who has all the warmth and charisma of a used bar of soap. The supporting cast is poorly used; they're unkindly used in some cases, notably Molly Ringwald and Levar Burton, playing Owen's mother and her boyfriend, who are trotted out for a few "old people have sex? Eww, gross!" jokes.

But we can't consider this solely as a rom-com, because its premise is so preposterous, and because the movie refuses to deal with what the world would actually look like if the Mandate had been posed. Some of the questions that came to mind as I watched the movie:

• Where are the anti-Mandate protests? If the government banned premarital sex, there would be riots in the street that would make January 6 look like a Sunday school picnic. And they wouldn't stop after a week or two, either. They'd still be going on, even three years later. This movie gives us a few listless chants of "fuck the mandate," an occasional bit of graffiti, and some halfhearted "Repeal" signs in windows. (Those signs are in the exact shades of blue and pink that are now associated with the trans rights movement, which is oddly distracting.)
• This movie takes place in a future near enough to be essentially our present, so I assume that it's our current right-wingers who have passed the Mandate. And the current sexual obsession of the right wing (at least as far as heterosexuals are concerned) is decreasing birth rates; they wouldn't be imposing restrictions that are going to decrease the number of pregnancies.
• We're supposed to believe that the federal government was able to install wrist monitors in every American in only three years? The government can't do anything that efficiently. And given the massive freakouts at the thought of getting a COVID vaccine, you think everyone's going to line up peacefully to have a piece of machinery implanted?
• How many people are required to monitor everyone's monitors for signs of unlawful sex, and how many new police officers had to be hired to make those arrests? And honestly, given typical police response times, you could probably get in a quickie and be out the door for brunch before the cops get there.
• There's a scene fairly early in the movie in which characters are trying to buy a condom (Oh right, condoms are mandated, too, which raises another whole batch of questions...), and all of the stores are sold out. On free sex night? The one night when you know there's going to be a huge demand for condoms, and none of the stores have stocked up with enough condoms to get them through the night? And it's not like this scene is at 6:45 am, when the clock is about to run out; it's pre-midnight, with hours to go yet.
• What about tourists, visiting the US from other countries? Surely the government isn't installing these expensive high-tech gizmos in every visitor. Every tourist is an opportunity for unmonitored sex. They're going to be the most popular people at every singles bar in the country. (They're also likely to be the victims of a vastly increased amount of rape and sexual assault.)

But even more than its minimization of its own enormous premise, what really drags the movie down is how conservative and anti-sex it ultimately is. Every attempt that either Owen or Allie does make to have sex goes horribly wrong, usually in humiliating fashion.; we don't actually see anyone in this movie having a happy night of sex. (Ringwald and Burton are as close as we get; they do seem to be enjoying themselves, but in ways that make them the butt of the joke.) We hear more than one character suggest that the pro-Mandate folks were right, and everyone really is better off waiting until marriage. Supporting characters are depicted as crass, disgusting lechers for being eager to have sex on the one night they're allowed ot do so.

It's anti-romance and it's not very funny. By my count, that makes it a flop on both halves of rom-com. Avoid at all costs.

MOVIES: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, Jane Schoenbrun)

As the opening credits play, Schoenbrun lays out in impressively concise fashion the history of the Camp Miasma slasher franchise: The unexpected success of the movie in the mid-80s led to cultural ubiquity – board game, video game, lunch boxes, magazine covers – and a long string of successively less successful sequels before the franchise faded into irrelevance. But recenly, film scholars and gender theorists have begun to reclaim and reevaluate the movie, despite its deeply problematic elements, and now the studio that owns it thinks it’s ripe for a reboot. A lesser filimmaker would have spent the first act laying in that 40-year history; Schoenbrun does it in a brilliantly edited sequence of about three minutes.

The studio is in talks with Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) to direct the reboot. She’s up for the job based on the strength of her first film, a Sundance smash (“it’s Psycho from the point of view of the shower curtain”), and all she needs to land the job is a good pitch meeting.

What they’re hoping for is a straightforward prequel, laying out the story of the franchise’s killer, Little Death (Jack Haven). Kris has something more complicated in mind, and is especially eager to confront the transphobia of the original. She’s arranged a meeting with Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played the “final girl” in the original film, in hopes of casting her in the reboot. Getting that meeting was an accomplishment in its own right. Billy turned down roles in the sequels and left acting. She now lives in seclusion at the same abandoned summer camp where the movie was filmed.

Kris and Billy are instantly drawn to one another, and as they discuss the movie – complete with a viewing of Billy’s own print, on film – a complicated psychological and sexual relationship evolves between them. The lines between reality and cinema begin to blur. As the two walk across the campground, the landscapes are occasionally replaced by obvious matte paintings, and Kris begins to get the sense that someone is watching them.

This is largely a two-hander for Einbinder and Anderson, and both are excellent. Anderson is having great fun, putting on a massive blonde wig and a broad southern drawl; it’s like a fusion of Dolly Parton and Gloria Swanson. As the women watch Camp Miasma, you can almost hear her thinking “I am big, it’s the sequels that got small.”

In the final act, as those lines separating Kris and Billy from the world of the franchise get even blurrier, the movie stumbles slightly. Its metaphors become overly broad and vague, and Schoenbrun gets carried away with the meta of it all. The movie doesn’t stick the landing as solidly as Schoenbrun’s last film, I Saw the TV Glow (a masterpiece).

But even if the ending falters a bit, this is still a very good movie. Smaller roles are smartly cast with an array of fine actors – Eva Victor, Dylan Baker, Patrick Fischler, Kevin McDonald, Sarah Sherman – largely used to provide sharp comic relief. Cinematographer Eric Yue does an expert job of recreating the look of mid-80s low-budget horror in the scenes from Camp Miasma.

If you’re averse to the gore of slasher movies, I should warn you that there is quite a lot of blood here. But I am also not a slasher guy, and I found that the gore here is so exaggerated, well past the point of plausibility, that it stops being scary. When the neck of a decapitated teen spouts a Bellagio fountain of blood 20 feet into the air, that’s not terrifying. It’s just gross and silly.

Hi!

This blog was active for about nine years, from late 2004 to late 2013, and has lain dormant ever since.

Now I'm reviving it.

I'll be focusing mostly on TV and movies this time around, though there may be occasional posts on books, music, or anything else that happens to grab my fancy.

The blogroll over on the left side of the page has been updated, and new posts will start appearing within the next few days. There won't be any set schedule, but I imagine I'll be posting a few times every week.

Welcome back, if you were a fan of In Which Our Hero 1.0, and welcome, if you're popping in for the first time!

MUSIC: LA Philharmonic, November 10 (Britten/Tovey/Shostakovich)

Bramwell Tovey, conductor
Alison Balsom, trumpet

The program:

• Britten: The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra
• Tovey: Songs of the Paradise Saloon
• Shostakovich: Symphony #5 

Tovey's trumpet concerto was not a premiere; it was something even rarer -- a piece of new music getting performed several years after its premiere by a soloist other than the one who premiered it. Songs of the Paradise Saloon is five years old now, and it's a spinoff of sorts from Tovey's opera, The Inventor, about the real-life Civil War-era con man Alexander Keith. One short scene of the opera finds Keith at Manhattan's Paradise Saloon, and Tovey has expanded some of the musical ideas from that scene into a concerto, in which the orchestra plays the role of the saloon's colorful denizens, and the trumpet plays the role of Keith, manipulating and maneuvering each of them. In musical terms, that becomes a sort of theme and variations, with the trumpet soloist bending, twisting, and altering the various melodies presented by the orchestra.

It makes for a fragmented and kaleidoscopic concerto, in which the soloist rarely gets a full-fledged melody, but is instead playing with fragmentary bits and pieces; there are frequent jazz influences, including a lovely passage in which Balsom and the orchestral brass, all muted, sound like a 40s swing band. As in any bar, multiple "conversations" are often happening at once, and they don't always quite mix; there's one striking passage where the oboes are playing a lovely waltz that's not really in the same key as the rest of the orchestra, and Balsom is ignoring them all with a series of frantic military fanfares.

The disjointed nature of the piece makes it hard to fully grasp on a single hearing; it's never unpleasant to listen to, and there are some fine moments, but I can't say that it ever gripped me strongly enough to make me long for a second shot at it.

The rest of the concert reminded me of how spoiled we are here in Los Angeles, where under Esa-Pekka Salonen and Gustavo Dudamel, I've become so accustomed to thrilling performances that the merely excellent is almost a disappointment. Tovey's take on the Young Person's Guide was charming, and all of the Philharmonic's principals made the most of their moments in the spotlight. The Shostakovich was a solid, sturdy performance, but for most of the way, it felt slightly lacking; the Largo, for instance, had me thinking mostly of how heartbreaking it could be with a stronger conductor.

Tovey's interpretation came fully to life, though, in the final movement, especially in the coda, which was absolutely thrilling, and which brought the audience to its feet for a rousing ovation.

BOOKS: Two Boys Kissing, David Levithan (2013)

Over the course of a single weekend, we follow the lives of several high school boys who make up a cross-section of what it is to be a young gay guy today. A pair of exes engaged in a political demonstration; a couple in the comfort of mid-relationship; a couple who've just met; some singles who are coping (or not) with the stresses of being gay and alone.

The narrative voice is in the first person plural, made up of the ghosts of the generation of young men lost to AIDS. For me, one of the surviving members of that generation, that occasionally brought up tears, as I was reminded yet again of just how damned awful those years were, or as random words or turns of phrase would remind me of particular friends.

Levithan's characters capture what it feels like to be young; his narrators capture what it feels like to look back on youth. It's a powerful combination. And that narrative voice is a glorious thing to read, wise and insightful, sad without being bitter, missing their lives in all their joy and pain and confusion. There are thoughts, sentences, paragraphs, that I wish I could have heard at 15 or 16 (even if I suspect wouldn't have understood or believed them at the time). I loved this paragraph, for instance:

The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest. Each of us had a first sentence, and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it. What we hoped, and what we found, was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first, and the third sentence is even easier than that. Suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs, in pages. The fear, the nervousness, is still there, but it is joined by a new confidence. All along, you've used the first sentence as a lock. But now you find that it's the key.

I'm curious to know what the YA audience for whom the book is written will make of that voice and that perspective. Do they know the history of that era well enough to understand it who these narrators are, and will it just come across as old guys preaching at them?

By the end of the book, the narrators are shouting out (to borrow Whitman's words) a "barbaric yawp" in celebration of life, demanding that it be lived and loved and fought for with every ounce of strength.

Stunning book, recommended with the highest possible enthusiasm.

MUSIC: LA Philharmonic, October 20

Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor
Anssi Karttunen, cello
women of the Los Angeles Master Chorale

The program:

• Debussy: Nocturnes
• Lindberg: Cello Concerto #2 (world premiere)
• Bartók: Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta

I have come to the conclusion that Debussy is a composer whose music I'm simply never going to connect to. It's well-crafted, and it's pretty, but for me, it's a very monotonous pretty, like staring at a canvas in eighteen impeccably chosen shades of beige, and it washes over me without making any real impression.

The Nocturnes are a bit more interesting than the other Debussy I've heard, I will admit. There are moments in the Fêtes movement that caught my ear, particularly a long crescendo that begins with timpani, harp, and brass, and the use of the women's chorus in the Sirènes movement is often lovely.

Magnus Lindberg's new cello concerto uses a small orchestra by contemporary standards -- double winds and horns; a single trumpet and trombone; no tuba, harp, keyboards, or percussion. The orchestral writing is dominated by the strings, though the brass have a few nice moments; they have a particularly lovely moment as the orchestra re-enters after the cadenza, playing a series of burnished dark chords.

It would, I think, take two or three more hearings to get a good grasp on how the concerto is put together. Those additional hearings would allow me to understand the piece better, and there are parts of it that I could even come to like; I doubt, though, that it would ever be a piece that I would love.

The highlight of the program was the Bartók, which I like to think of "Sugar Plum Fairies in Hell." It's a piece that mixes creepiness and brutality in fascinating ways, and Salonen brought out both in spectacular fashion. The percussionists were in fine form today, as they so often are, and the opening of the third movement was a highlight; the timpani playing blooping glissandos while the xylophone repeats a single note so insistently that you start to forget it's a pitched instrument and begin to hear it almost as a woodblock.

TV: Reign (Thu 9, CW)

It's 1557, and 15-year-old Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland (Adelaide Kane), is being shipped off to the French court to prepare for her eventual marriage to Prince Francis (Toby Regbo), a marriage which was arranged when they were six. But politics have changed in the last decade, and the French royals are no longer convinced that an alliance with Scotland is in their best interest. Mary is thrown into complicated intrigue and plotting for which nothing in life has prepared her.

The one person who seems to be entirely on her side is Francis' illegitimate half-brother, Sebastian (Torrance Coombs), known as Bash. Despite being a bastard, he is the favorite son of King Henry II (Alan Van Sprang), which is an immense annoyance to Queen Catherine (Megan Follows). Catherine is most definitely not on Mary's side, especially after her counselor, Nostradamus (Rossif Sutherland), tells her that according to his visions, Mary will literally be the death of Francis.

If you're looking to Reign for accurate history, you will be disappointed; Nostradamus was about 20 years older than the dashing young man we see here, and Bash is entirely a fictional creation. And since this is the CW, everyone is young and pretty -- bordering on interchangeably so in some cases, notably Mary's ladies-in-waiting -- and the focus is at least as much on everyone's love life as it is on international politics.

But if you're looking for a swoony, romantic fantasia on the life of the young Mary, Queen of Scots, then this might be just the thing. It's surprisingly well made; costumes and sets are reasonably stylish by broadcast TV standards; and while none of the actors are doing award-worthy work here, no one is embarrassingly awful, and Follows has a few nice moments as the show's reigning bitch/diva.

I have no idea whether this will appeal to the CW's young audience or not, but the CW is a network that doesn't generally produce a lot of backup shows, so it's likely to last for at least a few months.

BOOKS: Talking Hands, Margalit Fox (2007)

Imagine a group of children raised in isolation, whose caretakers do not speak to them, and who have no access to any spoken language. What sort of language would they develop among themselves, and what would it tell us about the way languages are created, or about the innate human instinct for language?

Obviously, this is not an experiment one could ever actually do, which is why linguists jokingly refer to it as "the forbidden experiment." But occasionally, circumstances arise that provide conditions as close to the forbidden experiment as one is ever likely to see, and Margalit Fox's Talking Hands follows a group of linguists as they explore one such rarity.

Al-Sayyid is an isolated village in Israel with a population of about 3,500 and an unusually high rate of genetically inherited deafness; one in 25 residents are deaf (1 in 1,000 is the typical rate). Because of their isolation, the villagers have developed their own sign language, and nearly everyone speaks it, whether they're deaf or not.

It's a new language -- the current generation of children is only the third generation to use it -- which makes it an ideal topic for study into how languages are created and developed. But the team is pressed for time, because the village becomes less isolated with every generation, and bits of Israeli and Arabic Sign Languages are already creeping into the language of those children; it's a bit of a challenge to find kids whose local language is still pure.

It wasn't that long ago, Fox tells us, that studying the sign language of Al-Sayyid would have been considered a waste of time, because sign languages weren't thought to be real languages at all. They were considered merely glorified pantomime, with none of the linguistic subtlety or complexity of spoken language. It wasn't until the mid-20th century that linguists began to realize that sign languages had their own syntax, grammar, and complex rules; and that they were every bit as thoroughly developed as spoken languages were.

Fox alternates between chapters showing the team of linguists at work, collecting data from the people of Al-Sayyid; and chapters on the history of sign language in general, with a focus on how our understanding of such languages has changed and deepend in the last fifty years.

I was particularly fascinated by a chapter on how strokes impact sign language. To oversimplify a bit, we know that language ability is controlled by the left side of the brain, and that dealing with spatial relationships is mostly controlled by the right side of the brain. Given that sign languages are almost always highly organized in space -- a sign made in front of the body might not mean the same thing as the same sign made to one side, for instance -- what happens to the ability to use sign language when a stroke injures one side or the other of the brain?

Fox has degrees in linguistics herself, and does a very good job of discussing the subject in layman's terms. I was fascinated by the history and the details about how sign languages work, and I enjoyed the book very much.

TV: Once Upon a Time in Wonderland (Thu 8, ABC)

Once Upon a Time in Wonderland is a sort of spinoff from Once Upon a Time, but only just barely; it's a spinoff of concept, rather than of characters. Once again, we're following familiar storybook characters on their travels between their worlds and this one. There's a very brief prologue set in Storybrooke, the village from the original series, just to establish that the shows share the same continuity, but the producers have said that the shows will be independent of one another, and they don't plan to do major crossovers.

We begin with Alice, just returning from her famous visit to Wonderland, and immediately thrown into an asylum when she tells her father of her adventures. Jump forward a few years, and Alice is now a young woman whose doctors are convinced that she's lying (and therefore still delusional) when she tells them that she no longer believes that she went to another land.

She's rescued from the asylum in the nick of time by the Knave of Hearts (Michael Socha) and the White Rabbit (voiced by John Lithgow), who take her back to Wonderland. When she learns that Cyrus (Peter Gadiot), the genie with whom she fell in love during her original visit (which somehow never made it into Lewis Carroll's telling of the tale), might not be dead after all, she sets out on a quest to find him.

If you're thinking that you don't remember any genies in Wonderland, well, this is sort of a hybrid between Alice and the Disney version of Aladdin. The genie Jafar (Naveen Andrews) is one of the show's principal villains, teaming up with the Red Queen (Emma Rigby) in a plot to capture Alice for some as yet unknown reason.

The show looks marvelous, and its fantasy landscapes are very different from those of the original Once Upon a Time. Much of it is CGI, and the integration of the actors into the virtual sets is occasionally a bit clunky, but there are beautiful images like the Red Queen's castle, which looks as if it's been cobbled together from a giant chess set.

Casting is generally solid. Andrews is an ideal choice for Jafar; and Lowe, Socha, and Gadiot are attractive leads (the show is none too subtle about the love triangle that must inevitably develop). As the Red Queen, Rigby is the weak link, aiming for the same camp glory that Lana Parilla hits in the parent show, and not quite getting there.

Lithgow's voice performance is less manic than I'd have expected, but it works. Voice casting is one of the show's strengths, with Keith David providing a deliciously sinister Cheshire Cat; Iggy Pop only has a very brief appearance in the first episode as the Caterpillar, but seems like an interesting choice.

My hunch is that this show will burn out and fizzle from special to merely competent even faster than the original did, but it's only scheduled as a 13-episode season, and it should have enough juice to stay entertaining for at least that long.

TV: The Tomorrow People (Wed 9, CW)

As long as teenagers feel powerless and put upon, there will be a market for stories about powerful teenagers, which explains why The Tomorrow People is a concept that will not die. It started as a British series in the 1970s; a 90s version was co-produced with Nickelodeon; and in the 2000s, there were new episodes produced as radio plays to be sold on CD. And now, always on the lookout for material about beautiful young people, the CW has gotten its hands on the premise.

That premise centers on a group of young people who have taken the next step in human evolution and developed powers -- telepathy, teleportation, and telekinesis. (The special effects on the teleportation and telekinesis parts of that are really ugly.) Our hero, Stephen (Robbie Amell), is just discovering his powers, and is recruited by the local Mod Squad-esque group of shiny happy Homo Superiors -- blond hunk John (Luke Mitchell), Asian nerd Russell (Aaron Yoo), and hot babe Cara (Peyton List). Yes, those are reductionist character descriptions, but they give the characters more depth than the show does.

There is, of course, a government agency called Ultra, which is out to find and recruit other kids with powers and use them as weapons to capture and destroy the good kids with powers; this is the kind of show where one can reliably expect bombshell revelations every sweeps period to upend your notion of whether Ultra or the Mod Squad are the good guys. Ultra is headed by Dr. Jedikiah Price (the fine character actor Mark Pellegrino, bringing to the show the only shreds of subtlety it possesses).

Did I mention that Dr. Price just happens to be Stephen's uncle? (Yes, he's Uncle Jed; someone wasn't thinking about the TV-history overtones of that name choice.) Because Stephen's long-vanished father (Uncle Jed's brother) was a Tomorrow Person himself (though Uncle Jed is not), and had greater powers than any of them, and if Stephen has his father's powers, he could be the Moses of the Tomorrow People, leading them to the promised land of safety, and oh god, it's all just so stale and familiar and it makes my head hurt and somebody make it stop, please, please make it stop...

The young people are pretty to look at; Robbie Amell is the cousin of Arrow star Stephen Amell, which makes Wednesday the Amell Family FunTime Revue on the CW. Pellegrino is always entertaining, and if she's ever given anything to do, Sarah Clark might bring something interesting to the role of Stephen's mother.

And I suppose that if you're seventeen and haven't already seen 8,000 different versions of this story, it might even feel fresh enough to keep you entertained. But if you're any older than that, I can't imagine what The Tomorrow People has to offer you.

BOOKS: Three Graves Full, Jamie Mason (2013)

Jason Getty is not a man who grabs life by the horns and lives with gusto; he is a man who watches as life happens to him. He has had precisely one moment of assertiveness in his life, a confrontation with a con man that wound up with Jason burying a body in the backyard. A year later, he's just beginning to get over his paranoia about being discovered when landscapers turn up not one, but two bodies on his property. And neither of them is the body that Jason put there.

Mason eventually fills us in on how all three of the bodies got there, and tells her story through multiple points of view -- Jason, the people left behind by the assorted corpses, the cops investigating the whole mess. They're all distinct, vivid characters with lots of personality. Mason even gets away with making "volunteer police dog" Tessa a point-of-view character, with logic and motivations that feel perfectly dog-like.

Almost half of the book takes place on a single night, a long, bleakly hilarious series of disastrous meetings that bring together all of the book's characters in a frantic chase through the countryside. It's a magnificently planned sequence, reminiscent of Hitchcock in the way that complications pile upon complications. Everyone is struggling desperately to escape their situation, and every tiny decision only pushes them deeper into it.

This is dark comedy at its best; none of the characters are wholly sympathetic or wholly evil, and there are a lot of delightful moments where you realize that you're queasily cheering for someone to get away with doing something horrible. Mason's prose is smart and witty, filled with unexpected turns of phrase and sharp observations.

Highly recommended, and all the more impressive for being a first novel.

TV: The Millers (Thu 8:30, CBS)

Do you remember this song from about 20 years back?

"Justified and Ancient" was a disposable piece of dance music featuring guest vocals from Tammy Wynette. The lyrics were utter nonsense about a couple of guys driving around in an ice cream truck, heading for MooMoo Land, but Wynette brought to the song the same absolute conviction that she'd brought to her finest country songs. And by god, somehow she made you care about that damned ice cream truck.

Margo Martindale is doing the same thing in The Millers, taking material that barely rises to the level of marginal and making it weirdly compelling through sheer force of personality.

The central character here is Nathan Miller (Will Arnett), who is finally forced to tell his parents (Martindale and Beau Bridges) that he and his wife have divorced. The news inspires Bridges to announce that he wants a divorce himself; when the dust settles, Dad's moved in with Nathan's sister and brother-in-law (Jayma Mays and Nelson Franklin), and Mom's moved in with Nathan.

The rest of the cast are fine, and they are all worthy of better material than this, but Martindale is performing acting miracles. She's given fart jokes, and overbearing mother jokes, and ball-busting wife jokes; she's asked to re-create the classic dance scene from Dirty Dancing, and somehow, she makes it all work and gets laughs with every single bit of it.

The show is created by Greg Garcia, who has done marvelous things with unpromising premises in the past (My Name Is Earl, Raising Hope); the hope that he might be able to bring the writing up to snuff, combined with Martindale's astounding comic magic, will be enough to keep me watching, much to my surprise.

TV: Sean Saves the World (Thu 9, NBC)

Thursday night seems to be this year's designated night for returning comic TV stars -- Michael J. Fox and Robin Williams premiered last week, and now Sean Hayes is back in Sean Saves the World. He plays Sean, a single father whose 14-year-old daughter (Samantha Isler) has just moved in with him after his ex-wife has moved out of town; he gets child care help from his hyper-critical mother (Linda Lavin).

Half the show is set in Sean's office, where he and his co-workers (Megan Hilty and Echo Kellum) are coping with an eccentric new boss (Thomas Lennon, giving the most uncomfortably creepy performance I've ever seen in a sitcom).

The workplace stuff is better than the home stuff, but neither is very good, and Hayes is the weak link in the show; the loud, broad comedy that worked for him as a supporting character on Will & Grace is overbearing and abrasive from a leading man. There's an occasional funny line from Kellum or Lavin, but they can't make up for the awfulness of Hayes.