This is kind of a weird week. This week marks the end of not one, not two, not three, but four series that all are considered prestige streaming series. I’m talking about Succession, Barry, Ted Lasso, and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel.
This seems like a moment. Just a short couple of years ago, the streaming services were on a rampage creating content. Thinking that the more content it generated would bring that many more eyeballs to their service, a virtual endless set of projects were greenlit. It seemed like any writer would eventually become a show runner for their own show. The various streamers were just throwing money around. In particular, Ted Sarandos, for many years the Chief Content Officer of Netflix, seemed to have a virtually unlimited budget.
Things seem to be changing. Perhaps reality is starting to set in. The streaming services are showing a bit more self control in greenlighting projects. Even more bizarrely, services are choosing to cancel already created content before even releasing it to the public (I’m looking at you Max). Some series that have been released are being pulled out of circulation. Apparently, the services are willing to eat the sunk cost of this content to keep from paying residuals to the artists involved in the production.
So, in case we are at a pivotal moment, I thought that I’d say just a few words about the four important series that just concluded. I’ll discuss each one in ascending order of my own personal ranking of the series.
The Marvelous Mrs Maisel: Wrapping up its fifth season, I really enjoyed the first season. The series felt like a sip of champagne. The colors were bright and the dialog was sparkling. Taking place in an idealized 1950s New York City, I became immediately invested in the comedy career of Mrs Maisel. Her relationship with her manager Susie, her soon to be ex husband Joel, and her parents were lively and fun. Unfortunately, in the early part of season 2, Mrs Maisel’s parents temporarily move to Paris. This seems to start off a series of unrelated adventures across all of the major characters. It seemed to be following the traditional sitcom pattern of forcibly putting its key characters into weird situations as opposed to just letting them organically grow. By the time the fourth season rolled around, I’d started losing interest and was watching just because I was previously invested. The last season was a semi-random series of time jumps over a thirty year period or so. Of the four series, this was the one that I was happiest to see end.
Barry: Lasting four seasons, this was another series where I most enjoyed the earlier seasons. The idea of a hitman, very good at his job but at a point in his life where it felt that his soul was dead and then having it reawaken upon stumbling into an acting class, was a great concept. It did a fantastic job of creating a protagonist that you cared for even though he was, deep down, a monster. The tension of Barry trying to rediscover his humanity through the medium of acting while also constantly being put into situations of having to kill people was interesting and actually quite funny. It was necessarily a very dark comedy but, by the third season, it became way more dark than comedic. By the end of the fourth season, in my opinion, it’d lost the balance between darkness and humor at the expense of humor. Not to spoil, but unquestionably it had to end the way that it did, but again, like Mrs Maisel, watching it felt almost like a chore. In the final episode, it did redeem its black humor when we watch Barry’s son watch a hilariously fictionalized version of Barry’s life as portrayed through some schlocky adaptation.
Ted Lasso: Lasting three seasons, I think it’s best to understand the motivations of its creator, Jason Sudeikis. Ted Lasso was originally a character created for promotional purposes. When Sudeikis was expanding it to a series, it was during the Trump administration. As a counterpoint to the darkness and negativity of that administration, he intentionally made Lasso an inveterate optimistic, positive person. Knowing that is important to understanding the series. Even though the series deals with dark issues (Lasso’s divorce, his father’s suicide), there’s no question that everyone’s going to come out of it on the other side a better person. Everyone (OK, except for the billionaire asshole Rupert, who of course gets his comeuppance) in the huge ensemble cast grows and becomes more positive. Critics are hating on the final season due to the episode length and the schmaltzy closure of most of the main characters. Given the lens that Sudeikis was looking through, I think it’s understandable. There was no way that Nate wasn’t going to end the series as the heel. Lasso was always going to go back to his family. This isn’t Shakespeare here. This is a well made situation comedy bringing all of its characters in for a soft landing. Of all shows that I’ve watched over the last several years, Ted Lasso was the one that most often left me in happy tears. And well done for doing so.
Succession: Lasting four seasons, I’ve already written about it here. This show, even more than Barry, balances perfectly comedy and drama. If anyone has any envy of the very rich, watching this should quell it. These are all not only deeply unhappy people but are emotionally broken. On top of it all, despite their glib quips, they are not very smart. No matter which sibling ended up on top, you just knew that eventually they would end up destroying Logan’s media empire. Logan’s final words to them acknowledged this, accusing them of not being serious people. Logan reached outside of his family to sell off his empire to Lukas Mattson. Mattson initially appeared to thoroughly overmatch the Roy siblings. By the end of the last season, it is clear that Mattson is just another person that confuses glibness with intelligence. The series relentlessly makes the case that our powerful, filthy rich overloads are absolutely cluelessly strutting around with no clothes. This is the late stage capitalism show that our beleaguered timeline needs. I made a similar comment in my Glass Onion article (here), but Succession, along with Glass Onion and Don’t Look Up, needs to be sealed into a time capsule so that future generations, as they struggle to survive the postapocalyptic world that we’ve bestowed upon them, can understand how it happened.
Hopefully I’m wrong about peaking and that the streaming services will continue to build high quality compelling content. Right now, I’m banking on the second season of Severance (on hold pending the writers’ strike, alas).
dorkenstein 