Taron Egerton in Black Bird, streaming on Apple TV+ from July 8.APPLE TV+
Recently in this space the case was made for AppleTV+ being the best curated streaming service of the moment. There’s further support for that claim on this weekend’s list. Tight, taut and thoughtful in six episodes, the top item is a thriller with tension, meaning and a bunch of superb performances.
Black Bird (streams on AppleTV+ from Friday) is it and while the core of the story is a fraught prison drama, it spreads its wings to become a story about toxic masculinity everywhere. We meet Jimmy Keene (Taron Egerton, who played Elton John in Rocketman) when he’s a high-flying drug dealer, all charm and wit. A former high-school football star, he’s got good looks, energy and a way of seducing people. Then things go terribly awry for Jimmy. He believes he’s looking at two years in prison after a plea-deal is arranged. But a furious judge dismisses all that legal finagling, and Jimmy is looking at ten years behind bars.
Once there, he adapts but he’s bitter. Besides, he’s disappointed his dad (Ray Liotta in one of his final performances, and he’s outstanding here), a retired cop with his own history of dirty dealings. Out of the blue, an FBI team makes Jimmy an offer. The team, led by Agent Lauren McCauley (an exquisite performance by Sepideh Moafi) suggest Jimmy get transferred to a maximum security jail, make friends with one Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser), a prisoner doing time for a murder. The FBI believes Hall has killed multiple young women and girls, and want evidence. If Jimmy succeeds in getting it, he can go free.
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What’s happening is something the FBI hope is a shrewd move. Jimmy’s cleverness and charm will be weaponized against Hall, an eerily subdued figure who at one time was written off as a lonely eccentric, a fantasist who sometimes confessed to crimes to get attention. Even nailing him with one conviction was a complex task. We watch all of that unfold as Jimmy reads the files on Hall, and sees a man as clever as he is, but hiding his cunning self behind a façade of mental fragility and innocent boyishness. The drama is both cat-and-mouse game with a deranged serial killer, and a meditation in how some men get away with murder, both metaphorical and real. The one who sees through the cultivated male amiability is Agent Lauren McCauley, and her multiple tongue lashings to eviscerate Jimmy’s ego are dramatic highlights.
Written by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Shutter Island), who is adapting the book In With the Devil, by the real James Keene, the series – two episodes now, the rest released Fridays through Aug. 5 – doesn’t have a wasted scene or moment. It stays focused, with the suspense a slow-burning tour de force. For a story based on real events, it has a literary approach, reaching for subtlety rather than outright melodrama.
Natasha Calis as Nurse Hayley on the Paramount+ series Skymed.Pief Weyman/Courtesy of Paramount+ / CBC Gem
Also airing/streaming this weekend – SkyMed (Sunday, CBC 9 p.m.) is a new Canadian drama series, promising “Life, death, and drama at 20,000 feet”, and that means it exists to look at, rather than experience as great drama. City nurse Hayley Roberts (Natasha Calis) joins the team of nurses and pilots on flying air ambulances who save lives in remote Northern Manitoba. It’s a soaper with better scenery than actual plotting, but a nice escape. Really, it’s like a network first-responders drama (it will stream in the U.S. on Paramount Plus) who save lives, feud, have romances and speak terse dialogue to each other. It was created by Julie Puckrin, who based it loosely based on the experiences of her sister and brother-in-law who met flying air ambulances in Northern Canada.
Boo Bitch (streams on Netflix) is new and looks like a lot of fun. A teen/high-school drama-comedy with a lot of comedic bite, it’s about Erika Vu (Lana Condor), a high school senior who decides to stop being the mousy girl everybody ignores, and, you know, “live life to the max.” Right then, she dies in an accident and becomes a ghost. The premise allows the creators (who also did Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) to have a lot of uproarious fun with the clichés of high-school drama, and Condor is a delight in the meaty lead role.
Finally, note The Anarchists (Sunday, HBO 10 p.m., streams on Crave), a six-part documentary series about a bunch of people who believe in “anarchy” in the old-school sense; Libertarians who believe in absolute individual rights and self-rule. It started with a Canadian. That’s Jeff Berwick, a Canadian entrepreneur who launched a conference in Acapulco, Mexico in hopes of promoting anarchy in its purest form. That event, somehow, led to the creation of a group of people involved in drugs, crypto-currency and all manner of shady dealings.
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