The 77th Emmy Awards will be held this September 14 and broadcast on CBS and Paramount+. Chances are, you haven’t seen all of the nominated productions. That’s a good thing, trust me.
So starting today and over the following four weeks leading up to the Emmy Awards broadcast, I will release my ranked choices of the nominees, from least favorite to most favorite, in four marquee categories: Outstanding Television Movie; Outstanding Limited Or Anthology Series; Outstanding Comedy Series; and Outstanding Drama Series.
These choices are NOT predictions of what will win, nor am I trying to tell you what is the objectively “best” television film or series. Hopefully, reading these mini reviews will simply help you be a more informed and discerning viewer.
This week: Outstanding Television Movie
Inspired by real events, “Nonnas” tells the story of Brooklynite Joe Scaravella (a sleep-walking Vince Vaughn), who works through the mourning of his mother and a mid-life crisis by risking his job, life savings, and friendships to open an Italian restaurant in Staten Island. Rather than hiring professional chefs, Joe recruits his favorite Italian-American mothers and grandmothers from around the way, and brings their feisty personalities and cherished cooking skills from the old country to life.
Well, that sums up the screenwriting goal at least. With so many shows these days offering inside views of commercial kitchens, not to mention “The Bear” ’s darkly comedic dive into the food-drenched lives of an Italian-American family, you would hope “Nonnas” would invite us to sit down and dine on some gourmet-level storytelling. Instead, we’re issued a can of expired Chef Boyardee.
“Nonnas” most notably features every recognizable, albeit slightly faded, Italian Hollywood name you can think of (Talia Shire, Lorraine Bracco, Brenda Viccaro, Linda Carddinelli, Joe Manganiello, Drea de Matteo) and is headlined by some italian-adjacent types (Vaugh and Susan Sarandon). In other words, it’s an ensemble of otherwise talented performers shoved recklessly into a casting dumpster. The cast members don’t so much act as animate a series of italian schticks and tropes set to an italian score worthy of airquotes. Mama mia, that’s a lousy meatball!
What if a private defense contractor was secretly hiding a No Man’s Land gorge filled with mutants cultivated to produce super soldiers? No, this is not a chapter out of “X Men,” but the shaky premise for “The Gorge.” Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy play American Levi Kane and Lithuanian Drasa, two unwitting snipers, recruited to contain a modern-day “Island of Dr. Moreau,” and keep it out of sight from humanity. Sigourney Weaver rounds out the film’s star power, but she’s wasted in a role that is the evil corporate sellout twin to her Ripley from the “Alien” franchise.
The first half of the film takes place at the opposite ends of the gorge’s peaks, where Levi and Drasa make googly eyes and share messages across the expanse of the gorge’s canyon. Their placement as dual sentries and their love connection represent, by far, the film’s most effective moments, and it’s a shame Levi and Drasa can’t hold their positions on the watch. The second-half action takes place at the bottom of the murky valley where freaky creatures, military secrets, and chase scenes await, but the shoddy science fiction and half-baked story simply can not sustain any plausible suspension of disbelief. Look away.
Two years after his triumph with “Succession,” Jesse Armstrong has written and directed “Mountainhead” as a satirical look into the souls of tech overlords. If nothing else, Armstrong is a student of the excesses of power and privilege, and “Mountainhead” follows a bro reunion of four disgustingly wealthy tech titans as they spend a mountain retreat scheming to make markets, world order, and each other bend to their insatiable wills. Each have distinctive features that shape their group dynamic: Ven (Cory Michael Smith) is the world’s richest person, with an arrogance befitting Elon Musk’s and Mark Zuckerberg’s love child. Jeff (Rami Youssef), the thoughtful disrupter among them, has created a revolutionary app that can factcheck A.I., including Ven’s chaos-sewing disinformation machine. Randall (Steve Carell), the oldhead and wannabe mentor, is looking to reverse his terminal cancer diagnoses and outsmart death itself. Souper (Jason Schwartzman), the lowest one in the pecking order, regularly convenes the group at his mountain resort to compensate for the fact that he, unlike the others, is not a billionaire.
Armstrong’s absurdist screenplay makes incisive observations about the talents of these men. The “brilliance” that led them to amass unfathomable amounts of wealth is little more than a randomly winning combination of neurodivergent tics, narcissism and emotional underdevelopment. By the time they turn on one of their own with a Keystone Cops murder conspiracy, their ability to fail upward reaches peak levels.
Armstrong once again successfully reveals the misguided frailty of the .1% who shape our global reality. But unlike “Succession,” which gifted us a parade of ridiculously terrible people we were entertained by and even felt sorry for, the Mountainhead four are so utterly devoid of redeemable humanity that they’re just plain childish and boring. The dialogue is predictably snappy, and the writing is consistently smart, but maybe this time, Armstrong is a bit too cynically clever for his own good.
With Trump on the anti-DEI warpath, we could all use a sturdy, brilliant Black Man to swoop in and push back against cracka tomfoolery. And boy, does “Rebel Ridge” deliver. Aaron Pierre (So this is where the next James Bond has been hiding. He’s British y’all! Just sayin’…) stars as Terry Richmond, an archetypal Black-man-just-minding-his-own-damn-business before getting ensnared and ripped off by a racist, crooked sheriff (an exquisitely sinister Don Johnson) in a Louisiana backwater.
But this sheriff went ahead and messed with the wrong mutha! When he is pushed too far and prevented from rescuing his unjustly imprisoned cousin, Terry proceeds to, literally, wreck shop. With the help of a court employee, Summer McBride (AnnaSophia Robb), he also uncovers a law enforcement corruption ring with the sheriff at the center.
Terry is — why, of course — a former Marine and Close Combat Specialist, which serves to not only provide highly effective — and realistic — action sequences, but also adds a John Rambo-esque, put-upon military vet dimension. The plot makes for some surprisingly insightful racial dynamics and micro social commentary, even if it inevitably begins to strain credulity the further down the conspiracy road it gets. But Pierre’s steely presence and his antagonistic chemistry with Johnson are so compelling, you will joyfully suffer the ride, while cheering for some racialized comeuppance along the way.
1. Peacock’s “Bridget Jones Diary: Mad about the Boy”
Since 2001 Renée Zellweger, in the role of our favorite hapless blonde, Bridget Jones, has reliably streaked across our skies every few years like a dimpled comet. Over the course of three movies we’ve watched Jones build a career, declare her sexual independence, fall in love, break up, reunite, get married, and have children.
At the start of the fourth installment, “Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy,” Jones is mourning the untimely death of the love of her life, the endearingly uptight Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). With the support of her raucous friends, including the exuberantly rakish Daniel Cleever (Hugh Grant), Jones struggles to move on emotionally while juggling single parenthood and earning a living. True to the Bridget Jones formula, Jones triangulates a love adventure, this time with a swoony young hunk (Leo Woodall) and a more mature, brainy, and socially awkward hunk (Chiwetel Edjiofor).
Charming, guffaw-inducing romantic comedies are in short supply these days, and I’m a sucker for one. “Mad about the Boy” is pretty lightweight viewing and you can see most of the plot points a mile away, but Zellweger, Grant, and this latest Bridget Jones episode, like old comfy sweaters, still fit quite nicely and are sentimentally soft to the touch.