Author: rb809rb

Mariska Hargitay is going into her Emmys hosting gig as a winner.

The star, who is helming the Primetime Emmys on Sept. 14, took home two prizes at the Creative Arts Emmys for My Mom Jayne: A Film By Mariska Hargitay. She landed wins for directing for a documentary/nonfiction program and for outstanding documentary or nonfiction special; the night brings Hargitay’s career Emmy total to three, after she won best actress for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 2006.

“It feels extraordinarily new and it’s deeply meaningful for me to have gone into a completely different arena, and to be recognized like this is really beyond my wildest dreams,” she told reporters backstage of how these two trophies compare to her one from two decades ago.

Hargitay also spoke about this particular moment in her career, where she’s living by the motto of “I just say yes. I said yes to Broadway and I said yes to hosting the Emmys — when they called me, I thought it was a joke, and then I went, ‘Why not?’”

“It’s a year of firsts and a year of saying yes and not limiting myself or not being governed by fear. Like, what would I do if I wasn’t afraid? What if it all works out?” she continued. “I’m in that place right now of going, ‘I’ll figure it out.’ I’m really happy right now.”

She also gave a hint at her mindset heading into the main show, admitting, “It’s been a big week, this hosting the Emmys is no joke,” teasing that NBC “undersold it to me” and told her it would just be two days of rehearsal, which was “a lie.” However, she expressed how excited she was to be working with The Late Show with Stephen Colbert writing team on her material and added, “I just can’t believe at this place in my life — my third act is starting and it’s pretty awesome.” 

MGM+ and BBC One’s A Tale of Two Cities is neither the best of adaptations nor the worst of adaptations, but Daniel West’s take on the Charles Dickens classic may well be the meh-est of adaptations.

The four-part series benefits somewhat from the lack of an instantly identifiable definitive filmed interpretation of A Tale of Two Cities (depending on how you feel, I suppose, about the best picture-nominated 1935 feature) — a minor oddity given that the novel is in many ways Dickens’ most streamlined, featuring one of his best beginnings, best endings and most approachable narrative hooks.

It’s a love triangle and a thriller set against the backdrop of the French Revolution. It features the usual Dickensian melange of colorful characters, breathless cliffhangers, shocking twists (not Oliver) and trenchant social commentary. It’s very much the epitome of a ripping yarn.

Ultimately, though, freedom from negative comparisons to previous adaptations is not enough to prevent this take on A Tale of Two Cities from being a bland disappointment — one of the least Dickensian adaptations of a Charles Dickens work since Steven Knight adapted A Christmas Carol around the question, “What if Ebenezer Scrooge could say ‘fuck’?” It’s still a love story, but with virtually no passion between any of its three principals; and while it may be a tale of two cities, they both look like nearly identically designed stages in a warehouse in some affordable Eastern European country.

For those who haven’t read A Tale of Two Cities or seen one of the forgettable previous adaptations — none, apparently, since a 1989 take that aired in the States under the Masterpiece Theatre banner — the plot is at once simple and convoluted.

After a brief prelude in Paris in 1764, in which a young Lucie Manette watches her father apparently be killed, the action jumps forward 18 years. Lucie (Mirren Mack) is now living in London hoping to follow in her late father’s footsteps as a doctor. Lucie’s concrete interest in medicine is not, if memory serves, a part of a book in which she’s a more nebulous “healer,” nor is it all that relevant to the series after a strange introduction in which she’s practicing surgery on a corpse. It’s a nearly pointless choice, one of many.

Lucie is living with Mrs. Lorry (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) and doing just fine for herself when her life is turned upside down with the arrival of Charles Darnay (François Civil). Charles is working on behalf of French revolutionaries, embodied by Roxane Duran’s Madame Defarge, to smuggle a generally irrelevant woman to safety in England. He’s also bearing a letter that suggests that Lucie’s dad (Yannick Renier) isn’t actually dead. The letter contains the evocative words “recalled to life,” which are potent on the page and nearly meaningless in the series.

At the English border, Charles is wounded, which lets Lucie utilize her medical knowledge briefly. Then he’s arrested as a spy. Lucie seeks out legal representation for the heroic Charles, but finds only the generally drunk and uncouth Sydney Carton (Kit Harington).

Both Charles and Sydney immediately fall in love with Lucie, because she’s somewhat the protagonist of the story and she’s pretty. Lucie, for her part, falls in love with both Charles and Sydney, which makes a little bit of sense since they look almost identical (assuming they aren’t standing next to each other, allowing one to see that Civil is a lot taller) and they’re both in constant need of chaste undressing. It makes less sense, though, because nothing in her interactions with either man comes across as the least bit romantic and the chemistry between Mack, Civil and Harington is wholly lacking, regardless of the permutation.

As Lucie is reunited with her father, seriously psychologically damaged by his two decades in the Bastille, she learns shocking truths about Charles and his lineage and about the revolutionary motivations of Madame Defarge, whose general intransigence has caused her to be viewed as the villain of the piece, regardless of logic.

Watching A Tale of Two Cities, it’s almost impossible to gauge what attracted West and the producers to the book, other than the IP and the reality that there are only so many times one can adapt Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol before it becomes necessary to cycle back into the Dickens catalogue. The inspiration is nowhere to be found here.

And A Tale of Two Cities is, as I’ve already said, a ripping yarn, featuring doppelgängers and surprises and the French blooming Revolution — featured in one thoroughly lifeless scene — plus it’s eternally timely since the story is one of those reliable Dickens screeds in which the impoverished masses are on the verge of toppling the heartless elite. Madame Defarge is — whether or not you buy her as a villain — one of fiction’s great adversaries, and her backstory is, itself, both eternally timely and specifically timely at a historical moment when you might have noticed one or two headlines about immoral wealthy men preying on defenseless young women.

One could certainly adapt A Tale of Two Cities in a way that steers into the complications of Madame Defarge as a character, resulting in something that might almost resemble Hulu’s summer hit, Furious. She is, as a character, at best a righteous crusader and at worst a rigid zealot, but she’s hard to make uninteresting. Duran captures Defarge’s rage and, in a series plagued by thinly sketched characterizations hers comes closest to rising to the level of interesting. But her cause and her connection to that cause are mechanical pieces of the plot here, making it impossible to hate her or empathize with her. She’s just the person stirring up trouble whenever we go to Paris.

Plus, it’s hard to know when we’re in Paris. As directed by Richard Clark, A Tale of Two Cities is temporally choppy and fails to build any emotional or geographical momentum. Though two cities are in the title, we’re treated to maybe a block or two of London and a block or two of Paris, visually interchangeable in a way that offers no real tangible connection to either staged location.

Presumably, making Paris and London interchangeable is intentional, a parallel to the similarities between Charles and Sydney? Except that the entire purpose of the story’s arc is that one should be able to chart the life Charles was born into and the changes he made (all before the start of the story, since he’s pretty much stagnant onscreen throughout) and compare that to Sydney’s journey from the man he is when we meet him to the man he becomes by the end of the tale. In this case, though, since Harington and Civil are comparably solemn and earnest throughout — the actors do, if nothing else, look as similar as the story necessitates — there isn’t much evolution to trace.

There are supposed to be comparable parallels to the arcs of Lucie and Madame Defarge, one as a force of optimistic good and the other as a force of all-consuming vengeance, but neither progression is all that engaging. Like Duran, Mack brings a little fire to the series, but Lucie is one of those Dickensian women who are unexplained rays of light who exist mostly to fuel the growth of the main male characters.

As for the supporting ensemble from the page, from the bloodthirsty revolutionaries collectively known as Jacques to Sydney’s partner Mr. Stryver (a wasted Fehinti Balogun) to the figure known as The Vengeance, they’re either gone entirely or written so thinly here as to leave no impression.

A Tale of Two Cities is in such a hurry to get from that memorable opening (rendered poorly as a voiceover at the end of the first episode) to that tremendous closing (rendered poorly as another voiceover) that the adaptation might as well have been as a two-hour movie. Certainly the cliffhangers at the end of each episode lack the urgency that Dickens himself understood so well how to evoke. The story itself is probably good enough to pull some viewers along from episode to episode, but the telling definitely is not good enough to inspire anybody to seek out MGM+.

Regardless, there’s a far, far better adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities than has ever been done. This is not it.

When Mona (Julianne Moore) tells a friend she’s auditioned for a production of a show called Nosy Neighbors at their local theater, he admits he’s never liked musicals. They just don’t feel authentic, he explains, the way the characters are always bursting into song. Who does that?

Well, no one, not even in the musical-loving The Debut. But among the first of the film’s sly tricks is that it builds a world in which it feels like people could, where in fact it feels more unnatural that they don’t. Blessed with swing-for-the-fences brio and, in Moore and Paul Giamatti, a leading duo capable of navigating every one of those wild turns, the latest feature by Jesse Eisenberg makes for a frequently hilarious journey into the mind of an overly committed actor — even if, in the end, it seems unsure quite what it wants to say about the self-destructive pursuit of artistic perfection.

At first, Mona would seem an unlikely candidate to go Method in the way of certain prestige actors or comic book movie stars. When we meet her, she’s a meek suburban housewife who’s never acted a day in her life, and whose audition is so mediocre she doesn’t even realize how mediocre it is. Once she lands a relatively minor role anyway, owing to a twist of fate that she may have ever-so-slightly nudged along, she’s just happy to be there, drinking in any suggestion or note or friendly gesture extended to her.

But even from the start, before Mona properly goes off the deep end, The Debut starts inuring us to her heightened perspective. When Mona gets the call saying she’s gotten the part, a spotlight floods her grin and the camera rushes in, as if she might start belting on the spot. On her first day of rehearsal, the whole world is lit a little brighter than it was a few scenes earlier. When she endears herself to her new colleagues with a joke, the laughter feels slightly too enthusiastic. The effect is almost eerie to start, and it takes some getting used to. But it turns out to be just the tip of the iceberg.

The pivot comes when the production’s director, Jerry (Giamatti) — described in a low-key perfect bit of dialogue as “basically the biggest name in New Jersey community theater” — pulls Mona aside for the private special instruction that she (as a truly godawful singer and actress) so desperately needs. Jerry’s usual method is to break his actors down so he can “put Humpty Dumpty together again,” and it begins exactly as planned in an acting exercise that yields one of the very biggest laughs in a film rich with them.

But then Mona takes a little too well to his guidance. As Mona loses herself in her character, a building superintendent named Miss Danielle, her wardrobe, courtesy of costume designer Stacey Battat, goes from prim cardigans to ripped jeans to an actual coverall she’s stolen from a janitor. (This is neither the first nor last time you’ll think to yourself, “Man, theater people are a menace” and “Jesse Eisenberg’s seen some shit, huh?”) She begins frequenting a seedy motel that production designer Anne Ross has cleverly made into a theater actor’s exaggeratedly noirish version of what a seedy motel would look like, with smoke-blurred neon lights and a trash can fire outside and an inexplicably naked man roaming the halls inside.

Most worryingly for Nosy Neighbors — in-universe a well-known musical that’s been around a few decades, in reality an original concocted by Eisenberg and seen here in perfectly cheesy snippets — Mona starts to question Miss Danielle’s motivations, then her lines, then her actions. Jerry realizes he’s created his own worst nightmare: the sort of difficult actor who thinks she knows her character better than the director or even the script that invented her.

Lively throughout, The Debut ascends to new heights whenever Giamatti and Moore share the screen together. Moore is an absolute hoot as Mona, who starts out looking on paper like one of those disaffected housewives she’s played so often (and so expertly) in her career but turns out to be much, much stranger. Giamatti makes Jerry ferocious but not monstruous, a man who certainly likes barking orders at various underlings but loves making good theater even more. Their scenes opposite each other are not just entertaining but thrillingly dynamic, as the balance of power between them begins to shift.

It’s all so much fun that it’s easy not to notice at first that none of this is headed anywhere particularly profound. There’s a touch of poignancy in the understanding that Mona is so eager to lose herself in Miss Danielle because — like Rita, the protagonist of Telluride 2026’s other “New Jersey suburbanite abandons her family to pursue a more authentic life under the guidance of a charismatic but demanding leader” premiere — she barely knows who she is in the first place.

But the film never builds out the rest of Mona’s world, like her inattentive husband (Patrick Fabian), or even co-stars like Steph (a very endearing Halle Bailey) and Todd (Eisenberg, adorably giving himself an excuse to sing and dance), to take that line of thinking anywhere truly insightful or emotional.

Among the arguments between Mona and Jerry are what theater can or should be. Mona argues that that the stories it tell should be “real,” even at the expense of a happy ending, while Jerry argues that no one cares much about the plot — audiences just want to feel while spying on the intimate lives of other people.

The Debut, in prioritizing style, humor and outrageous plot turns over complex emotionality, would seem to side with Jerry. Maybe it’s not everything it could be. But as I howled over the lengths Mona would go to for the sake of what Jerry unkindly but accurately points out is, in the end, just some “thankless tertiary character,” it felt like more than enough.