What I'm Watching: What We Do In The Shadows, The Secrets of Hillsong, Steven Soderbergh's Full Circle, and More

Timothy Olyphant, Claire Danes, Full Circle, Max

Here’s the rundown on everything I watched, read, and wrote about this week.

The shows:

• What We Do in the Shadows is back for its fifth season this week, and while I still like the raunchy and ridiculous vampire mockumentary comedy, I do think it’s losing a bit of juice. After season 4 introduced so many great (and sometimes maddening) plotlines, the new season’s return to a less serialized, more aimless sitcom format feels a bit lazy. That being said, I’ve had my ups and downs with this show before, and I still think it’s pretty dang funny, so I’m not writing it off entirely. Check Film School Rejects for my full review coming soon!
• Steven Soderbergh returns to TV this week as well with the mosaic crime saga Full Circle on Max. Soderbergh may be known for his movies, but he’s shown he can work just as well on television before with shows like The Knick. I just wish this miniseries was as good as that show – Full Circle has a great cast and an intriguing premise that starts with a kidnapping gone wrong, but its twists get a bit silly, and its ideas about culpability and the tangled web of colonialism never quite coalesce for me. Keep an eye out for my full review of this one as well.
• I’ll be watching lots of docuseries over this month in (early) consideration for award season, and I kicked things off this week with The Secrets of Hillsong, a four-episode documentary that’s on FX and Hulu. The doc traces the rise and downfall of the popular megachurch whose charismatic pastors and Christian pop music turned out to hide a lot of alleged abuse and corruption behind closed doors. This series spends more time setting up “it was perfect…until it wasn’t” revelations than it does actually digging into the power dynamics at play, but it also features an impressive range of interviews that makes it worth a watch.

The movies:

• To be honest, I spent most of this week watching mid-aughts emo music videos instead of movies (I’m going through a phase…again), but I did get the chance to watch the 1996 Robin Williams and Nathan Lane-led comedy The Birdcage for the first time. This is one of those movies that people around me reference so often that I find myself just nodding along and keeping quiet about the fact that I haven’t seen it, but I’m so glad to have finally filled the blind spot. The flick about two gay parents faking straight to impress their son’s crotchety, conservative future in-laws is delightful. Even though it’s R-rated, it’s surprisingly wholesome and feels like the kind of movie I would’ve loved as a kid. I love it as an adult, too!

Odds and ends:

• If you’re a current or former Grey’s Anatomy fan, I highly recommend Lynette Rice’s book How To Save A Life. It’s an oral history of the making of the long-running medical soap that spills the tea on a lot of behind-the-scenes drama while also explaining how the show managed to make its on-screen drama work like a charm. I quit watching Grey’s way back in season 6, but this book has me debating getting back into it…
• Did you hear about how GQ published a piece critical of Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav, then edited it egregiously after his camp apparently called to complain, then unpublished it completely? Zaslav is the worst (for reasons the pulled article explains!) and this situation just kept getting wilder, like when it was revealed that GQ’s editor-in-chief is reportedly producing a movie for WB. If you want to learn more about this and why any of it matters (it gets into issues of journalistic integrity and the free press, not to mention unchecked corporate monopolies), here’s a good primer on the initial situation and a report on the wild twist. After all that went down, publications started pointedly exercising their right to post super-critical pieces about Zaslav anyway: this one, in particular, is delightfully venomous. A Slashfilm writer also recently wrote a scathing piece about him and all the awful changes he’s making to Turner Classic Movies.
• On a lighter note, there’s a podcast called Who Shat On The Floor At My Wedding? going viral lately that’s every bit as hilarious as the title would indicate. It’s an investigative comedy series about two New Zealander brides who really are trying to unmask a mysterious wedding pooper, along with the help of their side-splittingly funny “detective” friend, a janky lie detector test, and some genuine investigative experts who got in on the fun. I’m not done with this one yet so I can’t tell you if the culprit was brought to justice, but good lord, it’s a great time so far.

It was a weird limbo week for me so I don’t really have much of my own writing to share, though you can always find my news and write-ups at Slashfilm and reviews at Film School Rejects. Drop me a line and let me know what you’re watching if you’d like. Ta-ta for now!