THE PERIPHERAL | DOCUMENTARY NOW! Season 4 | DESCENDANT
Pop Culture Weekly Round-Up 21/10/2022 -
Hello, everyone! I’m back to give you some Pop Culture recommendations for your weekend. This week I share my thoughts on the Amazon Primes’s messy sci-fi/cyberpunk series THE PERIPHERAL. I also talk about the always hilarious DOCUMENTARY NOW! and the amazing Netflix documentary DESCENDANT. And as always there is a playlist with five songs I listened to last week.
QUICK THOUGHTS
DOCUMENTARY NOW! Season 4 is finally here. The highly-anticipated new season of this hilarious series premiered Wednesday, October 19. For those that don’t know, DOCUMENTARY NOW! is an IFC original comedy created, executive, produced, and written by Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Seth Meyers. It does amazing parodies of some of the most well-known documentaries in the world. Each episode highlights some of the most remarkable stories that never happened and is shot in a distinctive documentary filmmaking style. This season remains unique and brilliant and shows no signs of slowing down. And I adore how it consistently combines absurdist humor with incredible attention to detail. But honestly, this is not for everyone. DOCUMENTARY NOW! has a very specific sense of humor. But if you like to watch PORTLANDIA or LOS ESPOOKYS, you will love this series too.
DESCENDANT tells the story of the Clotilda, the last ship known to have unlawfully brought enslaved Africans to the United States. The ship was found in Mobile, Alabama, and documentary director Margaret Brown returns to her birthplace to document this historic discovery. This incisive and captivating documentary covers a relevant part of American history and how it should be interpreted, along with the need to make amends for past wrongdoings. Despite some minor imperfections in terms of execution, DESCENDANT captures an important and profoundly terrible story and its impact on the Africatown community. Overall, this is a well-made and well-paced documentary that places a strong emphasis on memory keeping and how one community struggles to find the most suitable manner to remember their ancestors and I highly recommend watching it.
THE PERIPHERAL is an adaptation of William Gibson's sci-fi book of the same name and was produced by WESTWORLD creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. Well, I really wanted to like this series. It has all the good ingredients for a good time in front of a TV. I’m a big fan of Chloë Grace Moretz and besides the annoying Southern accent, she does a good job here. The visual effects aren’t amazing but they are pretty good (much better than SHE-HULK). Gibson has always been considered a master of the cyberpunk genre and Amazon studios have more than enough money to bankroll an expensive product like this. But unfortunately, THE PERIPHERAL is a hot mess. Beautiful to look at sometimes but with some terrible writing, cringe dialogues, unsatisfactory timelines shenanigans, and some boring and typical Hollywood action scenes. It is a shame that they messed this up. I think that this show was a missed opportunity to bring to life a world that fits what will probably be our very near future. So yeah, I would only recommend THE PERIPHERAL for hardcore sci-fi/cyberpunk fans. If not one of those people, skip it.
TOP 5 SONGS
These were the 5 songs on heavy rotation in my house last week. You can listen to them on Spotify and YouTube.
Super excited for Documentary Now. Even if I hadn’t seen the source documentary every episode of that show still works. You can feel the inspiration dripping off the screen. Too bad “The Peripheral” is a dud. I find the success rate of great sci-if books to screen-- large or small-- to be sadly quite low.
That Briston Maroney track is a new one for me. Any song that involves Oregon is a win in my book!