was afraid this would just be a wealth porn reality show of hey look at the weird out-of-touch-with-reality ultra-wealthy and their gaudy rich people shit (and there is a fair amount of that) but it also weaves in the UAE/Dubai's geohistorical rise along with a look at various types of people living in the city (most often skewing towards the ultra-wealthy) to make it consistently watchable throughout its three 60-minute episodes
on the whole it does play a bit like a travel campaign for the city (admittedly at times I thought about career moves I could make to move to the city and live the life of the ex-pat) and only obliquely and occasionally touches on things that don't paint the city in a positive up-and-coming light
The first episode followed some of the low-wage service workers in the city and I wish we could've seen more of those type of interviewees throughout the series. Also wanted them to step just a little bit outside of the ex-pat-dominated city/vacation hot spots to parts where the Emiratis outnumber ex-pats and get a sense of how the rise of UAE/Dubai has affected those parts & population (though I get that isn't gonna be the focus of a show with the subtitle "Playground of the Rich")
Given how off-putting I find Sean Penn irl and having yet to watch anything starring Julia Roberts that makes me understand why she was so big in the '90s, I didn't come into this with high expectations thinking it'd probably be a one-and-done. My low expectations were consistently surpassed with this becoming a reliably enjoy watch each week.
While it felt like this show was sold as starring Penn & Roberts, it's very much an ensemble show and what an ensemble it is, a uniformly strong cast from lead characters to the smaller roles. Penn & Roberts are very good in their roles (I've seen some scathing headlines about Roberts but I thought she was more than fine).
Dan Stevens is serviceable and occasionally pretty good in a line delivery.
The reliably good Betty Gilpin, Martha Kelly, and Alison Tolman are reliably good with Kelly bringing her deadpan goodness and Tolman, as usual, making a case for her to get more screentime in any project she's a part of.
Stevens & Gilpin make their opposites attract relationship work instead of coming off as contrived which could've easily been the case
Shea Whigham as Gordon Liddy is chewing up scenery like he's a gd termite, going for broke and sucking the air out of most scenes he's in and which would not work nearly as well in the hands of a different actor and it's a hoot to watch. Get this man an Emmy asap
Nat Faxon and Patton Oswald, though normally comedic actors, do well in their handful of appearances (without me expecting a punchline at the end of their dialogue)
Chris's Bauer and Messina also bring characteristically good work to screen
The actress who played Gale(/Gail?) in the one episode where the FBI agents were sitting in a car trying to intimidate her husband into cooperating was amazing and made the absolute most out of her 3 minutes of screentime
Darby Camp was good as the Mitchells' young daughter, making me worry about her future the same way as I did for the daughter from FX's Fosse/Verdon
Historical political shows often either collapse on their own sense of self-importance or end up too dry and didactic, the good ones make it feel like you're watching news unfold before your eyes in real time: the sense of opening a newspaper (/twitter/news home page) and getting the drip drip drip of a story piece by piece from different angles, still unsure of the fuller picture, that you're living through history and Gaslit does that and does it well.
Framing Watergate through Martha MItchell's story and the romance of John & Mo Dean is an interesting angle to take and it very well might've been a mistake but Roberts is compelling and watchable as Martha and the chemistry between Stevens and Gilpin is good, making the opposites-attract of their relationship believable (and root for-able) and both those things go a long way in making the show work.
Gets worse with each season, though still generally watchable (if better at 1.25x, 1.5x speed in later seasons)
Combination of Matthew Rhys & Matthew Goode made the first season super watchable, the easygoing banter between them made this an entertaining show—even if you don't drink wine—and especially Matthew Rhys's quick-on-his-feet rapscallion humor played well with the more straightlaced presenters, helping let out any air of pretentiousness naturally innate in a show about wine.
As Rhys's screentime diminishes with subsequent seasons (presumably due to his busy filming schedule), others are brought in to diminishing effect (James Purefoy, Dominic West). Even worse they try to replicate some of the banter to keep the show light but it just comes across as try-hard. Without Rhys most other elements of the show get much more boring (Fattorini in particular, but Matthew Goode also appears to only be charismatic in the presence of Rhys) and the air of pretentiousness intermittently takes over the show, try as it might to be a general entertainment show palatable to the masses.
In later seasons, the end of the Wine Showcase segments often has Purefoy & Goode waxing poetic about life and wine while overlooking a sunset or some such wankery and it just makes me roll my eyes to kingdom come.
what a damn fine cast
Sam Worthington gives maybe his best performance, the series plays around with the audience's perception of his character and he 100% nails what's asked of him to play into that (mis)perception. skimmed some interviews he gave on the Avatar 2 press tour about the fast fame he found after Avatar 1 and the roles he got after that and it's nice to see him in something really meaty he could sink his teeth into and he totally rises to the occasion
Wyatt Russell is an actor I find hard to take seriously in a dramatic roles because I love love love him so much as Dudley from Lodge 49 and I can only see him as a likeable surfer bro-type person (he's Goldie Hawn's son!) but DAMN he also rises to the occasion and makes his character so menacing, great stuff and I'm partial to Lodge 49 but this also may challenge it for Wyatt's best performance
Watched Denise Gough in Andor and thought she was absolutely wonderful there (that whole damn cast deserves all the nominations from all the awards ceremonies) so it was certainly a pivot watching her in more of a kowtowed role (loved seeing her fiercer side come out at the end)
I'll be honest, I thought Daisy Edgar-Jones was the lesser of the Normal People pair but only because Pauls Mescal's performance was so damn powerful and I'm a sucker for silent-but-deeper-emotions-underneath types but between this and the commercial success of Crawdads she's definitely on her way up. Like everyone else, she gave everything this role asked of her
Andrew Garfield reliably good, just keep giving me 1 Andrew Garfield man-struggling-with-his-deeply-held-faith role per decade and I'll be satisfied
Billy Howle made you feel for Allen so much and Gil Birmingham played off of Garfield so well as his partner and when he goes off on Garfield in the last episode it definitely felt pent-up and earned after six episodes of largely biting his tongue
solid writing that takes a serious approach to the religion thanks to Dustin Lance Black's Mormon upbringing and while it clearly comes down hard on blind faith and fundamentalism and the secrets and protectionism that places the religion over the individual's well-being, it's much more fleshed-out than the typical one-note 'religion bad mmkay' takes that often come out of Hollywood
