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hellboys · 2 years
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MINDHUNTER (2017-2019) season 1, episode 10
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jgroffdaily · 8 months
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This is the first in a series of streaming lists about true crime films, shows and podcasts. And while I won’t dwell on these types of murderers in this in the future, the topic does feel like the appropriate place to start. Here are picks across television, documentary and podcast that offer more than the usual glorification of madness.
TELEVISION
“Mindhunter”
This gripping and moody Netflix drama — executive-produced by its creator, Joe Penhall, along with David Fincher and Charlize Theron — sadly won’t see a third season, Fincher confirmed this year, but the first two are more than worth the price of admission (that being a slice of your sense of security). Based on the memoir “Mindhunter: Inside the F.B.I.’s Elite Serial Crime Unit,” the show dramatizes the creation of the F.B.I.’s real Behavioral Science Unit, where the concept of a serial killer began. And while the central trio of characters — Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), an F.B.I. hostage negotiator increasingly unsettled by the emergence of a disturbing theme; the behavioral-science specialist Bill Tench (Holt McCallany); and the psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) — are fictional, the serial killers that appear are all based on real people, with casting that is eerily true to life.
It starts in 1977, with David Berkowitz (Oliver Cooper), who was known as the “Son of Sam,” and moves on to, among others, Ed Kemper, the “Coed Killer” (Cameron Britton, who won an Emmy for the role) and Dennis “B.T.K.” Rader (Sonny Valicenti, still only listed as an A.D.T. serviceman in the credits). The genius of “Mindhunter,” though, is that it’s — as The Times’s TV critic James Poniewozik put it when the first season was released in 2017 — “more academic than sensationalistic,” with the stomach-turning events rarely spelled out in blood, but instead explored through hushed conversations.
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doubleattitude · 3 years
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Radix Dance Convention, Dallas, TX: RESULTS
High Scores by Age:
Rookie Solo
1st: Lucia Piedrahita-’Fields of Gold’
2nd: Sylvie Win Szyndlar-’Rainbow Connection’
3rd: Ariella Scott-’Baby I’m A Star’
4th: Shale Herrera-’Wonderful World’
5th: Capri Barrett-’Ladies Night’
5th: Gwen Kramer-’Suitcase’
6th: Grace Bednar-’Cold Hearted’
7th: Saige Hibbard-’I’m A Star’
7th: Audrey Tiss-’When She Loved Me’
8th: Dejana Kostur-’More Than Words’
9th: Hayden Goren-’Cha Cha Cha’
10th: Maeve Olsen-’River’
Mini Solo
1st: Braylynn Grizzaffi-’God’s Creatures’
1st: Ellary Day Szyndlar-’Light Gathers’
2nd: Anna Holley-’Reminiscence’
3rd: Ainsley Epton-’Presto Change O’
4th: Paislyn Schroeder-’Defeated’
4th: Journey Uy-’Donna’
4th: Sasha Milstein-’Ephemera’
4th: Cali Cassidy-’Weird People’
5th: Isabella Piedrahita-’All Along’
5th: Mia Menjivar-’Spiral’
6th: Ava Grace Merritt-’Clumsy’
7th: Olivia Armstrong-’Hit Me With A Hot Note’
7th: Claire Gestring-’On The Mast of Faith’
7th: Sophia Bodendorf-’What Can I Do?’
8th: Olivia Meehan-’Parade’
8th: Delilah Hewitt-’Shop Around’
8th: Annie Carlson-’Young’
9th: Kinsley Eversole-’Circus’
9th: Olivia Randolph-’Unchained Melody’
10th: Evelin Peterson-’Able To Love’
10th: Atlee  Millard-’Big Time’
10th: Madison Ramsey-’Sunny’
Junior Solo
1st: Laci Stoico-’Mibiso’
2nd: Campbell Clark-’I’ll Be Seeing You’
3rd: Maddie Ortega-’Island Song’
3rd: Kira Chan-’Mama’
4th: Kaili Kester-’Red’
5th: Avalon Rivera-’L Train’
5th: Breanna Bieler-’Moonlight Sonata’
6th: Audrey Domingo-’Eclipse’
6th: Stella Eberts-’Valley’
7th: London Barron-’Bones’
7th: Avery Lee-’New York, New York’
7th: Gigi Johnson-’The Way It Was’
8th: Riley Zeitler-’Breathe’
8th: Lillie Lainer-’Business of Love’
8th: Tiffany Morales-’Over The Love’
9th: Eastyn Turner-’Afraid of The Dark’
9th: Carolyne Knutson-’Peace’
9th: Mia Narvaez-’Who am I?’
10th: Emmy Claire Kaiden-’Eyesore’
10th: Layla Solsvig-’Like A River Runs’
10th: Madison De Dios-’On My Mind’
Teen Solo
1st: Willow Notary-’Expo’
1st: Avery Lau-’Fear of the Unknown and The Blazing Sun’
2nd: Kaitlyn Tom-’Charity Hound’
3rd: Charlotte Cogan-’You’
4th: Ava Greenwaldt-’Outside The Lines’
5th: June Hurley-’Don’t Think of Me Like That’
5th: Grace Underwood-’Sing’
6th: Kaitlyn Ortega-’All Human Beings’
6th: Georgia Ehrlich-’On My Mind’
7th: Nia Kester-’Cellophane’
7th: Madeleine Chen-’Luminous’
7th: Laira Naslund-’Mountainside’
7th: Taylor Hoke-’Wild Is the Wind’
8th: Sarah Laskowski-’Broken’
8th: Sasha Zitser-’Do You Love Me’
9th: Maia Sokmanan-’Everything’
9th: Leigha Sanderson-’Gypsy’
9th: Kenzie Jones-’Love Of My Life’
9th: Kaylin Lehmann-’Speaking’
10th: Riley Platenberg-’Talking Points’
10th: Tatum Johnstone-’The Fall’
10th: Alexis Olson-’The Final Call’
10th: Avery Reyes-’The Garden’
10th: Faith Kramb-’Wicked Games’
Senior Solo
1st: Skye Notary-’Inside The Color’
2nd: Anna Miller-’50 Ways’
3rd: Priscilla Tom-’The Blues’
4th: Ariel Banfalvy-’Existence’
4th: Perris Amento-’Addicted to Love’
4th: Mikayla Sokmanan-’Free’
4th: Sydney Solomon-’Looking For You’
4th: Lauren Wallingford-’Put Your Head On My Shoulder’
4th: Keylee Watkins-’The Source’
5th: Riley Canterbury-’Nothing Compares’
5th: Clara Gough-’Snow Queen of Texas’
5th: Christina Naslund-’So Low’
5th: Megan McAdoo-’Timeless Existence’
5th: Makenna Wallace-’Woman’s Work’
6th: Kendall Scott-’Heart of Glass’
6th: Olivya Sessing-’House On The Hill’
7th: Dakota La Penna-’Dancing Under red Skies’
7th: Britton Moore-’Radiator’
7th: Cameron Suckle-’Sweet Dreams’
8th: Mikaela Quintana-’I Will Rescue You’
8th: Emily Chen-’Mike and Judy’
9th: Jordi Landry-’Far Away’
9th: Eyllah Babbitt-’Only The Bravest’
9th: Kennedy McCann-’Why’
10th: Brooke Ricketts-’Blank Page’
Open Solo
1st: Summer Martin-’Insomnia’
Rookie Duo/Trio
1st: Danceplex-’Stand By Me’
2nd: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Fashionista’
3rd: AVANTI Dance Company-’It Must Be Love’
Mini Duo/Trio
1st: AVANTI Dance Company-’Gracious’
2nd: The Industry Dance Academy-’About That Walk’
3rd: Stars Dance Studio-’Rescue’
Junior Duo/Trio
1st: Elements Dance Space-’Seperate’
2nd: AVANTI Dance Company-’Go Girl’
3rd: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Painted Black’
Teen Duo/Trio
1st: AVANTI Dance Company- ‘Blue Jeans’
2nd: The Dallas Conservatory-’Falling Like The Stars’
3rd: The Dallas Conservatory-’Changes Of The Wind’
Senior Duo/Trio
1st: AVANTI Dance Company-’Small Things’
2nd:  AVANTI Dance Company-’Would You Be Mine’
3rd: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Landslide’
Mini Group
1st: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Hey Pachuco’
2nd: The Industry Dance Academy-’Brighter Days’
2nd: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Nails Hair Hips Heels’
3rd: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Angel’s Staircase’
Junior Group
1st: AVANTI Dance Company-’Clones’
2nd: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Agness’
3rd: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Dreams’
Teen Group
1st: The Industry Dance Academy-’Parachute’
2nd: The Industry Dance Academy-’Pale Yellow’
3rd: The Industry Dance Academy-’In In’
3rd: AVANTI Dance Company-’The Cuckoo’s Nest’
Senior Group
1st: AVANTI Dance Company -’Strange’
2nd: AVANTI Dance Company-’Need U Tonight’
3rd: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Say Goodbye’
Rookie Line
1st: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Minions’
Mini Line
1st: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Enter Sandman’
2nd: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Monsters’
3rd: AVANTI Dance Company-’Work’
Junior Line
1st: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Let’s Get Loud’
2nd: AVANTI Dance Company-’Can You Dig It?’
3rd: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’Sun’
Teen Line
1st: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Bohemian Rhapsody’
1st: AVANTI Dance Company-’Sellers of Flowers’
2nd: AVANTI Dance Company-’Fever’
2nd: AVANTI Dance Company-’Runnin’
3rd: The Industry Dance Academy-’Highway 27′
Senior Line
1st: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’One Eye Open’
Mini Extended Line
1st: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’I Don’t Speak French’
2nd: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’Bills’
Teen Extended Line
1st: AVANTI Dance Company-’What Kind of Man’
2nd: The Industry Dance Academy-’Flashing Lights’
3rd: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’Sinking Deep’
High Scores by Performance Division:
Rookie Hip-Hop
1st: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Minions’
Mini Jazz
1st: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Hey Pachuco’ 2nd: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Nails Hair Hips Heels’ 3rd: The Industry Dance Academy-’Mambo 5′
Mini Ballet
1st: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’Code Name Vivaldi’
Mini Hip-Hop
1st: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Monsters’ 2nd: AVANTI Dance Company-’Mechanics’
Mini Tap
1st: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’Bills’ 2nd: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’Places’
Mini Contemporary
1st: The Industry Dance Academy-’Brighter Days’ 2nd: AVANTI Dance Company-’Glad It’s Raining’ 3rd: AVANTI Dance Company-’Work’
Mini Lyrical
1st: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Angel’s Staircase’ 2nd: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’I Will Always Love You’
Mini Specialty
1st: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Enter Sandman’
Junior Jazz
1st: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Agness’ 2nd: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Let’s Get Loud’ 3rd: AVANTI Dance Company-’Can You Dig It?’
Junior Ballet
1st: The Industry Dance Academy-’Spring’
Junior Hip-Hop
1st: AVANTI Dance Company-’Clones’ 2nd: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’Missy’
Junior Tap
1st: The Industry Dance Academy-’Jitterbug’
Junior Contemporary
1st: The Industry Dance Academy-’Clairvoyance’ 2nd: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’Sun’ 3rd: The Industry Dance Academy-’No Darkness’
Junior Lyrical
1st: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’I Will Rescue You’
Junior Musical Theatre
1st: The Industry Dance Academy-’West Side Story’
Junior Specialty
1st: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Dreams’
Teen Jazz
1st: AVANTI Dance Company-’Fever’ 2nd: AVANTI Dance Company-’Emotional Rescue’ 3rd: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’Bajale’
Teen Hip-Hop
1st: AVANTI Dance Company-’Runnin’
Teen Tap
1st: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’Can’t Hold Us’ 2nd: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’Dress’
Teen Contemporary
1st: AVANTI Dance Company-’What Kind of Man’ 2nd: The Industry Dance Academy-’Parachute’ 3rd: The Industry Dance Academy-’Pale Yellow’
Teen Lyrical
1st: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’Ne Me Quitte Pas’ 2nd: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’I Don’t Think About You’ 3rd: Pure Movement Dance-’You Take My Breath Away’
Teen Ballroom
1st: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’Que Calor’
Teen Specialty
1st: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Bohemian Rhapsody’ 2nd: The Industry Dance Academy-’Flashing Lights’ 3rd: Pure Movement Dance-’Maneater’
Senior Jazz
1st: AVANTI Dance Company-’Need U Tonight’ 2nd: The Industry Dance Academy-’Mein Herr’ 3rd: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’One Eye Open’
Senior Hip-Hop
1st: Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’Formation’
Senior Contemporary
1st: AVANTI Dance Company -’Strange’ 2nd: Soar Dance Academy-’Undertow’ 3rd: Soar Dance Academy-’Reality’
Senior Lyrical
1st: Soar Dance Academy-’Reborn’
Senior Musical Theatre
1st: Pure Movement Dance-’Boots’
Senior Specialty
1st: Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Say Goodbye’ 2nd: Soar Dance Academy-’Nutty As A Fruitcake’
Best of Radix:
Rookie
Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Minions’
Mini
Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Hey Pachuco’
The Industry Dance Academy-’Brighter Days’
Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’I Don’t Speak French’
AVANTI Dance Company-’Glad It’s Raining’
Junior
AVANTI Dance Company-’Clones’
Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Agness’
The Industry Dance Academy-’Clairvoyance’
Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’I Will Rescue You’
Teen
The Industry Dance Academy-’Parachute’
Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Bohemian Rhapsody’
AVANTI Dance Company-’What Kind of Man’
Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’Sinking Deep’
Senior
AVANTI Dance Company-’Strange’
Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Say Goodbye’
Soar Dance Academy-’Undertow’
The Industry Dance Academy-’Mein Herr’
Studio Standout:
The Industry Dance Academy-’Parachute’
Beyond Belief Dance Company-’Bohemian Rhapsody’
Artistry In Motion Performing Arts Center-’Sinking Deep’
AVANTI Dance Company-’What Kind of Man’
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26 Random facts about umbrella academy
1. The Umbrella Academy was written by Gerard Way, the singer of My Chemical Romance, who channeled his own painful feelings into the series when his band was going through turmoil while the verge of breaking up.
2. The Netflix series was originally supposed to be a movie with Universal Pictures.
3. The actor who plays Number Five (Aidan Gallagher) is only 15 years old.
4. Elliot Page said playing the violin is hard work. She actually had a violin double — a 16-year-old prodigy named Imogen.
5. Modern technology does not exist in the Umbrella Academy world. Ellen, Aidan, and Robert Sheehan (who plays Klaus) all agreed that they preferred the world without technology.
6. Aidan was late in auditioning for the role of Five. In fact, he was the last person to read for the part and because of this, thought he didn't have a shot.
7. After Aidan booked the role, he looked to the comics to study the way Gabriel drew Five to make sure he got Five's posture right.
8. Mary J. Blige said she had to go to "really bad places" to get in the mindset of a character (Cha-Cha) who was so empty inside.
9. Mary J. Blige's favorite scene to shoot was the fighting scene with Hazel — but she HATED the masks they had to wear.
10. Aidan's first day on set was shooting the final scene of the pilot with Elliot Page, who plays Vanya.
11. Steve Blackman (the showrunner) was actually concerned about not being able to cast Five. He'd seen hundreds of kids audition, but it wasn't until he got Aidan's tape that he knew that he was perfect for Five.
12. Aidan had read and was a fan of the graphic novels before auditioning.
13. The team who brought Pogo to life were the same ones who worked on Planet of the Apes.
14. While nobody took anything from set, the cast said they were given an umbrella to keep after wrap.
15. The show was filmed in Toronto between the months of January and July.
16. During the funeral scene, it was about negative 10 degrees (!!!!) in Toronto when they had to produce artificial rain to dump upon the cast.
17. You might recognize Emmy Raver-Lampman (who plays Allison) from both Hamilton and Wicked on Broadway.
18. Emmy said the siblings all bonded for the first time when they huddled around the space heaters in between each take of that funeral scene.
19. Emmy and Tom Hopper (who plays Luther) were trying to shoot the telephone booth scene before the sun came up. It was also the last scene to shoot before wrapping the entire season.
20. Emmy says that she considers Tom one of her best friends now.
21. Gerard Way said he began drawing some of the characters for his series backstage before shows.
22. From the get go, Mary J. Blige wanted to do a lot of her own stunts. On the initial call with Blackman she said, "If you let me punch and shoot and do my stunts, I’m in.”
23. In fact, Mary J. Blige had martial arts training every day of the shoot in Toronto.
24. Tom wore a muscle suit to make him look bigger. He originally wanted to bulk up for the role but couldn't gain enough to make his character look the way he should.
25. Cameron Britton (who plays Hazel) knew he would be fast friends with Mary J. Blige when they both realized they had similar styles of humor.
26. Surprisingly, Gerard did not have much input in the music featured in the show. Steve's vision was very specific for the songs he wanted.
*found this on buzzfeed*
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goxinsane · 5 years
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Wanted Opposites!
This isn’t a very important post, especially when I should be doing drafts but if anyone has these faceclaims to go against any of mine, platonically, romantic, strangers, etc. HMU! (MESSAGES!) I will probably already be attached because I just adore ocs, but even better with these fcs. Don’t be discouraged though if you have none, it’s just a post to put out there if you’re interested in checking it out. I will roleplay with the majority of faceclaims except the ones on my banned list. Of course I’ll be open to writing against these faceclaims with any of my other muses, these are just first thoughts. 
** Please bring me your underused faceclaims, poc, ladies, nb, older, etc! They don’t get much love in the indie rpc.
I tried my hardest not to repeat as there are several fcs I’d like for other characters too, but, 
Below the cut is the list:
Angelica Ward:
Dominique P. Chalkley, Kat Barrell, Shamir Anderson, Paige Turco, Natalie Krill, Jodelle Ferland, Megan Follows, Zoie Palmer, Anna Silk, Ksenia Solo. 
Brooklyn Nash:
Cameron Monoghan, Shanola Hampton, Emma Greenwell, Laura Slade Wiggins, Jane Levy, Joel Kinnaman, Ruby Rose, Dermot Mulroney.
Cody Jane:
Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, Alexis Demie, Margaret Qualley, Elliot Fletcher, Noel Fischer, 
Corrine Walker:
Charley Weber, Viola Davis, Matt McGorry, Tom Verica, Karla Souza, AJA Naomi King, Alfred Enoch, Alexis Bledel, Barry Sloan, Keiko Agena.
Dionne Davis:
Kristen Bell, D’Arcy Carden, jode Comer, Sandra Oh, William Jackson Harper, Jameela Jamil, Manny Jacinto, Emma Stone, Tiya Sircar, Adam Scott, Leslie Grossman, Stephan Merchant.
Fitz Stevens: 
Emmy Raver Lampman, Marin Ireland, Drew Barrymore, Robert Sheenan, Laverne Cox, Trace Lysette, Alexandra Billings, Indya Moore, MJ Rodriguez, Jamie Clayton, Gaby Hoffmann, Ritu Arya.
Ireland Magneri: 
Dave Franco, Aubrey Plaza, Gillian jacobs, Joel McHale, Carey Mulligan, Mary Holland, Mackenzie Davis, Bo Burnham.
Kendall Reid:
Alison Brie, Kristen Stewart, Kathryn Hahn, Rashida jones, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michael Cera, Clea Duvall, Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal, Taika Waititi.
Koko Gallagher-Yang:
Ashley Tisdale, Shay Mitchell, Rooney Mara, Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus, Kat Dennings, Brianne Howey, Ruby Rose, Cara Delevigne, Natalia Tena, Oona Chaplin, Ashley Benson, Lucy Hale, Troian Bellisario, Lucy Boynton.
Leona Langford:
David Harbour, Keanu Reeves, Ethan Hawke, Sean Astin, Christian Slater, Anthony Michael Hall, Johnny Depp, Millie Bobby Brown, Carla Buono, Joe Keery, Sadie Sink, Brett Gelman, Davis, Alex Baldwin, Michael Keaton, Catherine O’Hara, Dacre Montgomery, Francesca Reale, Angelina Jolie. 
Lillian Fitzgerald: 
Lili Reinhart, Milo Ventimiglia Sarah Paulson, Patrick Wilson, Evan Peters, Jessica Lange, Hamish Lanklater, Kyle Breitkopf, Connie Britton, Cody Fern, Zachary Quinto. 
Lorelai Bajwa Kapoor:
Mindy Kaling, Sara Ramirez, Tom Hopper, David Casteneda, Jake Epstein, Zoe Kravtiz, Perry Mattfield, Jode Whittaker, Pearl Mackie, 
Opal Riverand:
Cole/Dylan Sprouse, Camila Mendes, Reese Witherspoon, Molly Ringwald, Charles Merton, Madelaine Petsch, Mark Consuelos, Karlie Kloss, Keke Palmer, Vanessa Morgan, Marisol Nichols, Madchen Amick, Molly Ringwald, Skeet Ulrich. 
Penelope Banks:
Matt Czuchry,  Liza Weil, Lauren Graham, Samira Wiley, America Ferrera, Ashley Graham, Blake Lively, Amber Tamblyn, Amanda Seyfried, Lily James, Rosamund Pike, Chris Pine, Chris Pratt, Chris Evans.
Samantha North: 
Bonnie Wright, Natalia Tena, Kristen Stewart, Emilia Clarke, Piper Perabo, Lena Headey, Evanna Lynch, Mae Whitman, Kate Walsh, Ellen Page, Demi Moore, Jennifer Connolly, Cate Blanchett, Mandy Moore, Jennifer Gardner. 
Victoria Wilson: 
Rainn Wilson, Ed Helms, Steve Carrell, John Kransinski, Idris Elba, Jenna Fischer, Amy Ryan, Creed Bratton, Kate Flannery, Rachael Harris.
Zainab Abbott: 
Jim Howick, David Tennant, Hannah Waddingham, Jason Isaacs, Idris Elba, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juno Temple, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jeff Goldblum,  Willem Dafoe, Elizabeth Mitchell, Emily Blunt, Anne Hathway, Jon Hamm, Stellan Skarsgaard, Helena Bonham Carter, Sarah Lancashire, Siobhan Finneran, Dev Patel. Catherine Zeta Jones. 
Zero:
Hunter Schafer, Bella Thorne, Hailee Steinfeld, Jennifer Tilly, Barbie Ferreira, Maya Hawke, Maude Apatow, Diana Silvers, Saoirse Ronan, Talulah Riley.
Faces I’d love to interact with anyways: Lily Rabe, LP (the singer), Lana Del Rey, Winona Ryder, Stefanie Scott, Billie Ellish, Natalia Dyer, Natalie Portman, Natalie Dormer, Stella Maeve, Thomas Sangster, Most Drag Queens, Asia Kate Dillon, Halston Sage, Haley Lu Richardson, Shane West, Chris Meloni,  Selena Gomez, Jamie Bell, Charlie Rowe,  Kit Harrington, Matt Smith, Himseh Patel, Ansel Elgort, Lily Collins,  Katie Leung, Brendan Gleeson, Lea Seydoux, Rupert Grint, Domnhall Gleeson, Tom Felton, Allison Scalglotti, Ben Hardy, Chloe Sevigny,  David Tennant, Catherine Tate, Michael Sheen, Melanie Laurent, Rami Malek, etc.
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Netflix's 'Mindhunter' Drops Interactive First Look at Season 2
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by Jackie Strause   JULY 17, 2019
The trailer and a trove of photos were presented to press on Wednesday as an experience, making the serial killer drama the latest to take advantage of the streaming giant's push into interactivity. 
Netflix's Mindhunter wants members of the press curate their own first look at season two.
Ahead of the Aug. 16 return of the serial killer series, David Fincher and the team behind the Netflix series released a trove of images and the trailer for season two of Mindhunter — but there was a catch. The first look was presented to press as an interactive experience on Wednesday, and it boasted 200-plus images from the second season to explore before the trailer was unlocked and could be viewed.
The images — eight of which are embedded below — offered a deeper look into what is to come when FBI agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) return with nine new episodes.
Mindhunter offers a rigorous study of the damaged psyches of serial killers and the innovative FBI agents who attempt to understand and catch them. So it's fitting that the series would offer this challenge of a first-look exploration into what the new season has to offer. The images revealed the anticipated debuts of Charles Manson and Son of Sam, and the return of the BKT Strangler, as some of the second season's serial killer targets.
But they also paint a broader picture of the season, which will see Ford and Tench, along with Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), probing further into the psyches of their subjects as they apply their groundbreaking behavioral analysis to hunting notorious serial killers. And the focus will be on the Atlanta child murders of 1979-1981 in Georgia.
The 1977-set first season followed Ford and Tench, agents in the FBI serial crime unit, along with psychologist Carr, as they interviewed and studied a string of well-known violent offenders, ultimately coining the "serial killer" term and launching the bureau's real-life Behavioral Science Unit. Known murderers portrayed on the first season included the BTK Killer, Richard Speck, Jerry Brudos and Edmund Kemper, aka the Co-Ed Killer, who is played by standout actor Cameron Britton.
The first season ended on an emotional cliffhanger for Ford and the new images reveal that he indeed returns to his work. Among the images is Ed Kemper to mark the return of Britton, who seems to play a key role from the trailer. The first footage shows both Ford and Tench revisiting Kemper to seek help with a new case.
"Have you got somebody, Holden? Somebody you can't catch?" Kemper asks the duo in the trailer, as a woman is shown frightened in her home. "This person you are after, he has an overwhelming fantasy life," Kemper continues, as the scenes shifts to introduce the Atlanta child murders storyline. "Fantasies of what he's done. What he wants to do," Kemper continues. "His dreams will consume him. Soon, the real world too much to bear."
When Tench asks, "How do we catch a fantasy?" Kemper answers, "If he's any good, you cant." The trailer ends with the woman from the beginning screaming at whatever she has uncovered in her bathroom.
The new images also reveal new castmembers including Joe Tuttle, Albert Jones, Stacey Roca, Michael Cerveris, Lauren Glazier and Sierra McClain.
When the second season was announced (in November 2017), it sparked speculation about the famous killers who might be featured. Charles Manson, David Berkowitz (aka the Son of Sam) and Dennis Rader, the BKT Strangler who was teased in season one, will all be featured. But the season will mainly focus on the Atlanta child murders, according to Fincher. During a recent podcast, the filmmaker said, “We could probably have done three seasons on the Atlanta child murders. It’s a huge and sweeping and tragic story." He also said the second season would be about evolution and the FBI being "dragged, kicking and screaming, into the present."
The critically acclaimed 10-episode first season of Mindhunter released October 2017 and marked Fincher's (Seven, Zodiac) return to Netflix after directing early episodes of House of Cards.
With Tuesday's unique drop, Mindhunter becomes the latest Netflix series to take advantage of the streaming giant's push into the interactive genre and the first to utilize the technology from a marketing perspective, instead of a storytelling one.
After first launching with interactive kids programming, Netflix debuted interactive programming with the immersive and now Emmy-nominated Black Mirror: Bandersnatch in late 2018 and has continued to roll out interactive content with Bear Grylls' You vs. Wild and the upcoming Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt interactive special. Netflix's push into interactive content also follows the Mosaic branching narrative-app, which launched in early 2018 alongside HBO's miniseries from Steven Soderbergh.
Inspired by the memoir of FBI veteran John R Douglas, Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, Mindhunter was created by Joe Penhall (The Road) and is executive produced by Fincher — who also directed four episodes of season one and will helm some of season two — along with Charlize Theron, Joshua Donen, Cean Chaffin, Beth Kono and Courtenay Miles.
The second season of Mindhunter releases Aug. 16 on Netflix. Stay tuned for the trailer to drop and check out The Hollywood Reporter's curated first look at season two below.
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Source: THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
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constantlyirksome · 5 years
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Are you Cool Enough to Join the Umbrella Academy? (Season 1, no spoiler review.
Have you heard the one about the astronaut, the talking monkey and the violinist? Last week Netflix released it’s newest superhero offering, “The Umbrella Academy,” originally an indie comic written by Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance fame. Published by Dark Horse Comics, this is one of the first adaptions from an independent publisher, untethered to the Marvel or DC cinematic universe. Publishers aside The Umbrella Academy has enough unique style and story element to attract anyone suffering from SHFF (SuperHero Film Fatigue.) The story revolves around a family of six siblings, born across the globe to mothers who weren’t pregnant the day before, who all possess certain super human talents. Brought together by a careless billionaire scientist who wanted to build an army of super children, the now estranged siblings have to come together once again when their dear old dad kicks the bucket. As family secrets are revealed, tensions between the group become palpable, as they struggle to deal with past traumas, while trying to come together to save the world from a deadly fate. For the most part the six siblings are all very unique, from both each other and a lot of the other types of heroes you’d see from the Big Two studio. There’s Luther (Tom Hopper), an astronaut with super human strength. Alison (Emmy Raver-Lapman) is a glamorous movie star, who has built her life using her power to persuade others to do what she wants. Diego is an expert knife thrower who still moonlights as a vigilante. Klaus (Robert Sheehan), the family’s black sheep, is a drug addict who can talk to dead people. Vanya (Ellen Page) is the only sibling with no evident superpowers and is told by her father often and at length that she is nothing special. Number 5 is a time and space traveller who disappeared when the group were little, and he reappears in the present, looking just like the 13 year old who disappeared decades earlier. There was a seventh sibling, Ben (Justin H. Min) who died mysteriously while 5 was absent, and is now a ghost who can only talk to Klaus. He was the strongest, able to conjure ancient beasts from his skin to smash up bad guys. The central plot revolves around an upcoming apocalypse prophesized by five to happen in one week. Sometimes this main plot point becomes a little thin in early episodes as the siblings are distracted with their own troubles, and a clear way forward isn’t really established until mid way through. The second half pushes forward hard and fast as the apocalypse approaches, and relationships begin to splinter. While the first few episodes lack clear purpose they act as a good six origin stories, which help the season feel like both a beginning, there’s enough action and intent to make it a possible stand alone if there are no more seasons. As superpowers go the group have a pretty stacked deck. In a team there are usually a few cool powers and a few trained assassins, or a super genius. The members of the Academy however are all strong, powers honed by their strict father to be the perfect weapons. Super strength isn’t anything new but Luther makes up for it with a super ego and a super sense of self-importance. Diego is the Hawkeye of the group power wise personally if I had siblings who could conjure the dead or teleport, throwing knives would seem pretty lame. Each sibling carries on their own side story, the outlines how their powers have in some way or another ruined their lives. Obviously Ben had it the worst because he, well, died but most of the others have highly compelling stories. Alison used her powers on too many wrong people, leaving her personal life in shambles. Klaus, so haunted and terrorised by the dead, had to take up drugs to drown out the noise. Number 5 was ripped away from his family and spent, let’s just say, a lengthy amount of time trying to get back, and is now being hunted down by time cops Cha-Cha (Mary J Blige) and Hazel (Cameron Britton.) Diego and Luther however lack any sort of story worth getting teary over. Perpetual man children who never grew out of wanting to be the hero, they spend much of the season bickering, swinging their metaphorical dicks around and generally not helping the situation. While David Casteñeda does an admirable job of injecting Diego with some much needed heart, Luther’s character falls flat in almost every category. You almost want to root against him the way he mistreats people and feels sorry for himself. (Fake looking muscles and a weird sub-plot with incestuous undertones don’t help at all. Technicalities or no, the uncomfortable relationship between Luther and Allison is creepy and makes both characters slightly off-putting. While Aidan Gallagher plays Number five with a perfect mix of teenage snark and a world weariness that comes only after you’ve seen some shit, it’s Page and Sheehan who carry much of the seasons emotional heavy lifting. Sheehan, known mainly for his roll as the scene stealing Nathan from the show Misfits, once again steals the show as Klaus. Kooky yet troubled, hilarious yet haunted, the actor is mesmerising as he stumbles, high usually, through life. Without knowing his full backstory you can tell, through glances or certain lines, that this character is deeply disturbed, and not just a token junkie. He also is one half of the most touching, if not woefully under-developed, relationships toward the end of the series as Number 5’s time hopping shenanigans start to affect his siblings. Ellen Page, (think Juno) as Vanya is the character most grounded in reality, having grown up “normal” Page is perfect as a tired, shunted sister, the perfect person to stand in the middle of some of the seasons juicer plot points. Having written a book about her mistreatment as a child, Vanya is alienated from the rest of the family, is while sometimes morose also very raw. Page wearily moves through scenes with characters that are far whackier, but still holds her own. When the main story focuses, and Vanya takes centre stage, her inner turmoil and fractured relationships make for some of the seasons most gripping scenes. The world in which the siblings live is bleak, grimy and wild. Most scenes take place in run down diners or hotels, or in the decaying facades of the family mansion, with just enough colour and intrigue to keep the show from becoming depressing or drab. During flashback scenes the group, as children, wear matching school uniform in a kooky, Tim Burton like house. There are scenes on the moon, in glamorous Hollywood events, and gnarly apocalyptic wastelands that keep the settings fresh. The influence of comic writer Gerard Way comes through in the children’s uniforms, the matching black umbrellas and the architecture of the mansion, you can sometimes see how the comic was created by the same man who sang the Black Parade. Costuming does an excellent job chiselling out the identities of the siblings. The glamorous Allison in her red carpet dresses, the unassuming Vanya in her drab denims, and he badass Diego who wears all black. However, Klaus beats them all, as in every scene he’s wearing a new whacky ensemble, perfectly matching feminine and masculine, none of the pieces like skirts, flowy jackets or crop tops seemingly go together, but it works. Cha-Cha and Hazel steal their costumes straight out of Fortnite, the contrast between their cop uniforms and their giant animal head helmets is hilarious and unsettling. While the plot sometimes stretches a little thin between characters, The Umbrella Academy succeeds in breaking the traditional superhero tropes by imbuing the characters with more depth, personality beyond gruff tortured crusaders, and individual styles that both ground them, and elevate them so that they remain sympathetic. Not out as actual heroes since their teens, their humanity makes every fight or drama more climactic. As the apocalypse comes closer and the tension builds, it’s never actually certain that the siblings will actually win against whatever or whoever causes the apocalypse. The future of the show, whether it will get renewed or not, and the future of the world may remain uncertain it’s definitely worth exploring the futures of each of these characters. How will they and their powers grow? Will we ever find out how Luther got to the moon? Why was their dad such a dick? Watch this new season and you will definitely want to find out. Also their butler is a talking monkey named Pogo.
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tenebrix · 5 years
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The Umbrella Academy review
OK, so I haven’t done this in a looooooong time... 
But, here is my review of season 1 of the Umbrella Academy. 
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The Umbrella Academy is an adaptation from the Dark Horse Comics publication of the same name by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba. The basic premise of the story is in 1989 43 women unexpectedly and without any sort of connection became pregnant and gave birth to 43 children. Sir Reginald Hargreeves sets out to adopt as many of these children as he could, he found seven. This is not your typical superhero team, to start with they mostly all hate each other, mistrust one another, and they all have some serious daddy issues. When we are introduced to the Academy they are already disbanded, one of their own has been missing for some time and another died under mysterious and violent circumstances. They are brought together for the funeral of their father. It is during the funeral that Number Five returns from the future with a warning. “The world is going to end in eight days.”
The majority of the events of season one are taken from vol 1: The Apocalypse Suite and some elements from vol 2: Dallas. The show does a rarely good weiving of the events of the story to make its own path. The show uses the element of time travel as a very important backbone for the story, within the comics this plays out more in Dallas. As well, the argument can be made that the true villain of the season was not the White Violin but the Commission. At certain moments the show felt dragged and slow, the dialogue felt the same daddy issue or just bland writing. But the show has its moments in which it picked up the paced and the story began to deliver it’s potential. One of the many comparisons that have been made about the show is House of Haunted Hill with X-Men, I would agree with the comparison of the family dynamic with the meta-human aspect. Music plays a very important part in the show, it’s can be even viewed as an emotional drive of the story. My one problem is that at times during action sequences it felt like certain camera movements were lacking any sort of sharpness of clear style of what it wanted to be. Does it what to be Zack Snyder or does it want to keep it real time? The weird slow-mo at certain moments it looks sloppy. One can tell that the majority of the budget of the show went, if not to Ms. Kate Walsh, it went into the creation of Pogo, Sir Reginald’s talking chimp. Pogo looks beautiful in his scenes, he really does come to life when he appears with the other characters. Because of this, I think it’s why Ellen Page’s White Violin transformation suffered. The end result was a bit lackluster in what the comic present. Of course, having Ellen Page turn into a literal human violin would be a bit too much. But, the pale makeup with white glowy contacts that was used in the show was really a poor choice of what could have been done.
The general performance from the actors in the show was fairly good for the most part. At certain moments the performance feels very bland and humorless, but again taking into account that this group of people doesn’t really get along, like each other, have kept in contact for some time, and again the “cornerstone of their story” their daddy issues. It felt deliberate that the scenes were carried out that way, slow, dragged out moments between people who can’t get along. Granted after a while it was overplayed it wasn’t until the end that, perhaps, they may have overcome that and can now hold a conversation without making us the viewer uncomfortable in season 2? Who knows. The potential for this show to expand is great, but the problem will come with what they are willing to sacrifice budget wise moving forward with the CGI. The one thing that I found a bit distracting was Vanya Hargreeves, Number 7, looked too much like Ellen Page. it doesn't seem like she did so much to create a character that is different from who she is. I wasn’t a fan of Number 3, Allison Hargreeves, in the comics, still not a fan in the show. Emmy Raver-Lampman as Number 3 did a good job. Still, not my favorite character. Number 2, Diego Hargreeves played by David Castanada, was brilliant! Granted we didn’t get to see the Kraken use his power of holding his breath underwater, we mostly were treated with his expert aiming skills. HIs relationship with Dec. Eruda Patch was meh, there was hardly any time to develop some sort of emotional groundwork for what happens next to them. Number 6, Ben Hargreeves, is dead but we got treated with his presence as a ghost, that being said I need more of Justin H. Min’s performance as Ben in the next season! MORE OF NUMBER 6! Number 4, Klaus Hargreeves, played by Rober Sheehan did much better than I expected. This is one of the examples of characters that suffered because of the budget. Number 4 in the comic hovers over the ground, and he needs to be barefooted in order for his powers to work. Also, like many characters who have the abilities to read minds or seeing the dead, he falls victim to the stereotype of the character who has to be under a heavy amount of drugs in order to function. Thankfully Sookie Stackhouse, from True Blood, didn’t fall victim to this. Number 1, Luthor Hargreeves, played by Tom Hooper, I mean where do I begin with this one. The bodysuit needed A LOT of work and I do mean A LOT of work. His performance was ok for the one note for a broody character with severe daddy issues, you know like Bruce Wayne minus the money. His performance was good for the most part, again one note with the same repetitive issues. But it improves none the less. Number 5, The Boy, played by Aiden Gallagher, he was meh. To be fair, good actor, but, again typical stuff when you ask a young actor to portray someone who is older than them; broody, humorless, angry, drunk, and some sort of weird attraction to an inanimate object. I personally think, the actor looks too old for the role, but again my opinion. He was also missing the savage killer aspect fo the character. I kept hoping for Number 5 to cut loose as he does in the comic and we get to see more from him. HIs relationship with Delores the Mannequin was cute and weird. Mary J. Blige as Cha-Cha and Cameron Britton as Hazel brilliant casting, their characters needed to be a bit more fleshed out. Their companionship was a good match, their comedic timing needed A LOT of work. But, still, they have the potential for improvement. Kate Walsh as the Handler from the Commission, YES! I need more of Kate Walsh! I just need her to become the overall villain in the show, or I just need her to be more in the show. The Commission has the possibility to be a great main antagonist for the Academy if they don’t plan on bringing Doctor Terminal any time soon.
In Conclusion, the Umbrella Academy season 1 adds itself to a buffet of comic book related tv shows, yet it sets itself apart for its main focus on family dynamic and focusing on the hero aspect second. The show has a lot of ground to play with and given the freedom to follow the comics or expand on their own it leaves the door open to a series of stories to be told, hopefully not all will be “Daddy-centric”. The show is not perfect no first season ever is, but it was the potential, it has also laid a good foundation to grow from and make it a good show. As for season 2, more Time Travel, more Kate Walsh and bring Doctor Terminal. I would like for the show to explore more Sir Reginald’s background a bit more and show the audience that he is not human but an alien, spoilers for those who haven’t read the comic. Also, Abhijat needs to show up in the show, REPRESENTATION MATTERS! The Umbrella Academy is a solid B+, it’s a slow start but it picks up. Is it binge-worthy? That’s up to you.
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The Umbrella Academy‘s first season is a bit hit and miss, but by the final, it seems to have found its footing.
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Network Netflix Creator Gerard Way, Gabriel Ba, Steve Blackman Genre Sci-Fi, Drama, Comedy Good If You Like Melodrama Isn’t For You If You Don’t Like Superheroes Who Don’t Use Their Powers Often To Fight Crime
Like Charismatic Villains
Think Most CW Shows Are Trash
Noted Cast Reginald Colm Feore Luther Tom Hopper Diego David Castañeda Allison Emmy Raver-Lampman Klaus Robert Sheehan Number Five Aidan Gallagher Ben Justin H. Min Vanya Ellen Page Cha-Cha Mary J. Blige Hazel Cameron Britton The Handler Kate Walsh Leonard John Magaro
Summary
It all began October 1st, 1989 when 43 women gave birth to kids immaculately. Originally, the whole world was supposed to end approximately 25 years later. However, the members of The Umbrella Academy, founded by eccentric billionaire Reginald Hargreeves, were recruited to stop that, and various crimes. The members, who began their training before they were even 12 were the following: Number 1 (Luther) who had strength beyond the average human; Number 2 (Diego) who is a master with projectiles; Number 3 (Allison) who with saying “I Heard A Rumor” could manipulate anyone to do or forget anything; Number 4 (Klaus) who has the ability to communicate with the dead, and more; Number 5 (No Alias) who can teleport towards the future, past, and to different locations in the present; Number 6 (Ben) who could unleash a monster with tentacles to fight for him; and Number 7 (Vanya) who we are led to believe is powerless.
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Together, minus Vanya, these children were trained for great things. However, by the time they are adults, most have left Reginald and The Umbrella Academy behind for various reasons. Be it Allison wanting to become a famous actress, Diego wanting to operate outside Reginald’s assigned missions, or just not wanting to deal with the indifferent nature of Reginald who barely seems to like most of his children. But, upon his death, they all come together and between investigating how he died, and Five returning after disappearing for years, so begins the first season which focuses on how to stop a pending apocalypse. One which will require them to work together unless they want to meet the same fate Five escaped from.
Highlights
What Ellen Page Brings To This
Vanya (Ellen Page)
Recognizing not everyone is an Ellen Page fan, I honestly think she was the best actor out of all of them. As noted in the recaps, she brought a seriousness to the show, consistency in emotions, that we don’t really get from everyone else. While we hear the other actors, and their characters, vent about their childhood, adult life, and have these very forced upon emotional moments, it feels rather natural for Page.
For whether it is just her character being unwilling to hold most people’s glance, apologizing for existing sometimes, and other little things, you get a quality performance. Albeit one which barely fits in with the tone the show has, but towards the end, it becomes less of an outlier and more so something for this show to aim towards. Thus pushing the writing and Page’s peers to the point of trying to match her.
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Low Points
The Superhero Element Isn’t Tapped Into Much
If you’re expecting powers to be used in masse, crime fighting to happen, epic fights, and things of that nature? Well, you might be disappointed. There are only two to three big fights in the entire season, and two of the three are in the season finale. A finale which finally lets us see Klaus’ power in force, as well as see how Ben’s power works – since Klaus passively conjures him up, even when high – which makes little sense considering being high is supposed to numb his powers.
As for the rest, again, it is only in those three fights we really see their powers, sans Allison who doesn’t use her skills for reasons noted in the season.
In The Beginning, It Cheaply Tries To Make You Emotional
We’re told, fairly often, that things weren’t good in anyone’s childhood and with each other so for 12 or 13 years, the family didn’t speak to one another. Also, we see Reginald, while testing his kids’ capabilities, would borderline torture them. Klaus, for example, was locked in a mausoleum to get over his fear of the dead – didn’t happen. Also, Allison was used and allowed to use, her powers to manipulate people – including for Reginald’s use. Making it so, when she became a mom, she found herself even using that power on her daughter.
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But, there are other things. People die, and you can tell that it is supposed to affect you. There are multiple betrayals as well, and a bunch of drama which is made to be a big thing, but likely won’t hit you emotionally. They are just things noted to keep things chugging along, not so much the type of events which deepen your investment.
The Villains Were Lackluster
Hazel (Cameron Britton)
The Handler (Kate Walsh)
Cha-Cha (Mary J. Blige)
Being that this is based on a comic book, you’d think the villains would be spectacular, the organization they worked for would be sinister, complex, and more, but that’s not the case. The Commission’s mission is explained, and we do get to see inside of it, but how it was created, whether there is competition, and how does it decide what timeline is correct, that isn’t gone into. Mind you, most episodes are almost 60 minutes so not learning those nuggets make it so there is a bit of a gray area. Not the kind which complicates things, but more so leaves fans to make theories or feel pushed to read the comic if they want answers.
But, setting aside the organization and talking about their representatives, things aren’t much better. Cha-Cha and Hazel come off fearsome at first. However, like the majority of the characters, they are infected with this tone of appearing serious, but being low-key bumbling fools. So with each failure and their reaction being to strip away any and all mystique, it kills any sense of them being menacing or people to worry about.
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Then with the Handler, while she isn’t as exploited as Cha-Cha and Hazel, she doesn’t have the appeal of the villain with Cha-Cha and Hazel being her minions. She makes it clear she is just a recruiter, if not middle management. Thus taking away from any power or mystique she could have. Leaving us essentially without a villain besides the childhood trauma everyone, especially Vanya, are dealing with.
On The Fence
Some Call It Weird, I’d Say Awkward
 “Weird” is a term often used when this show is described, and I’d say the show is more so awkward. Acknowledging the source material began nearly a decade ago, there are times when you feel the show, in an effort to not be compared to X-Men, among other properties, tries to dodge comparisons and ends up in a ditch. There is also a problem of either trying too hard, like Klaus being a comic relief and not going far enough.
Now, the Klaus example one could write off easily as Robert Sheehan giving the fans what they want. However, when it comes to the “not going far enough” comment, the issue is how the show develops its characters. When it comes to Leonard, for example, there is no subtly when it comes to revealing who he is. He is made suspicious early on, and it makes the big reveal fall flat. The same could be said for Allison and Luther’s relationship and Diego and Eudora’s relationship. This show, awkwardly, tries to make these emotional connections, craft what should be major betrayals, but often times they feel dialed in.
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Leading to, as seen in episodic recaps, the show coming to the point where it is hard to get through since it doesn’t seem to have much going for it beyond a budget and big-name stars. Yet, one could write the awkwardness, weirdness, are first season jitters. Both the writers and actors getting a groove, if you will. For by the time we’re in the final two episodes, there is some kind of rhythm, the emotional moments are set up better, and could get a real reaction out of you. That is, compared to what they were early on which often felt cheap and desperate.
Overall: Mixed (Stick Around)
I feel like many of Netflix’s shows, this wasn’t necessarily adapted to be binged. It was made for a six to seven day forgiveness period so its flaws could be excused, its pacing wouldn’t seem so slow, and you didn’t experience the production as a whole, fatigue and all. Which I feel is a factor in the mixed rating. However, the bigger issue was not having a hook until damn near the end. The characters were a bore, the storyline never made the villains or the apocalypse that big of a thing, and the relationship drama, be it family or romantic, never reached a point where you could use that as a selling point.
Yet, because of the ending, that is why it is being noted to stick around. In general, most shows are figuring out how to handle their writers and performers and how to get the best out of them. Add in this being an established property, and that means trying to figure out what stories should be saved, held for the second season, and what can be done considering the budget. So while, by no means, over the moon when it comes to season 1 of The Umbrella Academy, this is getting a mixed label since it seems it can get better and is trying to. Rather than it feeling settled in the way it is, so you can take it or leave it, the last two episodes pushed the idea season 2 could give us everything season 1 struggled with. And sometimes, just leaving people with hope is all that is necessary to maintain their loyalty.
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Has Another Season Been Confirmed?: Not yet.
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The Umbrella Academy #UmbrellaAcademy: Season 1 - Recap, Review (with Spoilers) The Umbrella Academy's first season is a bit hit and miss, but by the final, it seems to have found its footing.
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geeks-n-stuff · 5 years
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Competing projects with more than passing similarities happen all the time. It was that way with Armageddon and Deep Impact, or Volcano and Dante’s Peak. And now, two streaming services have similar television projects hitting at the same time — dysfunctional superhero family projects, to be exact. DC Universe has the weird heroic zeroes of Doom Patrol and Netflix has the flawed family dynamics of The Umbrella Academy. Both are worth checking out, as they each deliver a fun take on tales of broken outcasts compelled to do good by virtue of their extraordinary abilities, but it’s the latter, with its Succession-meets-The-X-Men sensibilities and Royal Tenenbaums-like construction that is ultimately the more all-around enjoyably weird, giddily crafted, and memorable superhero series. 
Adapted from the Dark Horse comic of the same name from Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, The Umbrella Academy was developed for television by Steve Blackman (Legion, Altered Carbon) and FOX’s The Exorcist TV series creator Jeremy Slater. The result is an energetically weird series, one where the weirder it gets the more engaging it becomes. That’s mainly due to how the weirdness is in every atom of its being, from its disbanded and dysfunctional family of domino mask-wearing do-gooders to its increasingly bizarre storyline — a mystery about the encroaching end of the world. Yet the enigma of the end of days is only a portion of what The Umbrella Academy ultimately has on tap, as the series gleefully observes such genre staples as vigilantism, time travel, necromancy, and more, wrapping each up in a soiled cloth of familial angst. Oh, the series also has an anthropomorphized chimpanzee named Pogo and a malfunctioning robot matriarch, in case you thought it couldn’t get any more eccentric.
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It’s those eccentricities that make the series so appealing at first glance, but The Umbrella Academy doesn’t overplay its hand. Instead, the series leans into its unconventionality with a narrative that neither tries to explain nor justify itself — it simply just is. That kind of confidence is an appreciable abnormality in its own right, particularly with a piece of IP that’s as relatively new and untested as this one. It begins with an outlandish conceit: one day, 43 women around the world found themselves suddenly in labor, where moments before they had not even been pregnant. An eccentric billionaire by the name of Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore) went about attempting to adopt (really it was more like purchase) these abnormalities and ended up with seven of them. And with his seven children, whom he referred to by number, in the order in which they were acquired, Hargreeves formed a superhero outfit called The Umbrella Academy.
Though the de facto family, comprised of Luther/Number 1 (Tom Hopper), Diego/Number 2 (David Casteñeda), Allison/Number 3 (Emmy Raver-Lampman), Klaus/Number 4 (Robert Sheehan), Number Five (Aidan Gallagher), Number 6, and Vanya/Number 7 (Ellen Page), had their day in the sun several years ago, they’re something of a semi-forgotten pop culture relic when the series picks up. Number 5 has been missing for years, one member of the team is dead, and Vanya has been ostensibly ostracized for writing a tell-all about the family years before Sir Hargreeves’s death, which acts as the catalyst for bringing what’s left of the family back together.
With its mystery of the apocalypse, questions surrounding Sir Hargreeves’s passing, the unresolved conflicts between siblings and parents alike, plus a pair of ultra-violent assassins played by Mary J. Blige and Cameron Britton (Mindhunter), the series has an inordinate amount of story to tell. That helps make the 10-episode run more justifiable, as The Umbrella Academy, for the most part, avoids the pitfalls of so many Netflix — and other streaming service shows — by not falling into a listless standstill midway through the season.
Part of that is due to the sheer number of individual storylines it has to juggle, and part of its is due to the structure of the series itself. Like last year’s The Haunting of Hill House, The Umbrella Academy utilizes dual past and present narratives about a fractured family to great effect. It also doesn’t hurt that each episode makes a point to feature at least one infectiously exuberant action sequence set to a pop song — a tool that winds up giving the series one of the best soundtracks on television in a long time.
In as much as it sounds like a blockbuster, The Umbrella Academy looks the part, too. Pogo, a CGI creation, is every bit as convincing and emotive as the intelligent primates from the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy. Add to that the show’s fantastical, slightly askew world that at times looks as though pages from the comic book have literally sprung to life, and the manner in which the show brings its characters’ unusual and original powers to the screen, and what’s left is a thoroughly original new offering that’s fit to binge. Most of all, though, despite its dense narrative, multiple character arcs, and twisty structure with a world-ending mystery at its center, The Umbrella Academy never forgets that it’s here to have fun. It’s that last part that will likely prove to be most important in the long run. Viewers have plenty of options when it comes to their superhero TV shows and movies, but this particular super-weird superhero showdown that The Umbrella Academy finds itself involved in just might be won by virtue of the Netflix series’ willingness to out-weird the competition and have fun doing it.
-STARLORD
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aion-rsa · 5 years
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The Umbrella Academy Review (Spoiler Free)
http://bit.ly/2UGi03k
Netflix's The Umbrella Academy is an admirable attempt to bring the comic to the small screen that ultimately misses the mark.
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This Umbrella Academy review does not contain spoilers.
Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba's The Umbrella Academy, which opens with the spontaneous birth of 43 superpowered babies right at the moment a wrestler elbow drops a giant space squid in the ring, might be unadaptable. Despite its best efforts to capture the delightful weirdness of the comic as well as expand on some of the storylines only hinted at in the book, the new Netflix series is ultimately too grounded and sluggish to really keep us invested. The series never quite finds its rhythm until the very end and is surprisingly dull throughout, especially in the first few exposition-heavy episodes. 
The Umbrella Academy is the story of the Hargreeves orphans, a super-powered group of kids mysteriously born at the exact same time in different parts of the world, who are trained by their cold and manipulative adoptive father, Sir Reginald Hargreeves, to save the world. Originally a famous superhero team of seven -- Luther, Diego, Allison, Klaus, Number Five, Ben, and Vanya -- the family slowly begins to decay as the years go by. One sibling dies during a mission while Number Five capriciously travels far into the future against his father's wishes, never to be seen again. Most of the others eventually pack up and leave the Academy when they're old enough.
When the series begins, it's been 12 years since the team was together. But when Sir Reginald suddenly dies -- seemingly of natural causes, although Luther (Tom Hopper), the loyal leader of the team, is not so sure -- his adult children are forced into a nightmarish family reunion and back into old habits. As you would expect, things do not go well. 
It should be said up front that viewers expecting an action-packed superhero romp or something akin to Netflix's Marvel lineup will be sorely disappointed. The Umbrella Academy is not that kind of show, trading in the action sequences (of which there are very few) for slightly long-winded family drama. Of course, this won't surprise fans of the Eisner-winning series, itself a deconstruction of iconic superhero teams such as the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and most importantly, DC's Doom Patrol, one of the comic's major influences. While the Netflix series does an admirable job of trying to captivate its audience with this particularly dysfunctional family of super-weirdos, it does so at the expense of its pacing. The Umbrella Academy is incredibly slow. 
The show's biggest problem is that it tries to stretch the book's six-issue first volume, "Apocalypse Suite," into 10 50-minute episodes, with bits and pieces of the second arc, "Dallas," thrown in. It's clear two or three episodes in that the show doesn't have enough material to keep things moving to the end, so showrunner Steve Blackman (Altered Carbon) and writer Jeremy Slater (Fantastic Four) crafted new storylines and expanded others while also remixing a few of the comic's character arcs. Unfortunately, these "bonus" scenes and new subplots rarely work. At times, they're actually detrimental to the characters. 
Further Reading: Gerard Way on Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion
This is largely the case for protagonist Vanya Hargreeves (Ellen Page), who is inexplicably thrust into an unnecessary romantic subplot. In the comics, Vanya is an outcast, neglected by the emotionally abusive Sir Reginald and sidelined by her narcissistic siblings. When her father dies, she's lonely and without a support system, harboring a quiet animosity towards her brothers and sisters, who are too busy dealing with their own drama to notice her. They've never let her in, even with her father removed from the equation. So when Vanya makes the choice to leave the family behind and go her own way, it's not really all that surprising.
The show, on the other hand, puts Vanya in an awkward relationship in order to flesh out another major player from the comics. The problem might be that the show never fully commits to the relationship, spoiling a big twist before we're ever really even invested in Vanya's love life. In the end, Vanya's story feels diluted by the additional subplot.
It's all in service of getting this show, which could have easily been two or three episodes shorter, to the finish line. Other annoying additions include a murder mystery surrounding Diego (David Castaneda), the family's robotic caretaker Mom (Jordan Claire Robbins), and their super-intelligent chimpanzee friend Pogo (Adam Godley); and an extended look at time-traveling assassins Cha-Cha (Mary J. Blige) and Hazel (Cameron Britton), who also falls victim to a strange romantic storyline. In the case of the murder mystery, the family members search for Sir Reginald's missing monocle -- which might provide evidence of foul play in connection to his death -- but it never really goes anywhere. To make matters worse, the show basically gives up on the yarn in the third act, giving the audience the answer with a few lines of exposition.
Meanwhile, troubled, drug-addicted Klaus (Robert Sheehan) gets much more screentime than comic fans might expect, and Sheehan is excellent in the role as if it were written for him. But too often, perhaps inspired by Sheehan's outrageous performance as Nathan Young in Misfits, the character is played for laughs. The result is a joke that begins to feel repetitive. Klaus is nowhere near this dim-witted in the comics. One thing that does work in Klaus' favor is his ability to communicate with the dead, which adds a horror element to the show. When Klaus learns to finally use this power to his advantage in the climactic battle, I absolutely cheered.
Further Reading: The Umbrella Academy Cast on Creating a New Kind of Superhero Show
While all that's going on, knife-wielding Diego, the rogue of the family, also gets a love interest, and it's by far the least interesting love story of all. Why Blackman and Slater felt that the only way to explore many of these characters was through romance is beyond me. In Way and Ba's comic, introspection doesn't come from the romantic, but through the familial ties that bind. For example, in the comic, Diego has to figure out a way to work with Luther, an altruistic hero who is sort of incompetent at being the team's leader, and while at first Diego despises his brother, they end up growing together. In the third arc of the comic, it's Diego, a loner by nature, who has to convince a depressed Luther to get the team back together. 
It's clear that everyone involved with this adaptation has real love for the comic, from the way it accurately recreates the young Umbrella Academy's costumes to the camera angles that recall the work of film auteur Wes Anderson, who is a clear influence on both the book and the show (you could almost imagine this as Anderson's very own take on the superhero genre, with all of the beautiful shots and retro zaniness). Blackman and his crew really took the time to make the show look and sound great -- one particular shot of helicopters flying over Vietnam comes to mind -- but it also feels like they don't fully understand what makes Way and Ba's fast-paced, minimalist, vignette-heavy family drama so effective. 
Despite my complaints about Vanya's extended storyline, I'm happy to say that Page's performance as the timid and anxious main character of this family tragedy is top notch. She makes the best of every scene she's in, even when her romantic counterpart isn't quite up to the task. Page is subtle in scenes with her over-the-top siblings, layering in claustrophobic loneliness over her deep-seated anger at being the sister everyone always ignores. I loved watching Vanya absolutely lose her shit later in the season, and Page has already given us so much by that point that it's impossible not to sympathize with her character, even as she takes a dark turn that she may not be able to return from.
Number Five, played by Aidan Gallagher, who's spent most of his career on Nickelodeon kids shows, is also a highlight. Gallagher is well-cast and is able to convey the wisdom beyond his years necessary for the role of a 60-year-old hitman trapped inside the body of a 10-year-old (although he's slightly older than that on the show). He rarely cracks a smile as the self-serious Number Five, or partake in his family's childish shenanigans, but when he does let loose, it's entertaining and very funny.
Further Reading: Everything You Need to Know About Avengers: Endgame
This trigger-happy hero-turned-assassin is also one of the few characters who benefit from an expanded storyline. The show dives much deeper into Number Five's backstory, giving us colorful pieces of his backstory the comic never has. Along the way, we learn much more about the secret organization Number Five worked for before rejoining his family in the present day. His interactions with this faction of time-jumping assassins are among the best in the entire series. Here, the show doesn't rely on romance to flesh out a character and it's really refreshing. 
Surprisingly, Luther and Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) get the least to do. While at the forefront of the comic, Luther takes a backseat to the characters the people behind the show are really enamored with, like Vanya, Klaus, Number Five, and Diego. On the show, Luther is a bit more bumbling and I had a hard time believing that any of these characters would actually follow him into battle, but there are some high points for him, too. His story is one of self-discovery, as he steps out from under his father's shadow for the first time (this is a man who's never had a drink or done a drug or rebelled against his dad), and it's in Luther's search for clarity as an independent adult for basically the first time that this character shines.
Allison is in the middle of losing a family, even as she regains another. "Hotel Oblivion," the current comic's third arc, begins to explore why Allison, who can alter reality at will by telling lies, has become alienated from her husband and daughter. The show expands on that, showing what created the rift, and it perfectly fits the character. 
As the credits roll on an enjoyable final episode, it's hard to call Netflix's The Umbrella Academy a success, but like its troubled family of freaks, it's not a lost cause. There are parts of the series I really liked -- the latter half of Klaus' arc when he's given a bit more depth, a hilarious showdown involving an ice cream truck, and a character's complete infatuation with the torso of a mannequin -- that hint at a freshness that could set it apart from other superhero TV and movies. The Umbrella Academy is at its strongest when it commits to the weirder elements of its story and world, such as the aforementioned talking chimpanzee, and does itself a disservice by trying to ground its characters in needless romance and the menial. Like Vanya herself, there's potential here, the show just needs to go off the deep end first.
John Saavedra is an associate editor at Den of Geek. Read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @johnsjr9. 
2.5/5
Netflix
The Umbrella Academy
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Review John Saavedra
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Feb 4, 2019
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mrmichaelchadler · 5 years
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Netflix's The Umbrella Academy a Not-So-Super Fusion of X-Men and Watchmen
Before we get HBO’s “Watchmen” remake and witness more stories of young mutants with the next “X-Men” movie, Netflix offers their own fusion of these superhero properties: "The Umbrella Academy". Derived from the Dark Horse comics written by Gerard Way and illustrated by Gabriel Ba, this new series tells of siblings who have special powers, and are forced to evaluate their lives and relationships outside the world of fighting crime. But the intrigue garnered by this premise is defeated not just by its slow pacing (across ten, one-hour episodes) but also by the story's superficial, and juvenile approach to such a story: it's never as quirky, cutting edge, or plainly cool as it so desperately wants to be.  
Created by Jeremy Slater, “The Umbrella Academy” tells of seven special children who were born on the same day, after their respective mothers became suddenly pregnant. They were all adopted by billionaire Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore), who made them into a family of crime-fighters, each with super abilities honed over time. There’s Diego (David Catañeda) who can throw a knife like a boomerang, Luther (Tom Hopper), whose extra burly physique covered by a coat is not just muscle, Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman), who has the ability to control people’s minds with her words, Klaus (Robert Sheehan), who can see dead people but is also fresh out of rehab, and Ben, now deceased, who had the ability to unleash a murderous squid from inside his body. The highly intelligent, time-traveling Dr. Manhattan of the group is played by Aidan Gallagher, who, like his siblings was not named, and is simply known as Number Five. But unlike his siblings, he still looks like a preteen, which is one of a thousand details that “The Umbrella Academy” eventually explains before moving on to the next offbeat detail. But the standout of the group is Ellen Page’s Vanya, who has no powers. She can, however, play violin,  and when she was younger, wrote the family’s saga in a tell-all book that’s created bad blood with her siblings. 
At the start of “The Umbrella Academy,” the family is estranged and scattered—Luther is on the Moon, Allison is a movie star, Klaus is in rehab. But Hargreeves’ mysterious passing gets them back in the same gothic mansion for the first time in many years, forcing them to wrestle with their angst towards each other and their cold, distant father. True to the story’s exhaustive plotting, “The Umbrella Academy” has issues to resolve not just with regards to the past, present, but also the future—the apocalypse is coming in eight days, as Number Five finds out, and only they can stop it. 
If a superhero story is only as interesting as its villain, “The Umbrella Academy” is in grave danger: it rambles when giving our heroes something to overcome, and fails to create an urgency in its expansive run-time despite all that the story focuses on. Their inner battles, with themselves and toward their siblings, are not all that compelling, even though that’s what the series wants its heart to be. The script wants to take a funhouse mirror to real expressions of family drama, but the world and tone of “The Umbrella Academy” is nowhere near grounded enough. 
The external obstacles feel aren’t much more gripping: the revelation of apocalyptic stakes in episode one feels like "The Umbrella Academy" is following superhero trends and not subverting them, its story focusing on Number Five trying to figure out who is behind the destruction. On a smaller scale, the family members are not shown fighting crime in their their current lives, but they do battle two villains named Hazel and Cha Cha, played by Cameron Britton and Mary J. Blige, respectively. The latter duo are Tarantino-esque hitmen of a mysterious employer, and they don’t pop on screen when the focus is on them gabbing about their next job, or their friendship. True to the mild imagination of “The Umbrella Academy,” these characters are used mostly to inspire stylized action scenes, wearing goofy masks while they fire guns because it’s what amuses this show. I’ll give “The Umbrella Academy” that it is awesome to see Mary J. Blige walk away from an exploding donut shop in slow motion, but that’s a fleeting moment of edginess, and it arrives around episode eight. 
The biggest enemy that “The Umbrella Academy” has is itself, thwarted by its ambitions to juggle all of these characters, their relationships, their mysteries. There are other characters too, like Vanya’s love interest Leonard played by John Magaro, and a couple of cops who are on the trail of everyone involved. Oh right, and then there’s the apocalypse. This busy nature initially makes for a slow start, as its pilot embeds us in their grief as means of gloomy exposition, but then it creates the opposite effect by the second and third episodes and onward—the series is both slow moving and overstuffed.
With all of these characters and their backgrounds, told by a story that yearns to create momentum out of constant cliffhangers and generally withholding information, the series is often frustrating, if not exhausting (I wouldn’t have made it past episode three were it not for professional obligations). There’s moments where this scatterbrained nature even strands the actors, like a scene in which Klaus experiences something so traumatic on a bus around episode five, yet we don’t know what he’s reacting to—we can only watch him cry his eyes out while Big Thief’s mournful spiritual “Mary” plays in the background, as if the simple presentation of emotion is all we need to be engaged. In a larger sense, it sucks the life out of top-tier talent like Ellen Page, who spends much of the series having her secrets revealed at a glacial pace, her performance becomes one big cloud until she’s given more to work with.
With the zealousness of a teenager's sketchbook, “The Umbrella Academy” has a heightened imagination for its world-building and inhabitants, forcefully mixing sci-fi with fantasy with gothic production design and prep school costuming (Number Five is always in his academy uniform). But it doesn’t lead to a memorable collective style, so much as emphasize this show’s motivation to create cool without being original. The camera's framing too, with high and low angles used often to spruce up dialogue-driven scenes, feels less like it comes from artistic intent, and more like a misguided idea of edgy visual storytelling. 
Given that “The Umbrella Academy” is executive produced by comic co-creator Gerard Way, lead singer of My Chemical Romance, you'd expect a definitive quality from its music. It's disappointing then, that the constant score plays with the obvious presence of a laugh track, and its soundtrack is full of familiar needle drops—Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” amps up an otherwise bland shootout in a department store, while “I Think We’re Alone Now” by Tiffany blares during an impromptu dance moment in the pilot. Even “Exit Music” by Radiohead feels more ho-hum than it ever should. Maybe the show's younger audience will find these cuts striking, and make a few Radiohead fans, but within “The Umbrella Academy” they’re totally played out. Their presence is a lot like the themes and visuals that define “The Umbrella Academy”—they’ll likely be most impactful if you haven’t experienced them numerous times before. 
All episodes of season one screened for review. 
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The Mindhunter Cast Knows How to Spot a Sociopath
By Abraham Riesman -  August 22, 2018 (x) 
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Photo: Maya Robinson/Vulture and Photo by Getty Images
Despite being a 1970s period piece, Mindhunter feels eminently of the present moment. We’re living in the midst of a true-crime renaissance, and the David Fincher–helmed Netflix series stands out not only as a (heavily fictionalized) example of the genre, but as a critique of it. As FBI agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) and psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) delve into the brains and motivations of serial killers — especially real-life murderer Ed Kemper (Emmy nominee Cameron Britton) — we’re given a window into why humans have such a fascination with individuals who engage in death and destruction. But just as interesting as the tales on the screen are the tales of what it takes to tell them, as an audience learned during a panel discussion with Groff, McCallany, Torv, and Britton at this year’s Vulture Festival. Over the course of the conversation, the actors talked about Fincher’s notorious obsessiveness, whether Ford is a sociopath, and how Britton learned to play Kemper partially thanks to his own time as a schoolteacher.
So first off, before the show started, for each of you, how big a true-crime fan were you, if at all? Why don’t we start with you Jonathan.
Jonathan Groff: Me personally, not at all. Not a serial-killer person.
I should hope, yes.
JG: That’s the weird thing, though, is that people keep coming up to us and saying “I am so obsessed with serial killers.” And people are obviously fascinated by the mind and the way the mind works, and what they do, and how someone could possibly do what they’ve done, and whatever, but that was not my jam. What drew me to the show initially was obviously the opportunity to work with David Fincher. And also, the scenes. The scenes with the four of us, and the scenes with the serial killers, they’re almost like play scenes. And so getting the opportunity to act that out and do such psychological work was what drew me to it.
Were any of you true-crime fans?
Holt McCallany: I was a big fan of some of David’s earlier films, like Seven. Which obviously, there’s a serial killer. Zodiac. So the opportunity to work with him, a great director like David in a genre that he is such a master of was very exciting also.
Cameron Britton: Well, I’ve always been fascinated with serial killers. I find it to be an incredible enigma, and [Edmund] Kemper is a great example. I’m very confused as to how you can have no remorse to take a human’s life, especially often a young girl and do it so intimately. So you have no remorse for human life, but you care about what we think of you. It’s so confusing to me that serial killers, many of them, they’re really keen on being liked or being justified through us giving them attention.
Anna Torv: But isn’t that because that’s the point, that’s the narcissist in you, is that you only care about what people think of you, or you only care if someone’s talking to you. So therefore, the empathy thing is connected to another person. And so anything to do with the world is absolutely not important. But as soon as you’re involved in it, then that’s what they feed on.
CB: That’s a good point. Mystery solved. I don’t need to do it anymore.
HM: Anna makes a great point. That’s one of the fundamental themes of the show, narcissism. And this is why you see so many of these serial killers communicating directly with the press. David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, the Zodiac Killer, Dennis Rader, the Bind, Torture Kill [killer]. These guys all wrote letters to the press and they wanted that adulation, they wanted that notoriety.
CB: They wanna feel special.
AT: Or they wanna take credit.
Tell me about the casting process? How did this go for each of you? Did you do sides? What scenes did you do? What made you wanna actually do the show? Why don’t we start over with Cameron.
CB: The first thing I read when I pulled up the sides is that little speech Ed gives when Holden says it’s hard to square you with what you’re in here for. You seem very nice. And Ed says something like, “I’ve been a regular guy most of my life. Nice home, nice suburbs, but at the same time, I was living a vile, deprived, entirely parallel other life filled debased violence, mayhem, fear, and death.” That was the first thing I read.
AT: He was like, “I want it.”
CB: I just need to know more. And there were something about the sides that were like …
HM: I’m perfect for this.
CB: Yeah. That’s me.
AT: Who is this guy?
CB: There was something about them, I just could tell it was a real person. So I looked up the name and then just went down a rabbit hole, it was all those YouTube … serial killers on YouTube, it’s a perfect example. It’s what the show feels like. It’s not terrifying to watch Mindhunter, necessarily, but it’s just unsettling. You can find Aileen Wuornos just talking to a camera. It’s hard to watch. Her eyeballs, they are just terrifying. I probably spent … I was up past midnight working on that self tape. I can do it better, I can get it, I can get the eyes right.
HM: And boy, did he nail it.
Anna, how about you? What was your audition process like?
AT: It was pretty smooth and simple, actually. I, again, got the pages. And often, you go in for an audition and you’re lucky if you get two pages. And it’s like, “Hey.” And it was a good 15. And then I knew what the show was, and so I read the book then, though, before I went to audition for it. And the character that I’m playing isn’t in the book, and I worked out who she was. But she’s a completely different person to the one that we’ve created in the show, to Wendy. And then I went in and tested with beautiful Laray, who casts the show.
HM: A round of applause for Laray Mayfield.
AT: Then I think I met with David and did them again. And then got the call. And I was beyond ecstatic, like beyond.
HM: I had worked with David a couple of times previously. I was in his first film, a film called Alien 3, and then I was in Fight Club. But they were smaller parts, I had never been in a lead. And so when I realized that Bill Tench was gonna be one of the really integral parts of the show, it was wonderful. Because in a certain way, it felt like I was getting a promotion.
JG: I had met Laray eight years ago when I auditioned and did not get TheSocial Network. And then I was in New York and I put myself on tape with the New York casting director Julie Schubert here. And for anyone that has an audition for Mindhunter, she gave me these tips before I was going, just general David Fincher tips. She said don’t move your forehead.
Don’t move your forehead?
JG: Don’t act with your forehead. Don’t blink, don’t up at the end like this, which I do all the time.
HM: Don’t segment the lines, no segmentation.
JG: Yes, and don’t be …
HM: Get to the end of the thought.
JG: Yeah, don’t be musical. And so I applied that.
HM: And be prepared to do a lot of takes.
JG: Be prepared to do a lot of takes, yeah. And so I applied that to the audition and then flew out to New York on a Monday on a day off and met with David. I had a feeling when I was sitting with him, this feeling of depression sometimes you get when something is really great. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this before when something really great is happening, something that you’ve dreamt about. And it’s almost like this feeling of sadness, because I felt like this is everything I’ve wanted and now I feel really depressed. Where this is too good to be true, I don’t believe this is happening. I’m in a room with David Fincher, he’s talking about this TV show.
HM: He’s probably gonna hire Justin Timberlake.
JG: Exactly. Exactly.
Tell me about your early interactions with David Fincher and Joe Penhall? What did they say they wanted the show to be and what did they want your performance to be?
CB: Well, David said something that I hoped he’d say, where he wasn’t looking for an impression. I mean, there’s hints of Ed there, there’s more his vibe I was going for and some of his voice. And he said he wasn’t looking for the genius Hannibal Lecter serial killer because it’s not all too accurate. The cinematic one, the sexy one. He couldn’t have got the sexy one out of me.
JG: That is so not true.
CB: Although, there have been some strange fans, I will … One person just wrote, a private message, “You’re a very hot bear.” What a takeaway. They’re watching this show Mindhunter and they’re like, “Yeah, this is …”
Anyway, the importance of this being a regular person, and honestly, the evil, the violent, the monster side of it wasn’t this pretty straightforward stuff. I agreed with him, my focus was more on making him a human being. I think that should be the takeaway from these people. My aunt doesn’t want her daughter to see it because she’s only 14. But at the same time, one of Kemper’s victims was 14. There’s something to be said … I don’t like to put that fear out there, but there’s something to be said about the assumptions we make on someone just because they’re nice, or well-spoken. Of course, we don’t do hitchhiking much anymore. You certainly don’t here anyway. So yeah, that was a lot of the talk, and then after that, there was an incredible amount of freedom that David gave me. He’d have notes on a thought, like this line, “I’d like it to be backed up with arrogance,” or something. But there were no overall notes. “I need Ed to be more this or that.” He just let me play, which it’s what’s so impressive about him. That he’s so in charge and yet you still feel so free.
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AT: We were talking about that last night about the idea of when you say no broad strokes, no overall notes. That he’s got such an incredibly clean mind, that when he gives you a note, it’s so unbelievably specific. And then even the eyebrows and everything, all of that, that’s him going, “I don’t want a distraction until I want it.” I want the story and the people, I wanna be able to see that. And it changes the way, we would say, it’s changed the way I watch things.
HM: And that’s what watching David direct is really like. It’s like watching the director of a symphony orchestra. He’s literally making adjustments to every department simultaneously. Not just the actors, but the camera department is changing, the lights, it’s all moving all simultaneously. And he likes to move at a fast pace. And so you’ve got to commit to that, to that pace, and to that energy, and to that way of working. And be able to make very small adjustments because we’ll do many, many takes. And sometimes, he’ll give a piece of direction which is very precise. And he wants to see the same thing he did last time, except with this precise adjustment. So it does require a lot of concentration.
AT: And every frame, you can pause, you can just stop every frame and it’s just so beautiful. It’s a portrait every time.
HM: And that’s really one of the most exciting things about the project because there’s a lot of television out there right now, but there’s not a lot of television that’s being produced at this level with an extraordinary filmmaker like David at the helm. And just to give credit to all of our friends at Netflix, they’ve been very supportive of the project and of him. And giving him the kind of freedom to create his vision. And I think that’s part of what makes it so good, is it’s not the kind of television by committee that you often see at the networks. This is one filmmaker’s vision. And it’s a very different way of working. And of course, most television is writer-producer-driven. And this is television that is director-driven. And that is also fundamental difference that can’t be ignored.
Jonathan, I’m curious, what were the conversations that you had with David about Holden? What did he say he wanted it to be and where did you then take it from there?
JG: He said this thing also last night at dinner when he was talking to Anna and I about directing: “I’m in a plane looking down at you and you’re in a cornfield and I’m telling you where to walk.” So he likes us to lose ourselves in the moment of the scene, know the lines really well, don’t move your forehead, don’t blink, don’t go up at the end.
HM: No smiling.
AT: He didn’t say I’m telling you how to walk, he said, “And I’m gonna tell you if you’re getting too close to the rocks.”
JG: Right. Yeah. They direct you.
AT: We need to get back into this.
JG: Yeah, that’s wet over there. I see you moving in that direction, but that’s actually an unsafe area to be, why don’t you move over here? And we find the way together. Yeah, actually one of the things that he said to me in the beginning was “Holden has no charm and no self-awareness whatsoever …”
AT: That is so brilliant.
JG: “… And you as Jonathan are a very smiley … You’re an actor, so you’re always trying to desperately be charming. And you have that needy thing that we all have for people to love us. And Holden doesn’t have that, he’s nerdy.” And so he said this thing to me at the very beginning that is a very small technical thing but has completely changed the way I am even in certain ways. He said, “You smile. Even when you don’t think you’re smiling, you’re smiling.” And I was like, “What? Am I smiling right now?”
And so it took a long time, but he does this with all of us. He finds these little technical things. That’s why one of the reasons working with him is such a life-changing experience where we would be about to roll on the scene or we’d be about to start shooting the scene and be like, “Okay, and we’re rolling. And Jonathan stop smiling, and you’re still smiling, and you’re still smiling, and okay, action.” And then I would eventually get there. But when I watch the show back, I did not recognize myself. And I saw how, via him and the plane looking down at me in the cornfield, I saw how he calibrated so expertly every one of our performances. I mean, we give him everything we can give him on the day, and then he goes into the editing room and makes these subtle adjustments. And ultimately, it’s him who’s picking the coverage, and who we’re watching, and whatever. It was a master class being on set, and acting, and being pushed in the way that he pushes you, and doing the amazing material with these guys. And then it was a master class watching it and going, “Wow, that is how he put it together and that is the piece of art he created in the end.”
CB: I don’t know if it was intentional or what, I didn’t know I was doing it, but I recently watched, someone sent me something. You’re gotta see this, someone put together the editing of Mindhunter, this cool link. And it covered how they edited it and what story you’re telling by cutting to this person. And the person narrating said every time that Kemper mentions his mother, his mouth tightens. I had no idea I was doing that, I don’t know if David knew I was doing that or if …
AT: He would’ve seen it.
CB: It was something else.
Tell me about shooting the interview scenes with Ed. Was there some kind of guiding philosophy when you were going into those scenes, how you were gonna make them interesting, how you were gonna make sure they don’t get redundant? How were you approaching it?
CB: I don’t remember too much conversation outside of the cool structure … Usually before we were even dressed up, done our hair and makeup or anything, we’d come in in the morning and run the scene until Fincher felt it was where it needed to be. And then we get to process those notes while we go get hair and makeup done and they set up the cameras and everything. They were very private rehearsals, but I’m sorry, I don’t really remember …
HM: Well, the key to what Cameron just said is the word rehearsal. We do a lot of it, and we did a lot of it before we ever began filming. We would do private rehearsals with David in which we just go through the scripts. Every new episode. We sit around a long table, we go line by line through the script, talk about whether the line is necessary, how can it be improved, what does the scene mean in different terms of the overall journey of the character, what’s going on … And then, when we get on set, then we do an hour’s rehearsal just with David, and our DP, and the actors, until we all really feel … So this is something that’s a lot more rare than it should be in television. Normally, in TV, they just don’t give you any rehearsal. Not simply an insufficient amount of rehearsal, they don’t even put it into the schedule. Everything is about shoot time, and sadly, mostly directors aren’t really empowered on TV sets. They wanna shoot the call sheet, they wanna get the day, they don’t wanna go over schedule, they wanna get invited back. And so to have somebody who says, “No, we’re gonna take our time here. As long as we need until the scene is as good as it can possibly be, and then we’ll shoot it.
CB: And I doubt I will ever see a quicker turnaround between cut and action. It’s cut, and then there’s a little note thrown in from video village, and then rolling, and then action. You are in it all day. And especially in a scene where you’re just sitting in a chair. I remember the prop master trying to put my shackles on to start the scene over and Fincher would say, “Rolling” and he’d go, “Rolling. Fucking rolling?” And then dive out of the way of the shot. I’ve never done that in my life, I’ve never just woken up, had breakfast and then acted until I went to sleep.
HM: Right. And my character smokes in the show. Even the time to reset the cigarette. It has to be the same length as in the previous take because we move really, really fast. But that’s why we’re able to do so many takes and that’s why when he gets into the editing room he has so many choices. And then the other part of that is working on the interview scenes specifically, is that they’re very long scenes. Some of them are 10-, 12-page scenes or longer. And that’s so rare that that’s when it begins to feel like theater, when you’re doing these long scenes. And he’ll let them run all the way through. And then it’ll be another setup, a new angle, and maybe takes. So you get so comfortable in them, you do them so many times you start to make discoveries. And the thing just starts to improve, and gel, and come together until he finally gets what he wants.
Jonathan, how did you approach doing the interview scenes? You have to really be a key component of that over, and over, and over again throughout the series.
JG: It was different with every one. And I remember with the Ed Kemper scene, one of the things that I heard David say … Because the first interview with Ed Kemper happens almost halfway through the second episode. And in most TV shows, it would happen in halfway through the first episode. This is the show where they interview serial killers, but it was really important to them to slowly build the story. And you see how the term “serial killer,” the idea of talking to serial killers, the behavioral science unit at the FBI, it’s a huge thing that happens, a huge journey that happens throughout the course of the first season. And so when they were tracking that journey and Ed is the first person they talk to, I remember David, first of all, wanting to have that full, long setup where we meet [points to McCallany], the road school … And then we get to Ed Kemper and it’s like beginner’s luck. We meet a guy who’s a serial killer who’s dying to talk about everything he did, and his motivations, and his mother, and his backstory, and everything. So the Ed Kemper interview was all about the absolute perfect person at the absolute perfect time for the characters to go, “Whoa, this is actually really worthwhile.”
And then we give the transcript to her [points to Torv], and he [points to McCallany] gets convinced, and then it starts to build. And then from there, each interview is slightly different. So Jerry Brudos, he’s a total asshole and won’t talk to us. And so we have to figure out a way to get him to talk, and we end up going to him and talking to him in the third person. And that’s how we get him to open up. And then you’ve got Richard Speck, who’s surly and crazy. And so then suddenly I’m talking to him about words that I promised I wouldn’t say on this panel.
But I remember in the sides, because the ten scripts were written, basically. They changed a lot, but they were written before we started. So [then there’s] that fun element of the character of Holden [starting to mirror] the serial killers to get them to open up. And so then each interview starts to become about, “Okay, they’re not all Ed Kemper, so how do we get them to open up and when does Tench have more of an impact on opening up with Monte Rissell. Being tough on him is actually the thing that gets him to open up because he fights back. And then the scene with Gene Devier, who is the guy that kills the 14-year-old majorette girl in Georgia. With him, it’s putting the rock in front of him, which is based on John Douglas’s real story, the idea of putting the rock … So then every interview becomes about a totally different way of getting someone to open up, and the staging of the interview, and the way we act is different in every one because it’s a different psychology in each scene.
Cameron, I heard that you used to be a preschool teacher.
CB: Yeah, for eight years, I taught special-needs preschool for 18 months to 3-year-olds. It’s what I was gonna do with my career for a while, and then I got a little burnt out. I probably did it as long as anyone. I’ve seen a lot of teachers come and go and you do three or four years and it’s exhausting. I realized I was just supplementing entertaining kids for entertaining audiences, so I had to be honest with myself and get back into acting outside of just doing theater with my friends. I can tell you something very strange. Part of teaching preschool helped me with Ed, to be honest.
So you have 15 kids a day, and some days are blessings, and they’re just the joy of life because it’s a preschool, like you’d imagine. But there are days with children with autism where it just breaks down and their impulses can get really intense. And everyone’s looking to you as the teacher. You can’t break or you lose the room. So I started slowly learning how to train myself to just cut all emotions out and just get rid of them entirely so I could be this serene, pleasant … Some days were pretty wild, but everyone had to look to you. And that was interesting because it wasn’t like I was sad or anything, but after three hours of that, class would end. And I’d go into the bathroom or something and tears would just well, because you let your emotions come back. And now, they’re flooding out because they’ve been blocked. And that started becoming a mechanism, almost a physical thing to be able to cut your emotions out. So when it came to playing Ed, it was actually really helpful. I would never have thought that those two things would complement the other.
Have you heard from any parents of kids that have seen the show?
CB: Yeah. I’ll have friends who work there and they say new teachers go, “The guy who played Ed Kemper was a teacher here.” They do not believe it, they go, “I actually don’t believe you. I don’t see how that works.” The other parents, I tried not to be Facebook friends with parents, but a few of them, you get an attachment to. There’s one girl who I was still babysitting while we were working on Kemper. So that mom was an industry type, so she wasn’t creeped out or anything. But I do like to think about one day these kids will grow up and their parents go, “You see that guy? That was your babysitter. That was your preschool teacher.”
For all of you, do you find after having working on the show, do you find yourself profiling people? Do you break people down in a way now because you’ve had to think about that and get in that mindset so much?
JG: My thing was everyone said to me after they’d watch the show that they thought my character was a sociopath. And I had no idea. And people would say … and so many of my friends were texting me, “So when are you gonna start killing people?” I was like, “I thought I was playing an everyman.” I was playing a sociopath.
I think that the thing that they’re aligning when they think that Holden is a sociopath, that I think is very similar between … That we start to see more and more in our characters is this characteristic of narcissism and becoming self-obsessed. And it was one of the things about the serial killers sitting there and waxing philosophical about they’d done. And that need to have credit, and be in the press, and all of that. And that starts to find its way into us at the FBI. It’s my favorite character turns for the three of us, at the end of the season when it starts to get a little tense at the unit and you start to see the narcissists come out, particularly in my character, but it starts to come out in the three of us. “Who invented this, who’s taking credit for what?” And that idea of we were all in the room when “serial killer” was invented, but I’m gonna take credit for it. I was the one that did this, and I was the one that brought that. And I think it’s that quality of narcissism that we’re seeing in Holden that makes an appearance that he is a sociopath. Or maybe I’m just a sociopath and I have no idea.
That’s exactly what a sociopath would say.
AT: But that’s the bit that I think is interesting, we talk about that then start to look at the line that not everyone’s into Ed Kemper. You can still have the personality bias. And it effects you in your workplace, and so with that, the statistics are … There’s a book called The Sociopath Next Door, and it was written not that long ago, and I think it was something like 25 out of every 100 Americans are.
Wow, you really did a lot of reading up for the part. You’d be surprised, I interview a lot of actors, and sometimes they’ll walk into something and just go, “Yeah, I memorized my lines, I did it, whatever. I got out.” But it sounds like you really went the extra mile to try and …
HM: Well, it’s a fascinating subject.
It is. It’s hard to live with, though.
AT: This is really weird because I read that after the show, after I finished filming. When I did it, there was this disconnect we’ve talked about. I felt it was too much. I remember getting cast and then having a bit of panic, going, “What is this? Do I wanna look at this?” And then I looked up some of the real people, and it was truly … I get sweaty palms even thinking about, if I’m honest. And then I went, “I’m not gonna think about this when I’m not on set.” And set’s a different thing because you do it so much that there’s a desensitization that comes to it. And then when the show finished, I don’t know why, I got fascinated with the disorders in normal people. And I read The Sociopath Next Door. I read The Puzzling Mind of a Psychopath, which is really, really interesting.
HM: There’s always a lot of research to do also because it’s a period piece. So we’re set in the late 1970s, it’s a different political context. You also have the fact that criminal profiling was really in its infancy and trying to figure out exactly how these guys do what they do. And then each of the killers is very different and they’re each fascinating in different ways. And so you wanna research who they are, how they committed their crimes, what makes them different from previous killers that we’ve interviewed. And it never stops. Every new episode, we have new characters and we use the real killers. We use the real stories of the real killers, and the real crimes. So it’s a lot of research.
I’m curious, why do you think Tench sticks with Holden? Holden’s such a difficult person to work with. It’s just fascinating to watch their dynamic. Why do you think he sticks with him?
HM: When I first got offered the role, I remember getting an email from David in which he shared with me some of his thoughts about my character, and where he was in his life. He’s a guy that had a failing marriage, that had a lot of problems raising his adopted son who’s troubled. He was a guy who’s not really interested in the politics of the FBI and the brown nosing that you have to do in order to get promoted. He didn’t want to engage in any of that and so he had run away. He teaches road school, gives classes to local law enforcement about the latest FBI investigative techniques, plays golf. And then he gets assigned a new partner. And what he comes to understand is that this young man has really hit upon an innovation that could be very useful to law enforcement.
Even though a behavioral science was in its infancy in the period that we discussed in the show, it has now become the biggest part of what the bureau does. So that’s why, because I often thought of Bill as a guy who was floundering in a certain way because he had forgotten why it was important to him to be an FBI agent. And he was going through the motions, and then when Holden comes into his life, he rekindles my excitement for the work and reminds me why it was that I always wanted to do this job.
Jonathan, I’m curious, there was more sex in the show than I was expecting. And we see a lot of Holden’s love life. I’m not saying this to be prurient or anything, but I’m curious. How did you think about Holden’s approach to sex, and intimacy and relationships?
JG: It was one of the things I was most excited about exploring on the show because it was interesting to me that this guy who is kind of buttoned-up, conservative, Mormon-like, very inexperienced, maybe a virgin, maybe not. It’s hard to tell, he seems like a virgin even though he says he’s not and he has his coming of age talking to psychosexual sadists and killers. And the sexual component of their murders is such a huge part of it. And at the same time, or even before that, he meets this girl that kind of blows his mind sexually and in a way that he never knew about before or anticipated. And there’s even that scene where I go to the FBI, because it is the late ‘70s, and blow jobs and oral sex are on the deviant list of words that shouldn’t be allowed. And I go on and I’m like, “I think we should take some of these off the bad word list because this girl’s gonna blow my mind. It’s actually really great.”
While at the same time, talking to these men who do these horrible things to get off. Ultimately, for a lot of them, it’s about ejaculation and … putting your desire to get off over someone’s heart beating is such a chilling and horrifying thing. And so he’s having this sexual excitement while he’s talking to this girl. So that dynamic was really interesting to me and the development of that. There’s this scene with Debbie where she’s filing her nails in the bathroom and we come out, and she does this thing. And that dynamic of sexual play between a man and women was really interesting to me. And then at the same time, in the eighth episode, it’s Jerry Brudos and he masturbates into shoes. And she sees Holden eyeing up these shoes at this store and she thinks, “He really wants me to wear these shoes.” And so I’m thinking of Jerry Brudos, how we’re gonna get him to open up, and she’s thinking, “I’m gonna really blow his mind tonight when he gets home when I’m wearing these shoes.” And she surprises me by wearing these shoes. And it’s the first time, the character has been so good at compartmentalizing everything and whatever. And that is the first time, suddenly Jerry Brudos has been brought into his personal sex life.
And that’s the first moment it starts to wear on him. And so the sexual component of his relationship was happening at the same time of the sexual exploration of these killers. And I was really excited to explore those things. And I was happy with how it came out at the end of the show as part of the character arc.
I wanna turn it over to the audience for some Q&A.
Audience member 1: When is season two happening?
HM: I don’t think that season two will be on until sometime in 2019. We’re actually in the process of shooting it right now, but we’re still in episode one.
Audience member 2: What did you think of the cold opens with the mysterious man?
HM: Are you talking about the scenes with BTK? To be honest, I think that this was an idea that came to David later in the season when we were shooting. And he decided to add that. And the actor who plays Dennis Rader, Sonny Valicenti. He’s a really, really talented guy and has really captured the attention of the audience much in the way that our good friend Cameron Britton did. Rader is a really complex character, too, and a guy that eluded authorities for 30 years, and committed his first murder in ‘74 and wasn’t arrested until 2005. So it was the longest period that a guy was ever at large, and huge breaks in between when he would commit murders. So fascinating character. I think we may see more of him. I don’t know.
Audience member 3: Jonathon and Holt, I’m just wondering, your characters’ relationship is one of the weirdest things I’ve seen. And it’s like this twilight zone between buddy and enemy. And I’m just wondering how you get to that place?
HM: We’ve seen in a lot of movies, this older cop, younger cop dynamic. It’s an archetype in Hollywood, even in a move like Seven, which is one of David’s movies also dealing with this genre. You saw Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt. In Dennis Hopper’s movie Colors, it’s Robert Duvall and Sean Penn; or in Training Day, it’s Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke. But the trick in my opinion is to not to try to borrow anything from a previous incarnations of this dynamic and to find what’s real, and natural and organic in this relationship. And even though Jonathan and I are very different, we found that we had tremendous chemistry as actors. And he’s a superbly talented actor, so we played off each other in a wonderful way. And what we found was humor. And I thought that that was really something that was important to mine because it’s a nice juxtaposition with the scenes with the serial killers, which are so dark, and grizzly, and graphic, and in many ways unsettling, as Cameron said. So to find some humor in the relationship between the two agents I thought was a nice counterbalance to that. So we looked for those moments.
Audience member 4: My question is for Anna because one of the things I think is really interesting about the show … and we were talking about sexuality and stuff before. One of the things that I think is interesting that goes unspoken is that a gay person probably wouldn’t have gotten security clearance in the 1970s from the FBI.
AT: We’re set in ‘79 and it was only a couple of year before that it was taken off the mental illness list.
Audience member 4: So I’m interested in your take on what the fact that she’s keeping this secret, in a sense, about her sexuality. Even if it’s just a secret of ommission, and how that relates to her attachment to her work?
AT: I think completely and then also not all. At the same time because that’s just the way of life, that’s how it was. But I loved that it was not spoken and I loved that the only little mention of it you get is when she’s talking to her girlfriend. And she’s like, “What? You’ve told them?” And she said, “Of course I haven’t told. It’s not even a discussion.” But it’s that and there’s little moments of it which she reacts quite strongly to the Brudos stuff. And there was one little line that you don’t know that she’s a lesbian at that point, I don’t think. But there’s one little thing where they’re talking about cross-dressing and Holden’s gone in with the shoe.
And she’s like, “That is not an antecedent to criminal behavior. It has been happening in every culture, in every city since the dawn of time and it does not make it deviant. We need to absolutely have a distinction.” And I remember doing that and going, “I don’t know if people will remember,” because I certainly knew why I was saying it, but I think it’s not for another couple of episodes that you [make the connection].
Audience member 4: There’s a lot of [true] crime shows [right now]. I was wondering as a part of this genre if you guys had any musings as to why they’re so popular?
JG: The month that our show came out in October of last year, that horrible Vegas shooting happened.
HM: Stephen Paddock, right? Killed all those people in Las Vegas.
JG: And it was just such a horrifying and chilling thing to see how relevant it is, to try and explore the idea of why. And I don’t think they ever have figured out why, with him in particular, the motivation. What is that? Why did that person do that? But I think with our show, I can’t speak for the other crime shows, but certainly, that’s the question we’re asking in this. And can you have empathy for people that are so below our contempt, you shouldn’t have time for them because they’re deplorable human beings and what they’ve done is unforgivable. But the idea of asking the question of why and using empathy as a tool to perhaps, in some way, understand why, or in some way to prevent it from happening again I think is just a noble human idea. Something that we’re all striving for.
HM: When that incident happened, the one that Jonathan is referencing, I called John Douglas who wrote the book Mindhunter. And I said to him, “John, if you were on the ground in Las Vegas right now and investigating this case, what were the questions that you would be asking?” And he had some interesting things to say. He said first of all, why did he choose those people? What did that group of people represent to him? What were the things that were going on in his life that led him to this moment where he stopped fantasizing about this kind of an act and actually committed it. Usually there’s a trigger. There’s something specific that happened that set him off. What was that? It might’ve been a fight with his wife, maybe he got fired from work. But generally, there is a triggering event. So trying to find that series of things that takes a guy from being … Because he was a man in his 60s. So why does a guy all of a sudden at that age wake up and decide to commit mass murder? And I think that’s why audiences find it so fascinating. It’s because they wanna know, too. Those people are so different than us, how did they become the way they are.
JG: And I think the bleak message of the show is that we’ll never really know. And we can try to understand and try to prevent things from happening, but evil just exists.
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2018 Emmy Predictions
Find under read more. Ranked from most to least likely to be nominated imo.
Best Comedy Series:
Atlanta (FX)
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon)
Silicon Valley (HBO)
Barry (HBO)
GLOW (Netflix)
Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO)
Will & Grace (NBC)
Black-ish, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Modern Family can totally get in though since they were all in last year and dropping three seems dangerous. The Good Place is a possible spoiler as well. Dropping Black-ish is my biggest risk here, but I feel like it’s time could be up.
Best Actor - Comedy:
Donald Glover on Atlanta (FX)
Bill Hader on Barry (HBO)
William H. Macy on Shameless (Showtime)
Anthony Anderson on Black-ish (ABC)
Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO)
Zach Galifianakis on Baskets (FX)
Eric McCormack can totally show up, but I don’t see the show really doing as well as people are predicting. Thomas Middleditch is on the bubble as well, but him not getting in last year is a bad sign. Finally, Matt LeBlanc and Ted Danson could be spoilers if Episodes or The Good Place happens this year.
Best Actress - Comedy:
Rachel Brosnahan on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon)
Allison Janney on Mom (CBS)
Lily Tomlin on Grace & Frankie (Netflix)
Alison Brie on GLOW (Netflix)
Jane Fonda on Grace & Frankie (Netflix)
Pamela Adlon on Better Things (FX)
Tracee Ellis Ross is the most obvious exclusion here, but I’m sticking with Black-ish having a bad yeah tbh. Ellie Kemper and Debra Messing are the other potential nominees I’m skipping. I don’t feel confident about anyone outside my top three though.
Best Supporting Actor - Comedy:
Sean Hayes on Will & Grace (NBC)
Marc Maron on GLOW (Netflix)
Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live (NBC)
Tituss Burgess on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix)
Louis Anderson on Baskets (FX)
Brian Tyree Henry on Atlanta (FX)
Anyone can miss here and I wouldn’t be surprised lol. Henry Winkler and Tony Shalhoub are the only ones I can see sneaking in in anyone else’s place (maaaaybe Lakeith Stanfield if Atlanta is really loved). But any combination of 6 out of those 8 is possible. I’m just going with these 6.
Best Supporting Actress - Comedy
Kate McKinnon on Saturday Night Live (NBC)
Megan Mullally on Will & Grace (NBC)
Alex Borstein on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon)
Leslie Jones on Saturday Night Live (NBC)
Betty Gilpin on GLOW (Netflix)
Rita Moreno on One Day at a Time (Netflix)
McKinnon is the only safe bet, but I still feel cautiously optimistic about my top four. Gilpin is more just what I’m hoping for, but she’s definitely on the bubble and can totally happen. I’m very concerned about Moreno since she didn’t happen last year, but there’s really no better options. Laurie Metcalf could happen, but I think Roseanne is too hated and Emmy voting was when all the shit went down. I also think a random Saturday Night Live woman could replace Vanessa Bayer (and I’m thinking that would be Aidy Bryant or Cecily Strong).
Best Guest Actor - Comedy:
Donald Glover on Saturday Night Live (NBC)
Bill Hader on Saturday Night Live (NBC)
Lin-Manuel Miranda on Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO)
Bryan Cranston on Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO)
Katt Williams on Atlanta (FX)
Jon Hamm on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix)
I’m very confident on the top four and the last two are just kinda hopeful. Williams and Hamm’s episodes of their shows were so acclaimed I hope they can sneak in. If not, I expect Will Ferrell, Sterling K. Brown, Leslie Jordan or Bobby Cannavale.
Best Guest Actress - Comedy:
Jane Lynch on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon)
Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live (NBC)
Tiffany Haddish on Saturday Night Live (NBC)
Molly Shannon on Will & Grace (NBC)
Blythe Danner on Will & Grace (NBC)
Laurie Metcalf on The Big Bang Theory (CBS)
I might be crazy discounting Wanda Sykes, but yeah...I’m completely destroying Black-ish here. The top three women are pretty much locks and the bottom three are just well respected women that they’d love to nominate. Sykes is certainly possible, maybe Elizabeth Perkins for GLOW, but I’m sticking with these six.
Best Drama Series:
The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu)
Game of Thrones (HBO)
The Crown (Netflix)
Stranger Things (Netflix)
This Is Us (NBC)
The Americans (FX)
Westworld (HBO)
This category is such a lock it’s not even funny. Killing Eve is really the only spoiler here, but I think it happened too late to really gain momentum. If it aired in the fall, it’d certainly be a contender. Maaaaaybe Homeland comes back but I doubt it.
Beat Actor - Drama:
Sterling K. Brown on This Is Us (NBC)
Milo Ventimiglia on This Is Us (NBC)
Matthew Rhys on The Americans (FX)
Jeffrey Wright on Westworld (HBO)
Liev Schreiber on Ray Donovan (Showtime)
Kit Harington on Game of Thrones (HBO)
The nominations barely matter because it’s pretty much down to those top three men fighting it out for the win. Wright should comfortably move up to lead and Schreiber always gets nominated so I can’t imagine him missing now. Harington is rocky and if I had to guess someone would replace him, I’d say Ed Harris. Freddie Highmore could happen, but his show was too blah. Maybe Jason Bateman, but I think him showing his ass during the Arrested Development press tour killed his Ozark chances. Jonathan Groff is a huge longshot, but maybe the Emmys really loved Mindhunter idk.
Best Actress - Drama:
Elisabeth Moss on The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu)
Claire Foy on The Crown (Netflix)
Keri Russell on The Americans (FX)
Evan Rachel Wood on Westworld (HBO)
Mandy Moore on This Is Us (NBC)
Emilia Clarke on Game of Thrones (HBO)
This category is competitive as hell. The top two women are 100% locks and Russell is an extremely safe bet. After that, anything goes. Wood had a dominant season so the fact that she got in last year makes me feel pretty good about her chances. Moore shockingly missed last year so that could happen again, but she was all everyone was talking about after that huge Super Bowl episode. Clarke is nowhere near safe, but the Emmys just adore Game of Thrones. Sandra Oh is the obvious spoiler here and I might be crazy discounting her because if she gets a nomination, she has potential to win. I’m sticking with my gut that Killing Eve just became big too late. Viola Davis is a goddess and could obviously happen. Laura Linney is an awards show favorite, Jodie Comer could happen if Killing Eve is a hit, Tatiana Maslany won for Orphan Black a few years ago and this is her last year, Claire Danes could always return...Hell Maggie Gyllenhaal could happen for her flawless performance on The Deuce. There’s so many options, but I’m gonna go with these six but feel like an idiot if Sandra Oh gets nominated tomorrow.
Best Supporting Actor - Drama:
David Harbour on Stranger Things (Netflix)
Peter Dinklage on Game of Thrones (HBO)
Justin Hartley on This Is Us (NBC)
Mandy Patinkin on Homeland (Showtime)
Joseph Fiennes on The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu)
Anthony Hopkins on Westworld (HBO)
This category is so open-ended with only Harbour and Patinkin as possible returnees from last year. Harbour and Dinklage are 100% locks. I think Hartley worked his ass off to get nominated so I’m throwing him in there and I’m keeping Patinkin in. I literally just put Fiennes in right now. He missed last year which concerns me, but I feel like Handmaid’s Tale is only getting bigger and bigger. I feel terrible about my Hopkins prediction since he did nothing and I hope he doesn’t happen, but he got a lead actor nomination last year and he’s just beloved. I have Noah Schnapp in seventh place and I’d love to see him happen because he killed it on Stranger Things but I’m not sure. Max Minghella, Matt Smith, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and Noah Emmerich are on the bubble as well and can easily snatch a spot from any of the bottom four.
Best Supporting Actress - Drama:
Thandie Newton on Westworld (HBO)
Ann Dowd on The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu)
Lena Headey on Game of Thrones (HBO)
Millie Bobby Brown on Stranger Things (Netflix)
Chrissy Metz on This Is Us (NBC)
Yvonne Strahovski on The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu)
I’m very confident on my top three (though no one seems to be a 100% lock). I feel good about Brown and Metz since they got in last year, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they missed. Strahovski is kinda what I’m hoping for so I’m just trying to send those good vibes out there. It’s either gonna be her or Bledel and I think Strahovski kinda deserves it more (though Bledel won guest actress last year). I’d love to see Vanessa Kirby happen, but I’m scared she’ll miss. Maisie Williams and Uzo Aduba are totally in the running too, but I’d be pretty shocked to see them.
Best Guest Actor - Drama:
Gerald McRandy on This Is Us (NBC)
Ron Cephas Jones on This Is Us (NBC)
Peter Mullan on Westworld (HBO)
Michael C. Hall on The Crown (Netflix)
Jimmi Simpson on Westworld (HBO)
Matthew Goode on The Crown (Netflix)
Idk, I only feel confident with the This Is Us men. If they’re watching Westworld both those men will get in, but maybe they’re not watching and neither of them are really super famous. Cameron Britton is on everyone’s predictions for Mindhunter but I just don’t think they’re watching it and the only chance that show happens is for David Lynch in directing. I’m terrible with guest and I have no idea who else could get in. Beau Bridges or F. Murray Abraham for Homeland? Alan Alda for The Good Fight? Who knows.
Best Guest Actress - Drama:
Diana Rigg on Game of Thrones (HBO)
Samira Wiley on The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu)
Marisa Tomei on The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu)
Rinko Kikuchi on Westworld (HBO)
Cicely Tyson on How to Get Away with Murder (ABC)
Pam Grier on This Is Us (NBC)
This category’s more fun than Guest Actor. Anyway, the top two women are 100% locks and Rigg probably has the win locked up unless something crazy happens. I feel pretty confident with Tomei, even if her role was kinda underwhelming for some, her name should secure the nomination. Kikuchi is a risk, but like with Mullan and Simpson in Guest Actor, if they’re watching the show she should be good. Tyson and Grier are both strong, beloved black women and I’d be happy to see them happen. Cherry Jones could maybe happen for The Handmaid’s Tale, but that would suuuuuck because she literally did nothing. Laverne Cox is in the running too just because she’s loved. Maybe Jodi Balfour or Elizabeth Perkins but I doubt it.
Best TV Movie:
Black Mirror: USS Callister (Netflix)
The Tale (HBO)
Paterno (HBO)
Flint (Lifetime)
Electric Dreams: The Commuter (Amazon)
Oh God this category is soooooooo tragic. The top three are the biggest locks ever, no chance they miss since they were actually decent. Everything else is a crapshoot since nothing good aired lol. Flint got a WGA nomination so that’s literally the only reason I put that in there. Electric Dreams has Philip K. Dick’s on it which helps it. So yeah. Fahrenheit 451 had the hype and the prestige but flopped so bad I don’t want to put it in. It might sneak in for a lack of better options even though it was awful. The Child in Time, Cocaine Godmother, Notes from the Field, and I Am Elizabeth Smart are floating around there too in the running since the cateogry’s so tragic.
Best Limited Series:
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (FX)
Godless (Netflix)
Twin Peaks (Showtime)
The Looming Tower (Hulu)
The Sinner (USA)
This category’s not as tragic as TV Movie, but there was no Big Little Lies breakout really. The top two are pretty safe I’d say. Twin Peaks has the passion votes which should help it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was so inaccessible it missed. The Looming Tower has prestige but idk if anyone watched it. The Sinner has the ratings and some buzz thanks to Jessica Biel, but idk if it has the prestige. There’s a ton of options that could sneak in though...Patrick Melrose, Genius: Picasso, Top of the Lake: China Girl, Howards End, American Vandal, The Alienist are all in the running. And if there’s a God, Alias Grace will happen but I know it’s not gonna (Netflix isn’t even really campaigning it which is stupid since it was the best limited series of the year BUT WHATEVER).
Best Actor - Limited Series/TV Movie:
Darren Criss on The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (FX)
Al Pacino on Paterno (HBO)
Benedict Cumberbatch on Patrick Melrose (Showtime)
Kyle MacLachlan on Twin Peaks (Showtime)
Antonio Banderas on Genius: Picasso (NatGeo)
Jeff Daniels on The Looming Tower (Hulu)
I am feeling pretty confident with these six. Michael B. Jordan was a safe bet for a long time till his movie actually aired and completely flopped. Maybe Jesse Plemons sneaks in but I think these’s too many big names he’s going up against. So yeah, I’m feeling good with this six.
Best Actress - Limited Series/TV Movie:
Laura Dern on The Tale (HBO)
Jessica Biel on The Sinner (USA)
Elisabeth Moss on Top of the Lake: China Girl (Sundance)
Michelle Dockery on Godless (Netflix)
Sarah Paulson on American Horror Story: Cult (FX)
Cristin Milioti on Black Mirror: USS Callister (Netflix)
This category feels kinda bleak, the top two are the only two locks. Hayley Atwell could get in, but I’m not sure anyone actually watched Howards End. Catherine Zeta Jones and Edie Falco starred in stuff that no one really cared about, but their names alone could get them in. I’m holding out hope for Sarah Gadon because she fucking deserves it, but I’d be shocked if she actually happened.
Best Supporting Actor - Limited Series/TV Movie:
Edgar Ramirez on The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (FX)
Jeff Daniels on Godless (Netflix)
Jason Ritter on The Tale (HBO)
Bill Pullman on The Sinner (USA)
Brandon Victor Dixon on Jesus Christ Superstar: Live (NBC)
Peter Sarsgaard on The Looming Tower (Hulu)
I’m taking like a million risks here but that’s okay. The top two are totally locks. After that it’s a bit of a mess. The Tale was beloved and Ritter’s performance was fantastic. In such a bleak category, I don’t know why he’s expected to miss. I know he was creepy as hell, but Alexander Skarsgård just won despite that. Ricky Martin, Jimmi Simpson, Michael Shannon, Bill Camp, Michael Stuhlbarg or Cody Fern could totally sneak in, but I’m just not really seeing it. I don’t think anyone watched The Looming Tower and I can’t believe I’m even predicting one of them. Simpson & Fern aren’t famous enough, Martin was barely on the show and didn’t really do much. I would love to see Fern get in though, he totally deserves it.
Best Supporting Actress - Limited Seres/TV Movie:
Penelope Cruz on The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (FX)
Laura Dern on Twin Peaks (Showtime)
Angela Lansbury on Little Women (PBS)
Judith Light on The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (FX)
Ellen Burstyn on The Tale (HBO)
Nicole Kidman on Top of the Lake: China Girl (Sundance)
Like with most these Limited Series categories, I don’t feel good about this at all. I don’t think there’s a single lock. I feel very good about Cruz and Dern, but I also could see them missing. I really, really want to predict Merritt Wever, but I don’t think she’s that beloved yet (even though she won a few years ago lol). It just feels crazy throwing her in there over Nicole fucking Kidman. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Elizabeth Debicki are my other backups.
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