Streaming on HBO Max - Rod Bishop recommends THE PITT (R. Scott Gemmill, creator, USA, 2025)

A family relative of mine spent much of his twenties working as an emergency nurse in inner Sydney hospitals. Stoic and unerringly polite, his decision to leave and move into medical equipment supplies took us by surprise. Until his wife simply said: “PTSD”.

If the idea of spending more than 12 hours or 750 minutes of screentime in an emergency department seems like a debilitating watch, then The Pitt is probably not for you.

Noah Wyle, The Pitt

Unquestionably deserving of its Emmys for Outstanding Best Drama; Best Actor in a Drama (Noah Wyle); and Best Supporting Actress in a Drama (Katherine LaNasa), The Pitt is designed to be emotionally harrowing, and to make you feel as exhausted as the doctors and nurses while confronting the funding failures in the American health system. 

Other social issues such as the fentanyl epidemic, the COVID pandemic, lunatics with guns, across-state-line abortions and sickle cell disease, lie alongside simple accidents with gas bottles, difficult child births, and car crash victims. 

There’s even a domestic violence victim who presents with a fork stuck up her nose, prompting one doctor to deadpan: “I’ll just go and find a utensil specialist”.

Noah Wyle gives a towering performance as the head doctor Robby (Michael Robinavitch). His preparation for the role included eleven series as Dr Carter in E.R. (1994-2009), the obvious television antecedent to The Pitt.

Katharine LaNasa, The Pitt

Like E.R., there’s a tendency to rely on soap to keep the characters interesting, but The Pitt spends a lot more time on medical procedures, showing off the astounding plethora of medical knowledge needed by those on the emergency floor. 

Particularly when there aren’t enough available beds in the rest of the hospital (due to budget cuts in nursing staff), or when a mass casualty event fills up every available square foot of the emergency department. 

The protocols in such moments necessitate a rationing of blood per patient, and to stop the patients from dying in front of them, inexperienced, but competent interns are allowed to perform impromptu operations.

At the very least…it’s enlightening.

Sydney Film Festival, The Current Cinema and Streaming on various platforms - Rod Bishop recommends REALITY (Tina Satter, USA, 2023)

Already acclaimed at film festivals, including Berlin, Sydney and New Zealand, this always fascinating low-key drama is having a theatrical release around Australia and is available on a variety of streaming platforms.

It opens one Saturday in June 2017, when Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney) pulls into the driveway of her house in Augusta, Georgia after visiting a local supermarket. She is suddenly startled by a very loud knock on her driver’s window. 

FBI agent Justin C. Garrick (Josh Hamilton) is knocking, and from this moment on, all of the dialogue in the 82-minute Reality comes from an actual word-for-word transcription of Winner’s FBI interrogation on that day. 

She is accused of releasing a classified intelligence document to The Intercept, a New York whistleblower publication.

Agent Garrick’s summoning knock turns out to be an out-of-character moment as he, and fellow Agent R. Wallace Taylor (Marchánt Davis), start to treat Winner with kid gloves. They worry about her cat and dog; about whether she’s thirsty; about the perishables in her grocery shopping; and about the sparse furniture in her down-at-heel house. Agents swarm around them seemingly photographing everything, pouring through books and documents and bagging her computer and mobile phone.

Sydney Sweeney, Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis, Reality

Winner, Garrick and Taylor move into a spare room at the back of the house where there is no furniture and they are forced to stand through the entire interrogation.

The FBI transcript makes it clear the agents believe Winner when she says “I wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything” and they act as though they couldn’t be more sympathetic to her plight. It’s just their momentary hard stares every time she lies that gives away their professional acumen.

Reality Winner, after all, has runs on the board, although only some of this is revealed in the transcript. She’s an Air Force veteran with the 94^th Intelligence Squadron; she has top level security clearance; she speaks Farsi, Pashto and Dari; she was based in Maryland translating intercepted conversations during the Afghan war; and she has received the Airforce Commendation Medal for “aiding in 650 enemy captures, 600 enemy killed in action and identifying 900 high value targets”.

Hoping to be deployed to Afghanistan, Winner was working for the NSA (National Security Agency) translating Farsi documents on Iran’s aerospace program when she went outside her brief, downloading and printing a classified document about Russian hacking of voter registration rolls in the 2016 Presidential election. Her pantyhose proved handy for smuggling it past security.

Apart from the Russian hacking of the rolls, the FBI was also concerned with the intelligence “sources and methods” disclosed in the document and Winner was given more than five years in jail under the Espionage Act, the longest sentence ever handed down by a US federal court for someone disclosing government information to the media without permission.

It’s extraordinary – or maybe just plain lucky - that all the essential elements of the Reality Winner affair were contained in the audio recordings made that day by the FBI. 

It gives the film a pared-down, rigid framework and director Tina Satter in her first feature draws some impressively reserved and nuanced performances from the three leads: Sweeney, Hamilton and Davis. Satter had already staged her successful play In This Room about the Winner affair and this undoubtedly assisted her clear-eyed and gripping direction in Reality.

Streaming on HBO channels and on DVD - THE GILDED AGE (Julian Fellowes, USA, 2022)

 

Agnes Von Rhijn (Christine Baranski), Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon)

You have to give credit to Julian Fellowes. After six series and two movies devoted to the British aristocracy he has moved on. Some said the the series Jumped the Shark way back in about the third season but, as the feature length spinoffs showed, punters couldn't get enough.

Fellowes next stop is New York in the 1890s and the tension between the rich, represented most notably by Agnes Von Rhijn, and the nouveau riche represented by Bertha Russell. Agnes is a widow, supporting her impecunious spinster sister Ada Brook and hoping for good marriages for her son Oscar (a closet gay) and her niece Marian Brook. 

 

Both  the Van Rhijn and the Russell households have an array of servants, many of them with secrets that are going to take years (seasons) to uncover. It’s very familiar territory and it’s done with a panache that seems to accompany anything that Fellowes has done from Gosford Park onwards.

 

So while waiting for series two to emerge I pondered equivalences.

 

As mentioned there is an acerbic witty quality to Agnes Von Rhijn (Christine Baranski) that clearly matches up with Maggie Smith’s grandmother Violet Crawley. Each is adept at tossing off vicious bon mots and asserting class superiority. "My dear I may be many things but I am never wrong." has probably been uttered by both.

 

George Russell (Morgan Spector)

While Google tells me that the Russells are based on the Vanderbilts, I think George Russell (Morgan Spector) surely has more than a touch John D Rockefeller. “Grandfather was never charged with a crime” said one of Rockefeller’s grandsons in a TV series devoted to the development of American capitalism. Maybe so but reining in what Rockefeller did  to so-called compete with other business, formed the basis of today’s US competition and anti-trust law. George Russell has no qualms in destroying his business enemies – everyone from a fellow railroad operator who refuses to sell out to him, to his stenographer who betrays him for money. He’s a tougher egg than Robert Crawley the lord of Downton Abbey and a business naif mostly concerned with preserving his estates in the face of declining revenues. “There’s this fellow called Ponzi in America. Maybe I should invest with him” said Robert at one stage.

 

There are three butlers to consider. Carson is the unflappable adviser to the Crawley family and a stickler for protocol. He would never do what Bannister, Mrs Von Rhijn’s butler, does when he secretly accepts $100 from the despised Russells to advise and supervise a dinner which will be one of their stepping stones into the New York 400. In so doing he manages to get up the nose of Bruce, the Russell’s butler who doesn’t know the etiquette associated with English table layouts. “ The English never eat their salad separately and thus do not require a separate knife and fork”. Bannister is worldly and far more tolerant than Carson a man who knew his place and lauded old-fashioned virtues such as total obeisance to the ruling class. 

Ada Brook (Louise Jacobson), Peggy Scott (Denée Benton)

 

Bannister and Carson are both however stout defenders of other staff when unfairly attacked. Bannister is most keen to let the staff know whenever any racial slight occurs towards Miss Scott, the young black woman who lucks into a job as Mrs von Rhijn’s secretary. Miss Scott is the equivalent of Tom Branson the interloper Irishman who sweeps one of the Crawley daughters off her feet.

 

The closet gay characters are in different classes. The valet Barrow in Downton runs parallel to that of Oscar, who is on the hunt for a pliant rich wife and has his eye on Gladys Russell who will inherit fabulous wealth. I fear a sticky ending…

Berttha Russell (Carrie Coon), Donna Murphy (Caroline Astor)

 

Finally one big difference that leads to the best joke of the season. The Russells have a French chef who talks like an American actor doing an Inspector Clouseau accent. There was no equivalent in Downton, just Mrs Patmore the no-nonsense cook. But to succeed in New York society in The Gilded Age  a French chef is a requirement and Bertha Russell has found one. He  feigns incredulity when asked to cook an English style meal for the visit of Ward McAllister the gatekeeper to the New York’s most esteemed member of society Mrs Astor, but trouble is afoot. I can say no more…

Streaming on SBS On Demand - Rod Bishop highly recommends THE SLEEPERS (Ivan Zachariás, Czech Republic, 2019)

Earlier this week television writers from both Fairfax and News Ltd ran stories about this six-part Czech spy series, first released by HBO Europe in 2019 and now on SBS On Demand.

Set mostly in Prague in the late 1980s, dissident Victor Skála (Martin Mysicka) and his wife Marie (Tatiana Pauhofová) have returned to Czechoslovakia from years in exile. After decades of Soviet occupation, the Velvet Revolution is about to usher in democracy for their country and Victor looks set for a high position in the new government.

His disappearance and Marie’s subsequent search for her husband throws open a murky world of agents, double agents, assassins and even triple agents as the Russians try to hold on to some form of control over the Czech secret police (the StB) in their battles with dissidents, MI6 and their own KGB.

Admirably intelligent, understated and dramatically assured, it unfolds with the careful restraint of Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in from The Cold (1965) and it’s almost a homage to many of le Carre’s secret world spy novels.

Cinematographer Jan Velicky has given Prague the moody tainted atmosphere of that city in the late 1980s; scriptwriter Ondrej Gabriel has capably found a way through the myriad of plot twists; and director Ivan Zachariás is well served by the uniformly excellent cast, none of whom try to out-stage their colleagues. 

Streaming on Foxtel Showcase - Rod Bishop reviews a new series produced by Ridley Scott RAISED BY WOLVES (HBO/MAX, USA, 2020)

 

Here’s an idea:

Resurrect the dead Mithras cult from the 1^st to 4^thCentury CE, a ‘boutique’ religion once pinched by the Romans from the Persians and popular among the Roman Centurions in Northern Europe.

Instead of perishing, let’s have them survive, thrive and by the 22^ndCentury, win a religious war against The Atheists. With the Earth war-ravaged, the Atheists are well in retreat but still manage to send some incubating children and a couple of very nifty androids to the distant planet of Keplar 22b where they plan to create a new world free of religion.

But those Mithraics haven’t survived the Millennia for nothing. They send a gigantic spacecraft named The Ark ofHeaven packed with Mithraic believers, their children and some double-agent Atheists pretending to be believers to Keplar 22b as well. Their mission: to create a New Eden and destroy The Atheists’ plans for an atheistic world. 

One of the androids, however is a Necromancer, and boy, can she cause problems.

Executive producer Ridley Scott directs the first couple of episodes and his son, Luke, gets to direct three as well.

Amana Collin, Raised by Wolves

Unsurprisingly, Scott’s preoccupation with artificial intelligence and its relationship to the human species (along the lines of “What makes you human?” and “Androids don’t feel empathy”) is in abundance as is the hoary old science versus religion debate. When one of the Atheists pretending to be a Mithraic is asked to help an ailing android, she briskly replies: “I’m a doctor, not a mechanic”.

There’s probably the artiest sex scene ever between an android and a computer simulation, if that’s your thing, along with silicon tumours and even a half-carbon fetus in need of plasma.

A lot of work (and money) has gone into the production design and art decoration and a very brief credit in the titles suggests inspiration from Zeitz Mocaa, the new Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town, South Africa.

Cricket tragics will also recognize the striking Table Mountain above Cape Town with its orographic white cloud formations pouring over the cliffs from its flat top.

IMDB.com lists nearly 400 contributors to “Series Special Effects”.

A second season is in production.