Lead Preview
Thursday
Pose
9pm, BBC Two
Over the past decade, Ryan Murphy has become something like a one-man studio, in the old Hollywood mode. First flaring up with Nip/Tuck in the early 2000s, since 2009 he’s been creator, producer, director or writer on Glee, American Horror Story, The New Normal, Scream Queens, American Crime Story, and Feud: Bette And Joan. He’s perhaps not the greatest talent of recent American television (none of his shows has hit the vibrating mystical plane occupied by series like The Sopranos or Mad Men), but his sheer energy and prolificacy is exciting, and his strike rate astonishingly high. Certainly, Feud and both American Crime Story series rank among the most memorable dramas of the past few years.
Even if Murphy’s not the greatest single creator currently at work in TV, however, he is the most significant, not just for what he’s putting on screen, but for his work offscreen, long spearheading a mission to ensure equal opportunities in his industry for women, LGBTQ people and people of colour.
Both onscreen and behind the scenes, his latest series is his most proudly conspicuous extension of that campaign yet. A vibrant period piece set around the “ball” club subculture of 1980s New York – itself a largely black, gay, trans scene – Pose boasts a young cast that is predominantly black and stands as the largest contingent of LGBTQ actors ever seen in a continuing drama. Like its characters, the series is far from perfect, but bursts and pops with an energy that demands to be seen.
Manhattan’s ball subculture had its biggest moment in the mainstream sun in 1990 due to Madonna’s Vogue single, which celebrated and copped moves from the scene. At ballroom nights, crowds gathered to watch strutting contestants compete to win trophies by striking poses while dressed-up to fit a specified category – say, “royalty” or “business” or “military,” or themes drawn from Hollywood. In common with the disco competitions of Saturday Night Fever, or the famous breakdancing showdowns of early hip-hop, ball nights were a chance for kids with nothing but style and attitude to become stars for a moment.
In Pose, these nights become the reason for living for a bunch of variously excluded characters who form a surrogate family. Leading the pack is Blanca (Mj Rodriguez). As the series begins, she’s a member of a ball “house” of performers led by the imperious Elektra Abundance (Dominique Jackson). But upon learning she is HIV-positive, Blanca resolves to make the most of her life by striking out to set up her own rival house. Joining her are a fellow deserter from House Abundance, Angel (Indya Moore), a trans woman surviving by turning tricks, and Damon Richards (Ryan Jamaal Swain), a 17-year-old dancer, whose parents threw him out when they realised he was gay.
Pose has some grit in the mix. The shadow of Aids rises, and sex work and homelessness are recurring themes. Meanwhile, all the historical moments and attitudes are pointedly arranged for contemporary resonance. Set at the peak of the greed-is-good era, a major subplot involves Angel’s relationship with Stan (Evan Peters), a young, white, ostensibly straightlaced businessman, who has just started working at Trump Tower.
But Murphy, cannily, packages all this like a teen photostory comicbook fantasy. Grooving to a killer soundtrack, Pose shares similarities with recent get-the-gang-together throwbacks like The Get Down and Glow, but its heart-on-sleeve earnestness reminded me far more of the 1980s Fame. Like all Murphy’s dramas, it has a hard, glossy-glittery, bitchy surface, covering something more fragile. It comes on like a walk on the wild side, but, really, it’s just searching for kindness.
DAILY HIGHLIGHTS
Sunday
Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy/
Born Digital: First Cuts
9pm/ 10pm, BBC Four
BBC Four launches a short season of programmes marking the (by somebody’s calculation) 30th anniversary of the internet with a repeat for Evan Davis’s 2011 profile of the late Apple guru. Following Jobs’s rise, fall and rise again, from his garage to global supremacy, the film considers how he fused Californian countercultural attitude with a relentlessly pernickety eye for design detail, and a near-visionary reading of the increasingly rapid advances in technology. It’s followed by Born Digital, a compilation of 11 short films exploring our digital landscape from a variety of perspectives: from wary speculative dramas like Skin, exploring the erosion of privacy; to documentary shorts like Outlying, about delivering super-fast broadband to the remote community on the Isle Of Rum.
Monday
This Time With Alan Partridge
9.30pm, BBC One
It’s probably taken the faithful a solid week to completely recover from the vision of Young Alan’s Schooldays that was at the dark heart of the last episode. But, steady yourself, because there are more alt-Alan apparitions to come tonight, as the This Time studio plays host to Ireland’s uncanniest Alan lookalike, leading to a sing-along that had me spitting out my teeth. Before that, though, there’s a packed programme to get through, as Alan lends his face to a campaign to honour brave police dogs; talks with a 100-year-old fan of the show; goes undercover to expose the corrupt stink of product placement; and reminds us of the importance of knowing the basics of first aid. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Lynn has to work fast to defeat fraud on a massive scale, and there’s a hint of romance in the air.
Tuesday
Storyville: The Internet's Dirtiest Secrets – The Cleaners 9pm, BBC Four Continuing BBC Four’s internet season, this is the week’s most fascinating documentary. Disturbing, at times shocking, the film shines a light on the hidden world of “content moderators” – people employed by giants like Facebook and Twitter to review online material and decide whether it should be removed. The first gobsmacking revelation is how many of these employees are drawn from impoverished communities such as the Philippines. We meet workers labouring in workhouse conditions in Manila, where each must meet a target of viewing 25,000 images per day. The film explores how constantly trawling the worst of the internet – videos of abuse, torture, beheadings, self-harm, suicide – impacts on them individually. Meanwhile, it raises hard questions about how such workers are expected to make editorial decisions about satirical imagery and political censorship. This is a vital film, and a thoroughly depressing portrait of our planet.
Wednesday
The Bay
9pm, STV
This new six-part series feels like they found some leftover bits from Broadchurch, chucked them in a blender with half a dozen outtakes other ITV crime dramas, then whizzed it all up and hoped for the best. It’s sturdy enough, but an achingly generic identikit, although a good cast does what it can to keep it breathing. Set by the sea in Morecambe, Morven Christie stars as DS Lisa Armstrong, a police Family Liaison Officer who finds herself wading into implausibly deep waters on her latest case. Two teenagers, a twin sister and brother, have gone missing, but Lisa soon discovers that she has an unexpected personal connection with the family involved, and seeks to cover it up. Meanwhile, her own troublesome teenage kids seem to know more than they let on.
Friday
Kenny Rogers: Cards On The Table
8pm, BBC Four
A repeat for this amiable documentary on the silver-bearded superstar. Whether or not you’re a fan, there’s no denying the drive that propelled a poor boy from Texas to become the velvet growler who, via songs like “The Gambler” and “Islands In The Stream,” notched up over 120 million album sales. In this profile, the early years are the most interesting. He got his start in the ever-changing folk-pop collective The New Christy Minstrels during the period of the 1960s when, thanks to Dylan, folk was shifting boundaries – hence Rogers briefly becoming a psychedelic pin-up when his second band, The First Edition, scored a hit with “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” making him a demi-god among Big Lebowski cultists. The meat of the film, though, focuses on his gazillion-selling glory years of the 1970s and 80s.
Saturday
Prince: A Purple Reign
12.40am, BBC Four
Another Saturday, another TV wasteland in which the only life is repeats. BBC Scotland’s existence-justifying re-run of Tutti Frutti (9pm) sees The Majestics reach their farthest flung tour date yet, where Danny and (especially) Bomba face tough questions on local radio. But the liveliest and most poignant flashback is BBC Two’s repeat of this Prince profile. Made in 2011, when the Purple Yoda still walked among us, the hour-long film barely scratches the surface of his unimaginable genius. But it makes the most of the short running time, and as it flits through his career and many moustaches from 1978 to 2011 (heavy on the 1980s – the final two decades get ten minutes), the welter of archive is enough to leave you panting for the epic Netflix documentary series that is currently in the works.
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