Television

For a certain kind of viewer — raise your hand if you love gritty, operatically scaled gangster melodrama — Seasons 3 and 4 of the Italian drug-gang epic “Gomorrah,” seen in other parts of the world but still missing from North American streaming services, are the Honus Wagner rookie card of television.(If you haven’t discovered the show yet, the first two seasons are on Netflix in America. We’ll wait.)Now that you’re back, we have news. “Zerozerozero” (eight episodes Friday on Amazon Prime Video) shares some DNA with “Gomorrah”: It’s also based on a book by the Italian journalist Roberto Saviano, and two of its creators, Stefano Sollima and Leonardo Fasoli, are “Gomorrah” alums. And it is, if you’ll pardon the expression, a decent fix. It’s not the pure stuff, but it will tide you over.“Zerozerozero” is, like the drug deal it chronicles, an international production, bringing Amazon together with the European networks Sky and Canal Plus. (The title isn’t explained, but presumably refers to the very large sums of money exchanged via banking apps or duffel bags.)And it reflects its mixed origins in a literal way. “Zerozerozero” is three shows in one: an Italian mafia saga with rocky Calabrian hillsides and generational omertà; a Mexican narco thriller with lavish cartel violence; and, more improbably, an indie-movie-style American family drama and character study. The series toggles among the three stories, which are intimately connected but for the most part told separately, with occasional meetings that are invariably bad news for the characters involved.The common thread, purchased in Mexico and transported to Italy by an American broker, is a shipping container of jalapeño tins that actually hold cocaine. They’re a familiar but effective narrative and visual device, weary but determined travelers whose progress we root for as they’re hoisted on and off ships and trucked across deserts and mountains.They’re also mute witness to the travails of their Mexican sellers, Italian buyers and American expediters. In Monterrey a special-forces sergeant (Harold Torres) takes his team of anti-cartel soldiers on a ruthless and bloody venture into the private sector while keeping up his attendance at evangelical church services. In Calabria an aging don (Adriano Chiaramida) hides out in underground bunkers and abandoned farmhouses while dealing with his rebellious grandson (Giuseppe de Domenico).Caught between, in New Orleans, a father, daughter and son (Gabriel Byrne, Andrea Riseborough and Dane DeHaan) struggle to keep the family shipping brokerage afloat, counting on the tens of millions they stand to make from transporting those jalapeño tins.And, again improbably, the American story line is the strength of “Zerozerozero” — when it’s onscreen, there’s more to watch than a coolly efficient international crime thriller. Perhaps because they couldn’t fall back as easily on mafia or narco clichés, Sollima and his collaborators came up with a framework for the American family — domineering father, children struggling to prove themselves in the business, sister fiercely protective of brother with degenerative disease — that’s usefully melodramatic and gives Riseborough and DeHaan room to portray a real and subtly moving relationship.Their scenes, as the sister and brother tend to the shipment through increasingly dangerous and implausible complications on the Atlantic and in Africa, provide emotional and dramatic jolts in what’s otherwise a polished, visually absorbing, highly engineered prestige-TV package. Locations in northern Mexico, southern Italy and the Sahara are photographed in ways that are simultaneously arresting and unsurprising, and the “Gomorrah”-like ambience — violent action depicted with a melancholy austerity of tone and style — is reinforced by the incantatory music of the Scottish band Mogwai.That kind of package is an impressive thing in its own right, and the Italian sequences have their share of coups, like an opening scene in which the gangster emerges from a cramped, windowless cell into a wild mountain landscape. But “Zerozerozero” also has stretches, especially in the Mexican story line, that serve mostly to fill our expectations of this kind of show, sequences in which the narco-thriller conventions are just there for their own sake. As a globe-spanning attempt to tell a start-to-finish story of the drug trade, “Zerozerozero” evokes Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 film “Traffic” (based on the superior British mini-series “Traffik”), and it shares the movie’s tendency to sacrifice dramatic specificity for the sake of broad-brush platitudes.It has a saving grace, though, in Riseborough, who overcomes an attention-grabbing hairdo — a two-tone affair resembling an alien warrior’s helmet — and makes human and disarmingly charming what could have been a flat, cartoonish character. Spoiler alert: Her character, unlike many, survives, and the smile that pops onto her face amid the carnage of the show’s final scene is enough to make you hope for a second season. More

Never accuse Alex Garland of thinking small. From his Gen-X touchstone novel, “The Beach,” to his mind-bending science-fiction movies “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation,” the British writer and director has spent his career exploring grand ideas like utopianism and artificial intelligence, in multiple mediums. Now he’s attempting television with “Devs,” an eight-episode techno-thriller debuting Thursday on Hulu’s new FX hub.“Devs” stars Nick Offerman (“Parks and Recreation”) in a rare dramatic role, playing Forest, the longhaired, haunted and quietly terrifying founder of a Silicon Valley tech company called Amaya, which specializes in quantum computing. When the boyfriend of one of Forest’s employees, Lily (Sonoya Mizuno), disappears, she suspects Forest may be involved.During the course of her investigation, she discovers that Amaya’s most secretive division has been doing research into simulated realities and multiverses. It has also developed a predictive algorithm so precise that it functions like a window into any point in time.Garland and Offerman spoke by phone about their collaboration — Garland from England, Offerman from a vacation spot in Napa Valley — and about the tech worship that inspired the series. They also discussed the extent to which they buy into the series’s deterministic vision of the universe. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.“Devs” represents fairly new territory for both you. How did you two connect?NICK OFFERMAN: Well, I had been running like I was performing in a circus act, with several figurative plates spinning: acting jobs, touring as a comedian, book writing and woodworking. I wanted to slow down, to create some daylight in my calendar. So I did that, and then miraculously I got a call that Alex Garland wanted to meet me. I’d been a fan of Alex’s for a long time. I was quickly cast under his spell.When I first sat down with Alex, he told me about some of the ups and downs of his previous projects, which involved clashing with large corporations and standing his artistic ground. And I said, “I am getting ready to propose marriage to you.” As an artist, you always hope your collaborators will be so aligned because you have a much better chance of making good art. The more the captain of your ship steers to the to the tune of the military industrial complex, the greater chance you have of making dross.ALEX GARLAND: Nick’s character, Forest, is in some ways genial and affable, but in other ways there’s something really dark inside him. Though I didn’t see darkness in Nick, I did see melancholy. And my experience with Sonoya was not dissimilar, inasmuch as there’s something subverting the thing that appears to be there. There’s nothing solicitous about Sonoya or Nick. Many actors operate from a deep-rooted desire to be liked. They play a kind of seducing game with the audience via the camera. And these two just don’t have any trace of that, at all.Nick and I also just got on really well. All of the people in this cast are serious actor-actors, but they’re also good-natured. When you’re shooting, it’s always going to be difficult, and in the end the personalities you’re involved with become crucial. Nick, don’t you think it’s true that there was very little in the way of the hierarchies that can easily happen on set?OFFERMAN Yes, it was this unique, ragtag band of high-end artists across the board, with a wonderful diversity. The prevailing tone around the set was that everyone felt very lucky. I think when a person loses the attitude of a student and instead decides they’ve become a master, that’s when bitterness can set in on a set. What you want are those of us who are inescapably aware of our failings, and who understand that we succeed because of our ability to embrace them, as human animals. Those are the people I love working with.There are obvious parallels between the Forest character and real-world tech entrepreneurs. Was there anybody particular you had in mind?GARLAND I had lots of people in mind; and they’re probably the same people that you have in mind. [Laughs.] But the thing I was most interested in was not the specific personality traits of any particular tech leader, but more the kind of messianic quality that is conferred upon them — by consumers, by the media and by their employees. It all has a slightly cult-y feel. Ultimately we’re talking about products. And yet their launches feel a bit like church.OFFERMAN I was glad I wasn’t called upon to emulate any specific Silicon Valley figurehead, but instead a more realistic, finely wrought human being. When the story begins, my character’s company has been established, and my product and my triumph are all in place.I’m grateful Alex gave me some very human circumstances to dig into, because I don’t know that I have the skills to play some kind of Howard Hughes iconoclast. If I started thinking, “Wow, how am I going to going to play Attila the Hun?,” that would’ve become a whole other juggling act.“Devs” deals with some big theoretical ideas, like the possibilities of a multiverse of realities, and the question of whether we’re all living in some sort of computer simulation. Do either of you personally believe in any of that?OFFERMAN I’ll be the briefer of the two of us because I’ve seen Alex deliver a complete college lecture on this subject, off the top of his head. Alex would gently bring me around to a rudimentary understanding of all this, and then within about 36 hours, I needed to be reminded. I can understand the theory of it, absolutely, but when asked to place that lens over my own existence, it almost immediately becomes too complicated, and I say, “Well, let me put that aside for the moment, because I need a sandwich.”GARLAND In terms of whether we’re living in a simulation, I think it’s fantastically unlikely. The “many-worlds” theories are just an attempt to explain the strange and counterintuitive nature of quantum mechanics; and there’s something attractive about it. I’ve met very senior physicists who believe entirely in many-worlds. I’ll ask them, “As we’re driving down this road, do you believe there’s another world in which your car spins out and burns up, and another in which you have a heart attack, and another in which the journey continues and your car arrives safely?,” and they’ll categorically believe that’s the case.We also deal with the idea of determinism. If everything is a result of cause and effect, this means our paths — our histories and our futures — could be predicted if we peered in closely enough. Of all the ideas contained within this story, that’s the one I think is most intuitive; because although we may feel very strongly that we have free will, we also can accept surprisingly quickly that we might not.Think about a 16-year-old who’s mugged someone at knife-point. If we live in a society that believes he exercised his free will, we’ll put him in prison. But what if the 16-year-old came from an impoverished family with a history of drug addiction? What if they became drug addicted themselves? Suddenly the question of free will becomes much more cloudy.Did the cast talk a lot about the ideas in the show?OFFERMAN We did. We shot across nearly six months, with a couple breaks, both in America and England. There’s a wonderful feeling of camaraderie when a cast assembles in different locations. We had these rehearsal sessions in which Alex held our hands and walked us through the ideas of determinism and many-worlds and how they might apply to our program.But really what got the most play between us was what it felt like to perform this. It was like if Eugene O’Neill and Stanley Kubrick had sat down to cook up a collaboration.Amaya’s secret team invents a machine that lets them peer into moments from history. If you could do that, what you look at?GARLAND The difficulty would be trying to narrow it down. But I’d like to go back to when we were living in caves. I’d love to know what kind of language existed then and what form human interactions took.OFFERMAN Mine’s easy, because I wouldn’t. I’m OK with just looking at what’s front of me on a day-to-day basis. I don’t need to see Hitler on a date with Eva Braun.GARLAND And I’d be very interested in seeing that. [Laughs.] I’d never stop. More

What’s StreamingDEVS Stream on FX on Hulu. Nick Offerman plays a tech mogul in “Devs,” a dark sci-fi show about a Silicon Valley company angling to become the Uber of determinism — the philosophical belief that every event in the universe is completely determined by previously existing causes. Created by the British writer-director Alex Garland (“Ex Machina,” “Annihilation”), the series casts Offerman as Forest, a man whose company specializes in quantum computing, and aims to build a computer that can calculate the cause and outcome of any event. The plot centers on one of Forest’s employees, an engineer named Lily (Sonoya Mizuno), who becomes suspicious that Forest has committed a crime. “Even through the slow stretches and occasional pretentiousness, I loved the sensual experience of ‘Devs’; it was like a spa visit for my eyes and ears,” James Poniewozik wrote in his review for The New York Times. Poniewozik called the show “half techno-thriller, half art-directed TED Talk on determinism, multiverse theory and the observer effect.”WENDY AND LUCY (2008) Stream on Amazon and Tubi; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and YouTube. Kelly Reichardt’s latest movie, “First Cow,” about friends in mid-19th-century Oregon Territory who come to rely on a prized bovine, hits theaters this weekend. Her 2008 feature, “Wendy and Lucy,” also shows a relationship between human and animal in the Pacific Northwest. The film stars Michelle Williams as Wendy, a young woman who meanders through Oregon and Washington on her way to Alaska. Her main companion is a mutt named Lucy. A.O. Scott labeled it a “short, simple, perfect story” in his review for The Times. “Underneath this plain narrative surface — or rather, resting on it the way a smooth stone rests in your palm — is a lucid and melancholy inquiry into the current state of American society,” he wrote.VERNON SUBUTEX Stream on Topic. A motley crew of Parisians drift in and out of “Vernon Subutex 1,” Virginie Despentes’s novel about a former record-store owner who starts living on the street. That book, the first volume of a trilogy, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018. Its main character is played by the French movie star Romain Duris in this TV adaptation, which aired overseas last year but is now available stateside.What’s on TVBETTER THINGS 10 p.m. on FX. “Mom, I want to create a dating profile for you,” Frankie (Hannah Alligood) says near the start of the new, fourth season of this dramedy. That mom would be Sam, a Los Angeles matriarch played by Pamela Adlon, who ended the previous season by celebrating her 50th birthday. This fourth season continues the show’s investigation of, as James Poniewozik put it in his review of Season 3 for The Times, “aging, growing up, freedom, dependence, mortality, responsibility, the flowering and wilting of life, all at the same time.” More