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    The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV

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    A few years ago, “Atlanta” and “PEN15” were teaching TV new tricks.In “Atlanta,” Donald Glover sketched a funhouse-mirror image of Black experience in America (and outside it), telling stories set in and around the hip-hop business with an unsettling, comic-surreal language. In “PEN15,” Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle created a minutely observed, universal-yet-specific picture of adolescent awkwardness.In February, Glover and Erskine returned in the action thriller “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” on Amazon Prime Video. It’s … fine? A takeoff on the 2005 film, it updates the story of a married duo of spies by imagining the espionage business as gig work. The stars have chemistry and charisma; the series avails itself of an impressive cast of guest stars and delectable Italian shooting locations. It’s breezy and goes down easy. I watched several episodes on a recent long-haul flight and they helped the hours pass.But I would never have wasted an episode of “Atlanta” or “PEN15” on in-flight entertainment. The work was too good, the nuances too fine, to lose a line of dialogue to engine noise.I do not mean to single out Glover and Erskine here. They are not alone — far from it. Keri Russell, a ruthless and complicated Russian spy in “The Americans,” is now in “The Diplomat,” a forgettably fun dramedy. Natasha Lyonne, of the provocative “Orange Is the New Black” and the psychotropic “Russian Doll,” now plays a retro-revamped Columbo figure in “Poker Face.” Idris Elba, once the macroeconomics-student gangster Stringer Bell in “The Wire,” more recently starred in “Hijack,” a by-the-numbers airplane thriller.I’ve watched all of these shows. They’re not bad. They’re simply … mid. Which is what makes them, frustratingly, as emblematic of the current moment in TV as their stars’ previous shows were of the ambitions of the past.What we have now is a profusion of well-cast, sleekly produced competence. We have tasteful remakes of familiar titles. We have the evidence of healthy budgets spent on impressive locations. We have good-enough new shows that resemble great old ones.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Shogun’ Review: Rediscovering Japan

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      The FX remake of the classic mini-series is classed up, retuned for contemporary sensibilities and still an epic soap opera.The new FX mini-series “Shogun” is getting a lot of credit simply for not being “Shogun,” the 1980 NBC mini-series also adapted from James Clavell’s best-selling novel about the last days of feudal Japan. But the new show stands and falls on the same terms as the old show: its success as an epic costumed soap opera. You can correct for wooden acting, dated production values and Eurocentrism, but you can’t really correct for the basic nature of the material.And on those terms, this “Shogun” — which premieres Tuesday on FX and Hulu with two of its 10 episodes — is perfectly successful. It is sumptuously produced, mostly well acted and not excessively sentimental or sensational. If its story seems to stop and start a bit, there are reasons for that, which become clear in a satisfying and moving ending; if there are major characters who don’t stand up to scrutiny, there are others who come alive and hold your interest. It may not live up to its hype, and it may leave you wondering why so much time (more than a decade) and money needed to be spent reanimating Clavell’s tale. But it delivers.Created by the husband-and-wife team of Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, the FX “Shogun” is still the story of an English navigator, John Blackthorne, who arrives in Japan at the turn of the 17th century and becomes embroiled — to a startling degree — in the political, cultural and romantic life of the country. (Blackthorne, like most of the significant characters, is loosely based on a historical figure.)Kondo and Marks have recalibrated the narrative, however, moving Blackthorne’s point of view down in the mix and elevating the roles of many of the Japanese characters, particularly Toda Mariko, the noblewoman who becomes Blackthorne’s translator and love interest, and Yoshii Toranaga, the lord who both protects and manipulates him.That’s a notable change from the original “Shogun,” but 44 years down the road, it’s not as if the show should get a ton of credit — it’s an easy win. In the current global TV environment, the show’s emphasis on Japanese characters and language is welcome but not exceptional. (Tremendous effort reportedly also went into vetting the details of period costume and behavior; few viewers, even in Japan, are likely to know the difference, but what’s onscreen certainly looks credible to the rest of us.)As the plot, busy yet not all that complicated, unwinds — Toranaga and his rival Ishido jockeying for power, with Blackthorne as a reluctant pawn; Blackthorne being alternately repulsed and seduced by his new surroundings — the real difference between the old and new shows has less to do with cultural enlightenment than with a higher level of tastefulness and technique. Though there is a multicultural dimension there, too: Marks and Kondo’s show is informed by the craftsmanship of classic Japanese samurai films, which were in turn heavily influenced by the attitudes and styles of Hollywood westerns and swashbucklers. This “Shogun” sits in a polyglot comfort zone.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Shogun’ Remake: This Time, the White Man Is Only One of the Stars

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      A 1980 adaptation of the best-selling novel cast it as the tale of a white hero in an exotic Japan. A new version tells a more kaleidoscopic story.Gina Balian, a television executive who had worked on the hit series “Game of Thrones” for HBO, had just left to help FX start a new limited series division when an agent sent her a nearly 1,200-page novel.It was “Shogun,” James Clavell’s 1975 best-selling chronicle of a hardened English sailor who lands in Japan at the dawn of the 17th century looking for riches and ends up adopting the ways of the samurai. Balian’s first reaction was that she had already seen this book on television — back in 1980, when NBC had turned the novel into a mini-series that earned the network its highest Nielsen ratings to date.Most of what she remembered about the first adaptation was Richard Chamberlain — its white, male star. But as she started reading, she discovered the novel had a much more kaleidoscopic point of view, devoting considerable pages to getting inside the heads of the Japanese characters.“I thought that there was a story to be told that was much wider and deeper,” said Balian, who is co-president of FX Entertainment. It didn’t hurt that something about it also reminded her of “Game of Thrones,” in terms of the “richness of so many characters’ lives.”It took 11 years, two different teams of showrunners and a major relocation to bring “Shogun” back to the screen. The 10-part series debuts on Hulu on Feb. 27 with the first two episodes, followed by new ones weekly, and will premiere on Disney+ outside of the United States and Latin America.Both Hollywood and Western audiences largely have moved beyond viewing the world as a playground where (mostly) white protagonists prove their mettle in exotic lands. Shows and films like “Squid Game” and “Parasite” have shown that audiences can handle Asian characters speaking their own languages.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Feud: Capote vs. the Swans’ Review: Cold Blooded

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      In FX’s series about Truman Capote’s downfall, there’s nothing waiting at the rainbow’s end.“Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” which premieres Wednesday on FX (streaming on Hulu), is something that its protagonist could not abide: a bore.The second season of the anthology series “Feud” stretches the story of Truman Capote’s falling out with the “swans” of New York society across eight episodes and more than seven hours. Much of the action takes place between the publication of the thinly fictionalized story “La Côte Basque, 1965” in November 1975 — in which Capote spills the tea about the misbehavior of many of his rich acquaintances — and the death in July 1978 of Babe Paley, one of the socialites who dropped him after the piece came out. Flashbacks touch on his grim childhood, his ascent to fame in the 1960s with the revolutionary “In Cold Blood” and his happy days as a dinner-party darling; other scenes cover his late 1970s to early 1980s spiral into alcoholism and addiction, leading to his death of liver disease in 1984.This could be the framework for gossipy, sexy, stylish, tragic entertainment, but that does not appear to be what the show’s creators — who include the writer Jon Robin Baitz; Gus Van Sant, who directed six episodes; and the executive producer Ryan Murphy — had in mind. They have gone instead for chilly, moralistic and cautionary. “Capote vs. the Swans” feels as forbidding and vindictive as the society wives who pass judgment on Capote.An element in that affect is the fashionably fractured approach the show takes to its storytelling. The action jumps back and forth relentlessly in time. One result is that it can take a few beats, even when there are titles with the years, to figure out whether what we are seeing is happening before or after the pivotal publication of “La Côte Basque, 1965.”Another, more important result is that the themes the show puts forth — the discrimination and condescension Capote faces as a gay man, even from those who champion him; the rigid patriarchy that oppresses the swans despite (or because of) their social standing; and the rapid changes in the culture that perplex all of them — are not elaborated on in a dramatic way. Ideas don’t develop — they agglomerate in a repetitive, undifferentiated jumble, and the power they might have drains away. The show is peculiarly lacking in dramatic tension (though not in melodramatic flourishes); it’s eight episodes of Capote circling the drain, bobbing higher or lower depending on the time frame.Chloë Sevigny as C.Z. Guest, one of the socialites Capote betrayed with his 1975 story in Esquire.FXWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      The Women of ‘Feud: Capote vs. the Swans’ Are Birds of a Feather

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      Famous women play the famous women in Ryan Murphy’s new period drama. In a group interview, they discuss the series and the burdens of public life.The first season of Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” aired in 2017. A juicy survey of the bitter rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the co-stars of “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” the show earned 18 Emmy nominations, winning two. A second season, based on Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s troubled marriage, was developed then scrapped, mostly because Murphy felt that he could never outdo “The Crown.” Another iteration, centered on William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, also fell apart. Murphy and his producers toyed with a half dozen other ideas, though never for very long.“It’s very easy to do a show where people are just nasty to each other,” Murphy said in a an interview earlier this month. “But feuds are never about hate. They’re about love.”Then Murphy read “Capote’s Women,” by Laurence Leamer, a gossipy, trenchant study of the novelist Truman Capote and the society women he befriended and later betrayed. Murphy had long been fascinated by Capote. He was equally entranced by the women Capote referred to as his Swans, self-created creatures whom he admired for their style, wealth and savoir faire. Their gift, as Capote wrote in his late collection “Portraits and Observations,” was to offer “the imaginary portrait precisely projected.”Tom Hollander plays Capote, whose betrayal of Babe Paley (Watts) was perhaps the most cutting.FX“It was a full-time job,” Moore said of the roles performed by the real-life women she and her co-stars play in “Feud.” “There were no casual sweatpants.”FXLeamer’s tale had luxury, treachery, artistry and spite. It had love, too, “the very fragile, wonderful relationships that exist many times between gay men and straight women,” Murphy said. With a script by Jon Robin Baitz and direction by Gus Van Sant, the story became “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” an eight-episode series that premieres on FX on Wednesday. (Episodes will stream on Hulu the day after they air.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Ally McBeal’ Star Calista Flockhart Returns to TV

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      On a chilly January weekend in Los Angeles, I turned into a truffle pig. I foraged relentlessly all over town, looking for truffle fries.By Monday, when it was time to go to my interview, the only thing in my suitcase I could squeeze into was a Spanx dress.“My sister gave me this for Christmas,” I explained sheepishly to the famously lissome Calista Flockhart as I slid into a booth on the terrace of the Georgian Hotel. “I guess you’ve never owned any Spanx.”“I love Spanx!” she said. “In fact, I just ordered — no kidding — a pair of Spanx jeans. They make really cute jeans. They’re very wide.”Seeing my skeptical look, she reminded me: “It’s not only about sucking it all in. It’s about smoothing it all the way. No panty lines.”And then, as we sat in this romantic spot, looking out at the ocean, she said the thing that made me fall in love: “Would you like to nibble on something? How about some French fries?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘The Bear’ Wins Best Comedy at the Golden Globes

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      Globe voters said “Yes, chef,” to “The Bear,” which beat out “Ted Lasso” and “Abbott Elementary” to win best comedy.One quibble: Is “The Bear” even a comedy? Any episode of the restaurant-set FX series has more agita and fewer jokes than most dramas. Some scenes and some entire episodes, like the most recent season’s standout, “Fishes,” can only be watched through fingers. But “The Bear,” created by Christopher Storer, also has a softish heart — among other organ meats — and a half-hour running time, enough to land it in this category.The first season, which saw Jeremy Allen White’s troubled chef, Carmy, inherit the restaurant from his dead brother, was a surprise hit despite its grubby milieu and absence of bankable stars. (Apologies, Oliver Platt.) It made an immediate internet pinup of White and a darling of his co-star, Ayo Edebiri, who plays a driven upstart chef. The second season saw the eatery morph from an Italian beef joint to a Michelin-courting sensation. It focused more on the camaraderie among the staff even as it broke a few characters away for special episodes, and it was praised for its realistic depictions of work, grief, Chicago, high-end food and friendship.A nominee last year for best comedy, “The Bear” yielded a surprise best lead actor win for White as the aggrieved Carmy. Repeating his win in the same category this year was less of a surprise.“I can’t believe I’m in this room with all these people I’ve loved so much, admired so much for so long. It’s unreal. I love this show,” he said.White’s co-star, Edebiri, won her first Golden Globe for best actress in a TV comedy.“Everybody at ‘The Bear,’ that’s my family,” Edebiri said in her breathless acceptance speech. “I love you guys so much. It’s an honor to work with you and grow alongside you.”“All of my agents, managers, assistants, the people who answer my emails, y’all are real ones,” she added. “Thank you for answering my crazy, crazy emails.”Lionel Bryce, who plays Marcus, spoke on behalf of the show’s cast and crew accepting the award. “Most importantly, thank you to the entire restaurant community,” he said. “We played these characters for a couple of hours a day for a couple of months out of the year, but this is your reality, the highs and the lows. So thank you for embracing us.” More

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      Emma Corrin Tries to Solve ‘A Murder at the End of the World’

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      The actor has worked steadily since breaking out as a young Princess Diana in “The Crown.” Corrin’s latest role is as an amateur sleuth in “A Murder at the End of the World.”“I have no idea what I like,” Emma Corrin said.This was on a recent Friday afternoon at the Mysterious Bookshop, a Manhattan emporium dedicated to thrillers, detective stories, spy stories and noir classics. Corrin, who uses they/them pronouns, had flown in from London the day before and seemed overwhelmed by the selection, spinning a display of pulp paperbacks, picking up and putting down a new translation of a Pier Paolo Pasolini novel. The real mystery? Which book to choose.Corrin appealed to the store’s manager, Tom Wickersham.“Go for it,” Corrin said. “What’s the best thriller?”Corrin, 27, had taken this last-minute trip, which coincided with the end of the actors’ strike, to promote “A Murder at the End of the World,” the moody, brooding FX limited series that began on Nov. 14. They play Darby Hart, an amateur detective who becomes a true-crime author after solving a case involving unidentified women in the Midwest. “A Murder” had filmed two scenes at the shop, which (appropriately) bookend the series.“We spent all day and all night here,” they said. Between setups, Corrin would read aloud from selected books, including a collection of erotica. “It was very funny.”On the series, Darby sports pink hair, layered hoodies and a watchful, wounded expression. Another character, the guerrilla artist Bill Farrah (Harris Dickinson), describes Darby as “really tough and really fragile at the same time.” In person, Corrin, who wore a brown suede jacket and black pants, their brown hair sleekly buzzed, was sprightlier, less wary, sliding from shelf to shelf in black flats.In “A Murder at the End of the World,” Corrin’s character is an amateur detective who ends up investigating a murder at an exclusive gathering.Chris Saunders/FXCorrin had spent the strike in London, with Spencer, their cockapoo named for Princess Diana, whom Corrin played in the fourth season of “The Crown.” “I honestly hadn’t really stopped working for the last three or four years, so it was a really nice chance to be with family and friends and dog,” they said.Had Corrin taken up any hobbies during the strike? No. “I found that so intimidating during Covid,” they said, laughing. “I’m not making bread. I refuse.”After a few months, relaxation had palled and Corrin seemed delighted to be back to work, even if work meant a whirlwind promotional tour. “I like talking about the work,” they said. “I like celebrating it.”Corrin paused at a row of true-crime books, as though expecting to see Darby’s book, “Silver Doe,” among them. Pulling out Helen Garner’s “This House of Grief,” Corrin mentioned a pair of genre favorites: Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer” and Maggie Nelson’s “The Red Parts.”“It’s so good,” Corrin said of the latter book. “I found that such an interesting study of humanness in this arena.”The series shot scenes at the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesDarby is also a study in humanness. A different sort of detective, she is young, female and despite her perpetual scowl, she is, as her name suggests, all heart. “She takes it upon herself to become the voice of the voiceless,” Corrin said. “That rests very, very deep inside her, that need to help those people.”One of the show’s prescient themes is the increasing dominance and sophistication of artificial intelligence. Darby remains skeptical of technology, even as she uses chat boards and online searches in pursuit of her investigation. Corrin shares that skepticism.“I will always prioritize human connection over artificial connection,” they said. “That’s where it begins and ends for me.”In some respects, Corrin felt quite far apart from Darby. “She’s far more cynical than I am,” Corrin said. “I quite naïvely look for the best in people, probably to a fault, and I can be quite gullible.” But Corrin identified with Darby’s empathy and drive. “She likes rising to a challenge, and she likes a problem,” Corrin said. “I share that as well. I’m pretty fearless.”The actor’s past roles, which have also included starring turns in “My Policeman” and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” have been largely period and largely romantic, the better to exploit Corrin’s English rose looks. Darby is the least femme screen role Corrin has played (onstage, the actor starred in an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid “Orlando”). And though “A Murder” is in part a love story, gender and sexuality don’t particularly define Darby.“The modern aspect was a real tick for me,” Corrin said. “Playing someone more androgynous was a real tick for me.”Corrin’s breakout role came as a young Princess Diana in “The Crown.”Des Willie/NetflixBecause Corrin has spent the whole of their young adulthood onscreen, the actor’s identity and relationships have been the source of much unwanted attention. Corrin described this corollary of fame as “that poisoned chalice thing,” as well as “grim” and “inescapable.” Maybe this has made them even more motivated to disappear into fictional people or to make choices that the public might not anticipate. It was recently announced that Corrin will next play a young scammer in the mercenary comedy “Peaches,” set in Hong Kong.“I surprised myself by being so into it,” they said.So Corrin does have some idea of what they like, just not when it comes to mysteries and thrillers. Stumped, Corrin appealed again to Wickersham.“Do you think that John Grisham is the absolute master?”“I liked those books when I was a kid,” he said diplomatically.Corrin considered one of Maurice Leblanc’s Lupin novels, a Len Deighton, a Charles Willeford, a mystery cowritten by the prime minister of Iceland. “A Murder” had shot for a month in Iceland, which lent some verisimilitude to the chillier scenes. (Maybe too much verisimilitude. Brit Marling, one of the creators, experienced hypothermia on the shoot’s first day.)“The elements we were shooting in were just so intense,” Corrin said. Even when the production moved inside, to sound stages in New Jersey, “you still could feel that in your body,” Corrin said. “Being that freezing.”Still, Corrin couldn’t choose a book. “I’m experiencing real indecision,” they said. “Crippling indecision. I’m so bad at making decisions.”Finally, with their publicist murmuring about a subsequent appointment, Corrin was nudged toward Dorothy B. Hughes’s “In a Lonely Place,” a classic of California noir. The blurb on the back described it as a page turner, and Corrin nodded in approval.“That’s very exciting,” they said, happy with the choice. “I’ll need to do a lot of flying soon. So I need a good book.” More

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      ‘A Murder at the End of the World’ Review: P.I. Meets A.I.

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      The story of death at a mogul’s retreat (no, not “Glass Onion”) has a few interesting ideas about tech within a familiar mystery scenario.An eccentric tech billionaire invites a slew of notables to a private retreat, where a detective must solve a mysterious death. If the premise of “A Murder at the End of the World” jumps out at you, it may be because you not so long ago encountered it as the premise of Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.”Or it may jump out at you because “Murder” is the latest creation from Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij of Netflix’s “The OA.” That series was a poetic and baffling testament to the force of human connection, involving interpretive dance and a telepathic octopus. The murder mystery, in comparison, is among the most literal, plot-reliant of genres. Could Marling and Batmanglij really have made something that … ordinary?FX’s “Murder,” which begins Tuesday on Hulu, is neither as weird as you might hope or as conventional as you might fear. (Or vice versa.) It takes an Agatha Christie scenario and spins it into a chilly, stylized cyber-noir with ideas about artificial intelligence and some familiar Marling/Batmanglij themes of global consciousness. Think of it as “Glass OAnion.”The detective here is a relative newcomer. Darby Hart (Emma Corrin), an intense young computer hacker, tracked down a serial killer with Bill Farrah (Harris Dickinson), a moody amateur investigator she met online and fell in love with. Her true-crime memoir earns her some literary notice, as well as an invitation from Andy Ronson (Clive Owen), a tech magnate who is convening a meeting of “original thinkers” — artists, entrepreneurs, an astronaut — at a sleek, remote hotel that he had built in Iceland.The purpose of this Arctic TED Talk is, ostensibly, to cogitate on the existential threat of climate change to humanity. Andy, however, has another intelligence at his disposal — an advanced A.I. called “Ray” that manifests in the holographic form of a neatly goateed man in black (Edoardo Ballerini). Andy believes in the transformative power of this technology and others, but transformative to and for whom?Darby questions whether and why she fits in with the luminaries at the gathering. But she accepts the invitation for the chance to meet a tech idol: Not Andy, but his wife, Lee Andersen (Marling), a renowned coder who dropped out of public life after a Gamergate-style harassment campaign and lives in seclusion with Andy and their young son (Kellan Tetlow).But another guest grabs Darby’s attention: Bill, now a famous artist, whom she has not seen since a falling-out at the end of their investigation. Before they have time to catch up — don’t say the title didn’t warn you — somebody turns up dead, and Darby’s wiring for suspicion kicks in.Misogyny and technology are the twin themes of “A Murder.” Darby was drawn into the serial-killer case by her talent for hacking and her empathy for forgotten female victims. A common theme of her investigations is how little credibility she is granted as a young woman. When she pulls her hoodie over her head, yes, it is a universal visual symbol for “hacker,” but she also might as well be drawing an invisibility cloak.Then there’s A.I., which pervades the story like it does Andy’s icy retreat. In some cases technological reality has moved faster than the TV production process. A scene in which Ray produces a Harry Potter story in the voice of Ernest Hemingway astonishes the guests, for instance, but you’ve likely seen a dozen similar examples over the past year.Still, “A Murder” has a multifaceted view of A.I., not just as a threat but as a possible helpmeet. On the one hand, Andy is another arrogant billionaire who looks to software to compensate for the deficiencies that annoy him in humans. But the surveillance features built into the retreat’s setting, however creepy, are also a trove of clues. As Darby digs into the mysterious death, she finds herself using Ray as a source and even an aide — part Sherlock Holmes’s Watson, part IBM’s.The present-day whodunit isn’t especially inventive, but Corrin carries the story with a nervy, febrile performance that invests Darby with the life that the dialogue sometimes fails to provide. And the series has atmosphere to spare, making the most of the stark volcanic beauty of its location in Iceland. (It also shot in Utah and New Jersey.)The flashbacks to Darby and Bill’s serial-killer chase, which take up much of the seven episodes, are emotional and involving; Dickinson gives Bill an open-wound vulnerability. But rather than adding resonance to the whole, these scenes end up outshining the long, talky story they’re meant to flesh out.“A Murder,” in its main arc, feels like a bit of an artificial life form itself. The blandly drawn retreat guests get no more than a stroke or two of characterization and are weighted with self-serious dialogue. Andy mostly plays to bullying tech-mogul type. And while Marling always uses her enigmatic air as a performer to good advantage, Lee is more of a riddle — how did a coding revolutionary become a tech tradwife? — than a rounded character.Marling and Batmanglij’s work has often been more about the delivery of ideas and intangibles than plotting or naturalism, however. At its best, “A Murder” has grandeur, chilly beauty and intellectual adventurousness (and it pulls off a satisfying final twist). It might have been more effective if, as with so many limited series lately, it were tighter and shorter. In this sense, technology is the culprit: Streaming-TV bloat has its fingerprints all over this case. More