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      ‘The Contestant’ on Hulu Offers a Glimpse of Reality TV Ethics

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      The documentary tells the strange story of a groundbreaking 1998 Japanese TV show but doesn’t go far enough in its examination.So imagine this. It’s 1998. You want to be a comedian, and you’re desperate for work. You strike out for the big city and start going to auditions. Then, to your utter joy, you’re cast on a reality show.When you show up to set, though, things get weird. You’re ordered to remove all your clothing and you’re handed a stack of blank postcards and a pen. The goal is to use them to enter magazine contests — lots of them — and win prizes. Once the prize value totals a certain amount, you’ve won. What have you won? Well … you’ll see.This is a real thing that happened to Tomoaki Hamatsu, known as Nasubi: He was selected by Toshio Tsuchiya, a Japanese reality TV producer, to do just that on a nationally broadcast TV show. (If the story sounds familiar, it’s because it was the basis for a popular “This American Life” episode.) If you can believe it, Nasubi’s story gets weirder from there, and is now the subject of Clair Titley’s new documentary, “The Contestant” (available on Hulu).The film was made with the participation of a number of figures involved in the original production, including Tsuchiya and Nasubi. It retells the story using interviews and a great deal of footage from the actual show, which underlines how innovative it was. Nasubi’s life inside the room was broadcast before voyeuristic webcams were common, and it began running the same year that “The Truman Show,” with its oddly similar plot, was released.“The Contestant” is worth watching for the strangeness of the story. I found it curiously underdeveloped as a documentary, though. It’s been more than 25 years since Nasubi’s ordeal, years in which questions of exploitation and ethics in reality TV — surrounding everything from Bravo’s “Real Housewives” empire to “The Jinx” and a whole lot more — have been, if not at all solved, at least explored at length, relitigated every time news surfaces about the manipulation of subjects or the truth behind the scenes. (“UnReal,” a scripted drama based on the machinations on a “Bachelor”-like show, is a revealing way to dig into those questions. It’s available on most major platforms.)The big question isn’t why arguably unscrupulous reality TV keeps getting made, because we know the answer. The bigger question is why we keep watching it, and what kind of human qualms and compunctions we have to push aside to indulge. “The Contestant” has at its fingertips a rich text for exploring our current reality landscape, not to mention our fascination with social media meltdowns. But it doesn’t really go there, preferring instead to reassure us that Nasubi is OK.But the film’s failure to dig into its story further doesn’t mean we can’t — and “The Contestant” is a great starting point for conversations like these. That’s why it’s worth watching and thinking about. Because it’s not just a crazy story: It’s an important one in our media-saturated, always-on, can’t-look-away age. More

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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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      Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone Discuss ‘Under the Bridge’

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      In a joint interview, the actors discuss “Under the Bridge,” their new true-crime series based on a teenager’s brutal killing in British Columbia.“We’ve been teenage girls,” Lily Gladstone said. Which means that Gladstone and her co-star, Riley Keough, know what teenage girls can do.In “Under the Bridge,” a limited series now streaming on Hulu, Keough and Gladstone play a writer and a cop investigating the 1997 beating and murder of Reena Virk, a 14-year-old Indo-Canadian girl. Six teenage girls and one teenage boy, many of them Virk’s classmates, were eventually convicted.The case has inspired plays, poems, documentaries and several books, including Rebecca Godfrey’s 2005 literary nonfiction work “Under the Bridge,” which gives the series its shape and name. (The show also relies on a memoir by Virk’s father, Manjit Virk.) Though Godfrey died in 2022, before filming began, she worked closely with the show’s creator, Quinn Shephard, on its development. Keough, who also produced the series, plays a version of Godfrey. Gladstone plays Cam, an invented character, a Native law enforcement officer who was adopted as a child by a white family.While “Under the Bridge” centers these women as adults, it includes scenes of the same characters as teenagers, drawing lines between the girls they were and the women they are.Earlier this month, Keough, who was filming in London, and Gladstone, who was in Seattle, met for a video call. In an hourlong chat, they discussed girlhood, violence and making a true-crime series that sidesteps sensationalism. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What were you like as teenagers?LILY GLADSTONE Whenever I meet anybody from high school, “Oh my God, you’re the same person” is pretty much what I hear. That version of Lily really built the foundation for who I am now. She had this sense of where she wanted to go. She cracks me up a little bit. Riley, I get the sense that you had a lot of energy, though I don’t want to say you were ever too much to handle because you don’t really have that vibe.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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      ‘The Stranger’ Review: Somewhere Over the Freeway

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      In this tense thriller on Hulu, Maika Monroe plays Clare, a Kansas transplant in Los Angeles who parallels Dorothy in Oz.“The Stranger” is a tense if tidy thriller that chronicles a ride-hail driver’s journey to surveillance hell and back. Her survival against all odds mirrors that of the movie itself: The film’s footage originally premiered in 13 short-form episodes in 2020 on the streaming service Quibi, several months before it shut down.The recut version (on Hulu) bears little trace of its earlier form, although its life span across algorithm-driven streaming companies does cast the villain’s tech preoccupations — “whoever figures out the mathematical formula determining the losers and the winners in life will rule” the world, he declares — in a new, meta light.Written and directed by Veena Sud (“The Killing”), the film follows Clare (Maika Monroe), a recent transplant to Los Angeles who falls into a freeway nightmare after her ride-hail passenger, Carl (Dane DeHaan), identifies himself as a serial killer. He claims he will murder her unless she tells him a good story.If this opening sounds cliché, the film at least seems aware of the pitfalls. Sud creates parallels between Clare in Hollywood and Dorothy in Oz, assigning Clare a Kansan back story, a yapping terrier and a guileless attitude. And DeHaan embodies the tech-savvy Carl as a pasty, smirking male chauvinist who is sillier than he is scary.It follows as something of a surprise, when, over the course of the second act, the film builds to a deeply agitated mood. Sud pulls off the tonal shift by keeping Carl largely offscreen; his looming absence, alongside Monroe’s knack for portraying paranoia, simmers with menace.The StrangerNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      Logan Lerman Honors Two Families in ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’

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      In this Hulu adaptation of a Holocaust novel, Lerman plays a character inspired by two different grandfathers: the author’s and his own.Logan Lerman has been an actor for more than two decades, starting at age 5, and he’s been sent a number of scripts about the Holocaust. They read as exploitative to him.“That’s always rubbed me the wrong way,” he said. “I’m like, ‘No, that doesn’t feel right.’”But the story of the Shoah he now stars in, “We Were the Lucky Ones,” felt different to the performer best known for his work in films like “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” (2012) and “Fury” (2014).Based on the novel of the same title by Georgia Hunter, the eight-episode series premieres Thursday on Hulu. It tracks the members of the Kurc family as they are dispersed throughout Eastern Europe, where they live, and elsewhere when the Nazis invade. Lerman, 32, stars as Addy Kurc, a musician who has been living in Paris and finds himself unable to get home to Radom, Poland. His journey takes him to Casablanca and eventually Rio de Janeiro, all while he is unaware of the fates of his beloved siblings and parents. As the title would imply, this is less a story of loss than it is of survival.While Hunter’s book is fictional, the Kurcs are named for and based on her maternal grandfather’s family, and their sagas were derived from her extensive research into their experiences. A co-executive producer of the series, she shared that background with Lerman as he set out to play Addy, who is based on her grandfather. But the actor reached into his own personal history as well, channeling his own grandfather, who was also a Jewish refugee during World War II. The result is a performance that combines both family histories, paying tribute to Hunter and Lerman’s ancestry in the process.“I also wanted to do it for the reason that I was like, ‘Oh I want to show my grandfather this,’” Lerman said in a video call.Joey King and Lerman in “We Were the Lucky Ones,” adapted from Georgia Hunter’s best-selling novel.HuluWe 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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      What to Watch This Weekend: An Icy Adventure

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      The star of “Free Solo” explores Greenland’s imperiled glaciers in the docuseries “Arctic Ascent With Alex Honnold,” now on Hulu.A scene from “Arctic Ascent With Alex Honnold.”National Geographic/Matt PycroftThoughtful personal growth, informed ideas about pending global disaster and moments of staggering athletic achievement are sprinkled throughout the mini-series “Arctic Ascent With Alex Honnold,” but they all take a back seat to the show’s sense of natural wonder. The cinematography in “Ascent” is staggeringly beautiful, and a ton of it is mesmerizing drone footage. (There’s so much drone footage that it includes drone shots of other drones.)The three-part story, which aired on National Geographic and is available now on Hulu, follows an expedition through Greenland’s imperiled glaciers. Honnold, the gutsy and gifted rock climber from “Free Solo,” anchors a group that includes two other elite rock climbers, a glaciologist who brightly describes her lifelong love of ice, a charismatic adventurer and a local expert.Honnold’s independence and single-mindedness were central to “Free Solo,” but here he has broadened his horizons a little, and the show leverages its excitement factor with its sense of ecological urgency. He and his climbing companions want to be the first people to climb Ingmikortilaq, a soaring, rocky cliff in a fjord in Greenland, and as part of the journey, they also help the glaciologist collect data and explain why the glaciers melting would be so disastrous for the planet.More people knowing and caring about a remote part of Greenland probably benefits humanity at large, but TV-wise, things are more exciting when people are getting beaned in the face by falling rocks. “Arctic” has a restrained respectability about it, but part of me yearned for the conventions of less-classy fare. In the third episode, Honnold and Mikey Schaefer, one of the other climbers, disagree about safety. Honnold argues that they’ve come all this way and might as well see the plan through, while Schaefer says that’s a terrible way to assess risk. Entire seasons of “Real Housewives” franchises have been built around less, but this just breezes by. When the expedition members lament that lousy weather has prevented the support team from bringing all the necessary gear, the YouTube monster in me wanted an entire play-by-play of every item they’d packed.But while I could do with a little more intrigue, there are worse ways to be wooed than with splendor. More

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      ‘Suncoast’ Review: How to Act When Your Brother Has Brain Cancer

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      Laura Chinn’s promising feature debut fictionalizes an excruciating experience: her brother’s slow death at the same time as Terri Schiavo’s ordeal.The writer and director Laura Chinn amassed a lifetime’s worth of material while in her teens. Her fantastic memoir, “Acne,” is a survivalist tale of enduring her distracted Scientologist parents; one darkly funny low point comes when she drops out of high school and gets a nightclub gig as M.C. of topless Jell-O wrestling events. “Suncoast,” Chinn’s promising feature debut, fictionalizes the book’s most excruciating part: her older brother’s slow death from brain cancer at the same time — and same Florida hospice — as Terri Schiavo, the vegetative patient whose right to die became a moral and legal flashpoint nationwide in 2005.With commendable wit and zero self-pity, Chinn sketches the daily surreality of her teenage analogue, Doris (Nico Parker), and mother, Kristine (Laura Linney), navigating a gantlet of protesters who call the hospice an execution chamber. Max (Cree Kawa), the dying boy, controls the story even as he is lying nonverbal and inert. Chinn fearlessly acknowledges that his yearslong illness holds the family hostage. It’s a bummer to spend endless dull hours at Max’s bedside while other kids party. Selfish? A little. False? No.Linney plays Kristine as a martyr with a hair-trigger temper. Terrified she’ll miss Max’s last breath, she begins sleeping at the hospice and abandons Doris (and, in one hard-to-believe scene, forgets her daughter even exists). When Doris complains, her mother scolds her for being a callow narcissist.Doris would be more compelling if she was. The script’s fundamental misstep is flattening Doris into a shy innocent — a sympathetic, synthetic template of a good kid. Even softened, there’s much to admire in the film’s bracing truths about witnessing a loved one’s inexorable decline, as when Paul (Woody Harrelson), a big-hearted but obstinate Schiavo protester, says he’ll pray for Max’s survival and Doris blurts: “Please don’t.”SuncoastRated R for teen drinking, drugs and sexual situations. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More