New Shows + Movies by Women — The Year So Far

The ebb and flow of titles is always unpredictable, so I thought I’d do something a little different this week. Last week saw 13 new shows and movies by women. This week sees just one, “Past Lies” from Spain. It’s frustrating when that happens, but rather than just pitch a single title up here, I’ll take the opportunity to share some standout shows by women I’ve seen so far from this year. First, let’s tell you about “Past Lies”:

NEW SERIES

Past Lies (Hulu)
directed by Julia de Paz, Clara Roquet

A group of successful women are shaken when the 25-year-old remains of a missing high school classmate are found in Mallorca, where they shared their senior trip. Star Elena Anaya may be familiar to American audiences from her lead role in “The Skin I Live In”.

Director Clara Roquet won Best New Director and was nominated for Original Screenplay at the 2022 Goya Awards, Spain’s equivalent to the Oscars. Director and co-writer Julia de Paz was nominated for Adapted Screenplay the same year.

“Past Lies” premieres on Hulu tomorrow, Friday May 10.

THIS YEAR’S SHOWS SO FAR

Links go to my reviews, let’s get in:

“Fallout” (Amazon) is one of the best shows of the year. It’s an incredibly biting and visually beautiful post-apocalyptic dark comedy co-showrun by Geneva Robertson-Dworet. It works as an adventure, as action, as science-fiction, as character drama, and especially as a dark comedy. Watching it kind of broke me because as fun as it is, its retrofuturist satire bites deeply into modern anxieties.

“Mr. and Mrs. Smith” (Amazon) is a spy comedy showrun by Francesca Sloane. Dry humor in an unsettling atmosphere makes for an incredibly unique feeling – the whole show is quirky but tense. There are multiple memorable guest stars, which is usually a feature I don’t care much about, but here it’s used very well and in ways that sometimes undermine the concept. Maya Erskine and Donald Glover star, and the pair act the hell out of it.

Those two are pretty intense. If you need something lighter but still very worthwhile, “Renegade Nell” (Disney+) is a really fun historical adventure/comedy about a woman forced to become a thief. It’s showrun by Sally Wainwright. I’d compare it to a period “Buffy” with much higher production values, or a series-level “Pirates of the Caribbean” without the baggage. If the first episode doesn’t hook you, you are unhookable.

“Death and Other Details” (Hulu) is fun if you can get along with its period-mystery-in-modern-times vibe. Mandy Patinkin plays the wacky detective. It’s co-showrun by Heidi Cole McAdams. Its quirk might come off as overly precious to some, but I ended up liking its diorama-esque stylization. It acts like a stage comedy, which is something I look for, but you’ll be able to tell pretty quickly if it’s your thing or not.

And of course, “Abbott Elementary” (Hulu) is still a great comedy co-showrun by Quinta Brunson. The writing has an incredibly good feel for its ensemble and where their strengths lie. Usually a sitcom gets its good writing in early seasons and the ensemble develop their timing in later ones, but “Abbott Elementary” has enjoyed both right off the bat.

I’m working on “Unnatural” (Netflix) right now. I loved Nogi Akiko’s police series “MIU404” because it presented a way that police can help people from a non-antagonistic perspective, and it focused on both large and small cases. Not everything was high drama, life-or-death stakes. Its sensibilities were completely different from an American cop show. “MIU404” is still on Netflix. I highly recommend it, and I’m thrilled Nogi’s prior series “Unnatural” – about a woman leading a forensics team investigating odd deaths – is now there, too.

On my watchlist are the second season of Tima Shomali’s Jordanian drama “AlRawabi School for Girls” (Netflix). The first season was incredibly salient, punctuating an intriguing interpersonal drama about bullying with some rattling scenes.

I also need to watch Korean vigilante mystery “A Killer Paradox” (Netflix) written by Kim Da Min, and I keep hearing really good things about Vivienne Medrano’s animated musical-in-hell series “Hazbin Hotel” (Amazon) so I’ll be checking that out.

In this feature, I limit the weekly coverage to series showrun or directed by women (or else I couldn’t do the amount of research I have to do weekly). But I do want to highlight how good of a year it’s been for anime written (or based on work written) by women:

“The Apothecary Diaries” (Crunchyroll) is the best mystery going for a second year in a row. It follows Maomao, the daughter of an apothecary in Imperial China. She wants to remain anonymous and live a quiet life of testing poisons on herself, but her knowledge of chemistry and medicine means she can make connections between clues others can’t. The mysteries are balanced between small and large, between incidental and intentional, and its protagonist is a unique blend of tenacious and lazy that you usually don’t see – especially for women characters. “The Apothecary Diaries” is based on a light novel series by Hyuuga Natsu.

“Delicious in Dungeon” (Netflix) is a rangy fantasy series that tells its story through cooking (of fantasy creatures), written by Ueno Kimiko and based on a manga series by Kui Ryouko. Its talented but sometimes bumbling adventuring party is a familiar anchor of fantasy, but done very well here. As they set out to resurrect one of the party’s sisters before a dragon fully digests her, what makes the show unique is how it world-builds. They’re broke, so they cook monsters along the way. Hunting and cooking requires knowledge of the dungeon’s ecology and environmental impacts, which in turn reveal complex relationships between the world and its magic. It’s deeply thought out and surprisingly engrossing. And while it’s not primarily an action series, its action scenes are phenomenal.

“7th Time Loop” (Crunchyroll) is one of the best uses of time loop fiction I’ve seen, about a woman who repeats five years, each time taking a different career. Every time, a war that envelops the world causes her death, and she restarts that five year chunk. She keeps the skills and knowledge she accumulates each go-round, and makes it her mission to use these to stop the war. It’s written by Machida Touko and based on a light novel series by Amekawa Touko. I would’ve preferred it got an extra episode to give the ending some more room to breathe, but it has such incredible character writing along the way that it’s a minor flaw. There are scenes here that are so literary and layered they should be studied if you’re even remotely interested in storytelling.

“A Sign of Affection” (Crunchyroll) is a superb and tranquil romance between a deaf woman and a man who learns sign language. What I like about it is that things don’t come easy – and I don’t mean the usual trope of dragging the will they-won’t they out. What I mean is that both characters question if they truly like each other or simply see in each other an idea they want to embody in themselves. Yuki’s been sheltered and likes that Itsuomi travels the world. Does she like him, or just that he represents a wider world out there? Itsuomi travels because he seeks out new experiences. Does he like her, or is she simply a new experience that will fade once familiar? The great gentleness and care for the other with which they figure this out already provides the answer, but even if the anime itself is pretty sentimental, it’s refreshing to see this realistic complexity and sense of responsibility be the core of the story. It’s also a really good view on a man doing the work to unlearn assumptions and understand someone else’s perspective. Itsuomi doesn’t automatically know how to understand and relate to someone who’s deaf, and he makes clear mistakes, but he does the work to unlearn bad habits and replace them with recognition and communication.

This last one is current season, so only halfway in, but “Train to the End of the World” (Crunchyroll) is a very hidden gem. It fuses wholesome with disturbing as four girls drive a train through an incredibly artistic and metaphorical post-apocalypse to find their lost friend. It’s cosmic horror if the power of very stubborn friendship was enough to fight your way through it, and holding onto that in the face of unprecedented weirdness has its own way of speaking to our times. It’s written by Yokote Michiko.

Take a look at new shows + movies by women from past weeks.

If you enjoy what I write, subscribe to my Patreon! It helps with the time and resources to write more features like this one.

A Surprisingly Fun, Stylized Mystery — “Death and Other Details”

I try going into series without expectations, but sometimes you can’t help yourself. Before I’d even started watching, I was holding “Death and Other Details” up against one of my favorite movies: “Clue”. Perhaps it’s the trailer trying to look like too many other things, but I was surprised that the show comes through so strongly on its own merits.

Imogene has joined her best friend and corporate bigwig Anna on a cruise. Anna’s family has raised Imogene after the murder of her mother, and the family’s corporation is on the brink of a major deal with a corporation owned by the Chuns. The cruise is a way for the two families to celebrate that imminent deal. That doesn’t even cover a governor, political kingmaker, streamer, ex-journalist, lawyer, and various family members who all become suspects when one very rude rich man is harpooned in his suite. Except he may not have been rude, or rich, or even existed as who he claimed to be before that cruise.

Luckily, has-been detective Rufus Cotesworth is on board. Once dubbed ‘the greatest detective in the world’, he’s a shadow of his former self…unless that’s what he wants others to think. Imogene hates his guts – the man who tells stories over dinner about never having failed a case once abandoned his investigation of her mother’s murder. Yet when Imogene becomes the prime suspect in the harpooning, the pair are forced to work together to prove her innocence.

In my “Clue” comparison, what I was looking for wasn’t necessarily the same type of zany comedy. What I want out of an Agatha Christielike as stylized as this is a sense of theatricality to find its way through. I want to feel in some sense that I could be watching them on stage – not for the acting or look to be stagy, but for the energy and spontaneity to make it feel like what’s happening is evolving before my eyes.

For an idea of what I mean, consider a British mystery like “Poirot” against a David Fincher film like “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” or “Gone Girl”. They’re all mysteries, but we watch them completely differently. “Poirot” is very cinematic in places, but its dialogues always focus on staging, blocking, and set. How two characters’ positions relate in a scene can portray or betray power. How fine china is positioned, the sight lines from a window seat, all the little details of staging matter. “Poirot” finds those moments to bring a strength of the stage into a TV series.

That quality of theater refers back to seeing the stage in different ways. Depending on which side of the theater you’re seated when watching a play, you’ll pick up on eye lines in different ways, you’ll notice positional relationships another doesn’t, you’ll quite literally be more on-side with one character than another. Clues can be more or less obvious depending on where both the characters and we are positioned.

Compare this to a Fincher film full of exacting uses of cinematography and editing that surprise and shock, and we’re all watching a single, driven vision. The focus isn’t so much on how our perspectives inform what we see, but on how Fincher’s perspective overrides our own to guide what we see the way he wants. That removal of ourselves in order to watch through someone else’s perspective feels less like spontaneous events transpiring, and more like we’re being told a story. It’s more curated – neither better nor worse, but lending itself to a singular vision rather than the variation of perspectives you’d find across an audience.

For something like “Death and Other Details”, I want that theatrical sense of variation to find its way through. No matter how many times I’ve seen “Clue”, it feels spontaneous, as if it’s evolving right there before me. I want the auteur to subside and treat their way of seeing things as secondary to the audience’s experience of discovering things for themselves.

“Death and Other Details” doesn’t achieve this like “Clue”, which treats every room like a set. It’s much more cinematically inclined, but there are other ways to convey that sense of theatricality and each series like this has to find its own. Here, it’s the editing that does it. I’d normally hate a show that feels the need to rely on flashback this much. We’ve all seen the trick where an adult character talks to another while also walking through one of their flashbacks. But have you seen the flashforward to a flashback inspired in the character witnessing someone else’s flashback inside of their own flashback? Sounds annoying and needlessly complex, but “Death and Other Details” communicates moments like this with masterful simplicity.

The series becomes a stage of flashbacks that characters occasionally wander through. It asks us to build a chronology of all these characters on the ship as well as their historical backstories even as Rufus and Imogene build these to solve the case. It takes moments throughout time and treats these as the sets, the fungibility of memory allowing characters to witness, participate, and even redesign and redirect how they remember something. Some moments they’re the performer, some the director, and in others they’re the audience, and the limits of their perspective and biases introduce variation that may or may not be accurate. There’s tremendous opportunity for both playfulness and consequence in this.

Violett Beane is a find as Imogene. She gets the opportunity for a lot of closeup acting, and as a blunt, assertive character her face doesn’t lie to the audience – even when she’s lying to the character in front of her. That’s a fine line to get right, but the show goes one better, mixing this theatrical irony in with code-switching and even code-mixing where two codifications in how someone communicates are switched on at once. A lot of work that involves code-switching tends to forget that people often have to navigate with two or more ways of communicating switched on at the same time. “Death and Other Details” finds ways to fuse this into the ironic tradition of communicating opposite ways to audience and in-story character. They don’t even use asides to do it, and it’s fairly brilliant to witness.

My suspicion before watching is that I’d find Mandy Patinkin’s Rufus Cotesworth tiring. This was tipped on its head the moment the show offers him to us as a washed-up drunk who Imogene despises. That in itself is a cliché, but it’s one he uses. Everyone else finds him incredibly tiring, and Cotesworth’s ability to play into that and catch others off guard with it immediately won me over. If Cotesworth wants me to find him tiring, I’m not falling for that, and both the show and Patinkin know it.

There are many very good performances that work within the band of stylization demanded by a modern corporate mystery and art deco 1930s-ish mashup. I want to highlight Angela Zhou, given something of the Tim Curry role she embodies as Teddy. She’s the manager of the ship staff, who’s hired more than a few of her own relatives, and she’s always got a cutting remark or witty deflection on hand. She can exist within the upper crust and the staff ably, which lends her presence a sense of the meta. This may be aided by the fact she’s both cast and one of the show’s writers. In any case, her within-without ability helps the upstairs-downstairs class angle of the show.

I deeply appreciate that “Death and Other Details” isn’t constantly feeding me witty banter. The writing is often smart and its flashback heavy format means looping back to anchor lines of dialogue that immediately re-establish our time and place. A lot of writers would give in to the temptation of going overboard in terms of finding its characters oh-so-clever. They’d feed us laugh line after laugh line to the point of exhaustion. They stay their hand, though. “Death and Other Details” doesn’t lose its focus for easy wins. It keeps things geared toward the longer story arcs at play and finds ways for characters to be funny that feel more individually honest to each. Since they all find different things funny, that means the humor stays varied – sometimes charming or assertive, sometimes dry or even muted.

Imogene is quick with a cutting remark, her humor inflected with anger both at others and herself. Best friend, adoptive sister, and corporate shark Anna is self-serious. Set to inherit her father’s corporation, her interrogation sees her delivering company PR responses that visually segue into a commercial. Cotesworth’s humor amuses himself rather than us, but how amused he is with himself is amusing to us. Teddy’s meta edge floats above the fray, perfectly willing to select moments to throw someone under the bus or fight to protect them. The list goes on, the comedy in each character feeling fresh as the story rotates through them.

I’m at fault comparing this to something else, but I think in its own way “Death and Other Details” holds up well to that comparison. Read the comments on its trailer (always a mistake) and you’ll see a backlash before it even premiered that compares this to “The White Lotus” and Benoit Blanc detective films “Knives Out” and “Glass Onion”. It’s early days yet, with the available two episodes essentially covering the set-up and backstories, but so far I prefer this to the former and it has the potential to be on par with the latter. “Death and Other Details” is far less self-conscious than “The White Lotus” and despite being much more stylized, it feels more subtle and far less gimmicky.

Its focus on Imogene and Cotesworth – two very imperfect characters who are trying their best when they can manage the energy to, but make no claim to a moral center – means that the series isn’t targeting cultural satire so much as character comedy.

“The White Lotus” is a solid show, but it backgrounded people of color in ways that, as Vox’s Mitchell Kuga wrote, “replicates the very power structure it purports to satirize”. By comparison, “Death and Other Details” includes criticism of the white upper class, but it’s blunter, less cutesy, and gives people of color far more interesting and nuanced roles. In terms of satire, “Death and Other Details” takes fewer shots since it’s not primarily a satire, but it swings for the fences when it does.

The comparison to “Knives Out” is a little closer in the way that the outfield is close to home plate. Sure, they’re both in the same ballpark, but it’s going to take a moment to get from one to the other, and the game they’re playing has been around a hundred years before either. You could say it’s like “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” or “Midnight at the Pera Palace” or “Murder on the Orient Express”, too, and that’s just starting with the letter ‘M’. The comparisons are descriptive of a popular stylized take on a genre, but it’s silly to use one as a dismissal of another. There are many Agatha Christielikes that each inject enough of their own originality into the mix to have strong reasons for existing.

The jury’s out on some things. We’ve been given many clues and red herrings mixed together, and because only two episodes have premiered, we haven’t really seen how capable the show is at combining them into something complex, cogent, and interesting. Any mystery has to get that right.

The scenes that involve memory as a type of set may taper off. I hope they continue as strongly as they have, and involve other characters’ memories, because it really is the strongest single element of the show. It could be something that’s useful to the premise and isn’t used as often later, or it could be a consistent storytelling device that continues to elevate the show. I hope it’s the latter, but we’ll see.

The show has some misplaced moments of nudity that are perfectly fine if you’re like, “Hey, random nudity!” but that don’t feel like they serve a purpose other than selling the audience on the fact you’ve got some random nudity. I’m all for nudity, I’m all for no nudity, do what you want, but it’s an element of the show and like any element, if it feels too consciously thrown in so that it can meet a marketing angle, then that’s exactly what the scene will communicate.

Overall, “Death and Other Details” is immensely promising and surprising. The parts I thought might be cloying or tiresome turned out to have acid and verve to them, the writing is good, the acting interesting and characters nicely individualized, the design gorgeous, the camera active when we need it to be and still when the characters need it to be, and most of all there’s variation across all these different elements that keeps each fun.

“Death and Other Details” is on Hulu.

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New Shows + Movies by Women — DuVernay, Okada, and Cowperthwaite

Something came up last week: I listed a showrunner incorrectly. “Echo” still belonged on the list, but I named Marion Dayre as co-showrunner with Richie Palmer. That was due to Yahoo listing Palmer as the showrunner in a January 4 article. I was notified by an agent later that Yahoo’s listing was incorrect. Dayre co-showruns with Amy Rardin. I’ve since corrected the article.

Now, even my corrected listing is an interpretation. Technically, shows in the Marvel Cinematic Universe don’t have showrunners. In fact, many productions – especially outside the U.S. – don’t even list a showrunner position. Some showrunner positions are named that way, but many are more of an informal title or industry definition for a head writer, an executive producer with specific responsibilities, or a majority series director.

For many European shows, you typically have a head writer or director who fulfills that role. Most of the streaming series we get out of Japan and Korea have a single director helming every episode. I list them as “directed by”, as you’ll see below. That’s not the norm as often for their broadcast series, but we get access to far fewer of those in the U.S. They take more contextual research – personal favorite “MIU404” had three different episode directors but can essentially be understood as showrun by sole writer Nogi Akiko.

Head writers Dayre and Rardin aren’t the showrunners of “Echo” by name, title, or technicality. For all intents and purposes, however, they’re the showrunners of “Echo”. The term ‘showrunner’ is often set aside in a way that overlooks the contribution certain writers, directors, and producers have. Combine that with women already getting overlooked for their contributions…well everywhere, but for this conversation specifically in the filmmaking industry. This feature would overlook a lot of women’s work if I only listed the showrunners who were specifically titled that.

I research the hell out of things to ensure I’m applying those titles with a high degree of accuracy, but sometimes I do make a mistake. Those mistakes will tend to disinclude series, because sources sometimes still credit men with women’s work – as with that Yahoo article that lists Palmer as the showrunner without mention of Dayre or Rardin. I’ve seen men credited with the work of women in industry coverage many times as I’ve researched this feature, and I often flag something for more research when credit is contradictory across different sources. Sometimes that results in learning a woman should be getting credit and I include a show.

That doesn’t change the fact that I didn’t catch something this time. “Echo” was still listed last week because of Marion Dayre, but Richie Palmer’s name has now been replaced with Amy Rardin’s.

In researching and writing this weekly feature for nearly four years, I’ve learned which way those mistakes trend. I’m much more worried about failing to include something that should be in here than I am about including something that shouldn’t. Industry coverage is much more likely to make a mistake about assigning too much credit to a man than it is to make a mistake about assigning too much credit to a woman. Because I use that industry coverage as the verification step in my research, there’s always a risk of my propagating that mistake.

I have a set of specific rules to try and avoid both those kinds of mistakes and any implicit bias I may hold. They aren’t perfect. And maybe going on about this for paragraphs is overly technical, but I like to be transparent and I think the mistake I made demonstrates the way bias in media coverage is easily propagated from one source to the next. Where a mistake like that is propagated, it becomes understood as truth regardless of whether the content of that truth is accurate. Like I said, I’ve been writing this feature weekly for four years. When I see that mistake propagated across sources, it’s nearly always to women’s detriment.

I fucked up and you all deserve to know how and why I fucked up. It’s also potentially valuable to use it as a way of demonstrating how simple assumption can so easily get propagated down the line.

Shifting gears, there’s one title I’d like to include before we get to the list:

This feature is for new series and films by women. If I covered returning series, it would become too much to research on a weekly basis. But sometimes you get something with a foot on each side of that boundary. “True Detective: Night Country” is the fourth season of that series, but it is five years after the most recent season. The story is standalone. It has mostly a different crew behind it. Starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, it’s showrun, directed, and co-written by Issa Lopez, the director of “Tigers Are Not Afraid”. Technically yes, it’s a continuing series that began in 2014, but given a lot of the details of its return, “Night Country” is an entry worth bringing up on its own.

The premiere of “True Detective: Night Country” is out on Max. New episodes arrive every Sunday for a total of 6.

New series by women this week come from Canada, Japan, and the U.S. New movies by women come from Japan and the U.S.

NEW SERIES

Death and Other Details (Hulu)
co-showrun by Heidi Cole McAdams

Death on a Mediterranean ocean liner leads Detective Rufus Cotesworth to start an investigation. He takes on a protege: the chief suspect Imogene. She must help him solve the murder before it’s pinned on her. Mandy Patinkin and Violett Beane star.

Heidi Cole McAdams showruns with Mike Weiss. She’s written and previously produced on “The 100”.

The two-episode premiere of “Death and Other Details” is out on Hulu, with a new episode dropping every Tuesday for a total of 10.

Bucchigiri?! (Crunchyroll)
directed by Utsumi Hiroko

Arajin is a student whose reunion with an old friend goes wrong when they accidentally enter into a brawl with the local toughs. Things only get stranger when a genie drops in.

Director Utsumi Hiroko has also helmed the well regarded “SK8 the Infinity” and “Banana Fish”. She’s known for her dynamic visuals.

The premiere of “Bucchigiri?!” is out on Crunchyroll, with a new episode dropping every Saturday.

Hazbin Hotel (Amazon)
showrunner Vivienne Medrano

In this animated musical series, Hell attempts to find a non-violent alternative to punishment. Lucifer’s daughter opens a rehabilitative hotel. She hopes getting demons to redeem themselves will grant them a chance at Heaven.

The four-episode premiere of “Hazbin Hotel” arrives on Amazon Prime tomorrow, Friday January 19. Another two episodes drop each Friday for a total of 8.

Wild Cards (The CW)
mostly directed by women

A con woman and a demoted detective can redeem themselves…if they work together to solve crimes.

Winnifred Jong (“Pretty Hard Cases”), Lee Rose (“Star Trek: Discovery”), and Alexandra La Roche (“Superman and Lois”) direct on the series.

The premiere of “Wild Cards” is out on The CW. A new episode drops every Wednesday.

NEW MOVIES

Origin (in theaters)
directed by Ava DuVernay

This biopic tells the story of Isabel Wilkerson, the author of “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” and “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, and Niecy Nash star.

Ava DuVernay has directed two Oscar-nominated films. “Selma” was nominated as Best Picture in 2015, and “13th” for Best Documentary Feature. Despite this, DuVernay couldn’t find studio financing for her most recent film about a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of two bestsellers. Let that sink in. Instead, DuVernay financed the film through grants.

“Origin” opens wide tomorrow, Friday January 19.

Maboroshi (Netflix)
directed by Mari Okada

A factory explosion freezes a town in time. All exits are sealed off for those left alive inside this bubble. Everyone is free to do what they want, but is forbidden from changing. To emotionally change is to be erased, but the young people of the town will not tolerate this long.

Mari Okada is prolific. She’s served as the lead writer for countless anime, most notably “Toradora!”, “Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine”, and “Gosick”. This is her second film directing after the lauded “Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms”.

You can watch “Maboroshi” on Netflix.

I.S.S. (in theaters)
directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite

When war breaks out on Earth, the U.S. and Russia send orders to their crew aboard the International Space Station: take the station at any cost. Ariana DeBose and Chris Messina star.

Gabriela Cowperthwaite was previously nominated for a BAFTA for her documentary “Blackfish”, about the captivity of orca in aquarium theme parks. “I.S.S” is her third foray into narrative filmmaking after “Megan Leavey” and “Our Friend”.

“I.S.S.” opens wide tomorrow, Friday January 19.

Take a look at new shows + movies by women from past weeks.

Subscribe to my Patreon! It helps with the time and resources to write more features like this one.