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.

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Cosmic Horror Slice-of-Life — “Train to the End of the World”

I live for this level of weirdness. Two years ago, the launch of 7G cellular service ripped apart the world. Different regions have suffered different effects. For instance, the people of Agano all become animals when they turn 21. A town once an hour away now takes days to reach across warped landscapes and over inland seas. The skies at night are filled with moons and encroaching galaxies.

Most places have taken these changes apace. If you can’t do anything about it, you may as well welcome life as a bear or grow content with your brain becoming a fertile bed for mushrooms. In the midst of this, four girls refuse to give up on finding their friend, who ran away just before the 7G disaster. When they get a lead where she is, they take off on a disused train into an unknown world.

I love when a story like this can be told so earnestly. There’s this strange scene where the girls notify a guinea pig that her human granddaughter is still alive and…the weirdness of it all disarms you so much that you forget to have your guard up. I wasn’t prepared for how bittersweet it was to see a guinea pig looking at a family photo and missing everything that once was.

On their way home, the girls argue about how long guinea pigs can live, and how much time she might have left, until the argument turns to whether they should even be talking about this in the first place. That overflow of conversation might be a bit much for some viewers – this is a very dialogue-based show. Yet it gives us an idea of how people still live inside this trippy, unknowable world. It’s not just world-building, it’s the step beyond it: witnessing people who already live in a built world day to day.

“Train to the End of the World” isn’t based on a pre-existing manga or light novel. It’s an original work commissioned for the 150th anniversary of Japan’s first railway. When the U.S. does things like this, we usually get a light infomercial and a commemorative coin, not a thoughtful and weirdly uplifting cosmic horror.

There are metaphors you can read into it all – being stuck on your phone all the time stops you from riding the train to visit new places, but they only serve as premise. When those new places waffle between magical realist landscapes and the horrors of the abyss, I’m not sure how much service this is really doing for Japanese railroads. I’m glad they took what could’ve been a simple assignment and went wild with its ideas.

A series like this can be so audacious it breaks genres, or it can fall flat on its face. The light comedy works, the premise is engaging, the world is strikingly realized, the storytelling is energetic, the relationships between the four girls feel real, and some scary bits are unnerving. It doesn’t feel too close to anything I’ve seen before. You can make comparisons to the train sequence in “Spirited Away”, though only for a moment.

If anything, its breakneck conversation and the thin border between the funny and the melancholic sparks of recent Natsume Shingo series like “Sonny Boy” or “Tatami Time Machine Blues”. Even that comparison only goes so far. The aesthetic of “Train to the End of the World” is more modern, the underlying feel of it less nostalgic and more (potentially) uplifting, and it’s becoming more narratively focused rather than metaphorically so. Four episodes in and things have gotten very weird – even momentarily repulsive, but still maintaining a strangely wholesome vibe. Given the main characters, it’s also thankfully avoided anything exploitative thus far.

Every season I look for an anime that wants to break things with a purpose. We don’t always get one of them, but “Train to the End of the World” is a good candidate. It’s different from most in the category because of its more optimistic characters. All the Spring 2024 anime are at least a couple episodes in by now. So far, this is my favorite of the season.

“Train to the End of the World” is on Crunchyroll.

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