Dark Matter is a ‘sliding door’ head-spinner tailor-made for Joel Edgerton
Dark Matter ★★★★
Apple TV+
Joel Edgerton’s defining quality as an actor is his watchfulness. His characters are attuned to the world around them, and even at his most stoic or menacing you can feel the men he plays sifting through their reactions. It’s artistry on the level of emotional sinew, and it shines through to outstanding effect in this deft science-fiction series. The Australian actor’s role – or more accurately, roles – in Dark Matter feels custom-made for him. The result is engrossing, then exciting, then nightmarish.
Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly in Dark Matter.Credit: Sandy Morris/AppleTV+
Edgerton plays Jason Dessen, an introverted Chicago physics professor who lives with his gallerist wife, Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), and teenage son, Charlie (Oakes Fegley). “I’m doing this for us,” promises Jason’s doppelganger, who suddenly kidnaps him and places him in the parallel world Jason2 is from. There Jason finds that he’s considered a brilliant scientist, but single because he chose his work over Daniela. Jason2 covets his family, and Jason doesn’t know how to get back to them.
In superhero movies, multiverse plots robbed the story of stakes that mattered, but in this brain-bending expansion of Sliding Doors the danger never dissipates. In adapting his 2016 novel, writer Blake Crouch captures intimate details. At first, it’s procedural: Jason2 is an imposter in his own home, while nobody will believe Jason. Steadily, however, the deeper ramifications emerge. Jason goes on the run with Jason2’s abandoned girlfriend, Amanda (Alica Braga), while Daniela starts to suspect something is not right with her husband.
There is an all-powerful device that opens up countless worlds, and early on someone uses the phrase “psychogenic amnesia”, but the quantum mechanics never overwhelms the personal stakes. The show is alert to how individual relationships are tiny and miraculous – when Jason meets Daniela2, a famous artist, she can sense he is different from the man who turned his back on her. “Tell me about us,” she asks, and the warmth of Jason’s otherworldly memories bonds them.
Like Netflix’s German time-travel drama Dark or the dual-worlds spy thriller Counterpart, Dark Matter teases us with the strange attraction of different editions of the same person in close proximity to one another. But it rarely feels schematic. Over nine episodes it turns out to be a thorny concept that anchors itself with glances and regret, fear and longing. It’s hard to conceive of a better showcase for Edgerton, a fine actor who is rarely ostentatious. He not only makes each Jason different, but also distinctly sympathetic. Who’s to blame when culprit and victim are one and the same?
Shelved ★★★½
Binge
Shelved is a Canadian sitcom set inside a chaotic public library.Credit: Binge
It’s nothing but a compliment to say that this Canadian sitcom about a chaotic Toronto public library has big Abbott Elementary energy: the setting is an underfunded public institution, there’s winning character energy in the disparate staff, and the underlying warmth allows for genuine insight instead of precluding it. Nearly every 22-minute episode in the show’s debut season neatly ties together – not every comedy need be revolutionary, sometimes evolutionary is just fine.
Creator Anthony Q Farrell sets up the cast with studied ease, making bewildered cross-town transfer Howard Tutt (Chris Sandiford) the audience proxy trying to understand how striving people-pleaser Wendy Yarmouth (a terrific Lyndie Greenwood) keeps the doors open. The workplace comedy’s bickering comes from conservative Bryce de Laurel (Paul Braunstein) and punky progressive Jaq Bedard (Dakota Ray Hebert), but even then they both love to play “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve found in the return slot?”
Politics, and how they play out in a community space, are not something Shelved avoids. The third episode has the timely instigation of a drag queen filling in on storybook reading duty, leading Bryce to grow increasingly apoplectic. The whispered exchanges – quiet please, this is a library – are witty and allow for the input of the cross-legged young listeners, but the situation is resolved not with arguments but a rather deeper understanding of who Bryce actually is. That’s the mark of a quality comedy.
My Next Guest with David Letterman and John Mulaney
Netflix
David Letterman in his new interview show My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.Credit: Clifton Pescod/Netflix
If you’ve seen Baby J, last year’s brilliant Netflix stand-up special from American comic and actor John Mulaney, then you have a fair idea of how eventful his past few years have been, from a star-studded addiction intervention to fatherhood. This extended interview with David Letterman, complete with visits to Chicago and a dinner with Mulaney’s father, is an excellent addition, serving as an explainer for Mulaney’s comic roots and finding some uncomfortable truths behind a performance persona that is so perfectly pitched. Kudos to Letterman, who is a wry and complementary presence to his guest.
The Veil
Disney+
Elisabeth Moss plays a woman “trying on different characters” in The Veil.Credit: FX / Disney+
You can understand why, after a run of acclaimed roles highlighted by Mad Men and The Handmaid’s Tale, Elisabeth Moss might want a change of pace, but playing a cavalier MI6 undercover agent in this clumsy war-on-terror drama does not work out for one of our best screen actors. The latest show from the prolific Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders) has Imogen Salter (Moss) transporting an ISIS commander, Adilah El Idrissi (Yumna Marwan), across Europe while trying to coerce time-sensitive information from her. It’s somewhat clunky, but more worryingly quite self-impressed.
Elsbeth
Paramount+
Carrie Prescott plays an unconventional detective in Elsbeth.Credit: Evelyn Freja/NYT
The weekly murder mystery gets a welcome fillip with this offshoot from The Good Wife, which has longtime supporting character, lawyer and investigator Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston), being seconded from Chicago to the New York Police Department. In this quirky procedural she soon goes from observer to detective, much to the chagrin of her new colleagues, and the show makes the most of the ‘howcatchem’ genre: we see the opening murder and who commits it, then follow Elsbeth’s off-kilter but incisive unravelling. Bonus points for The Wire’s Wendell Pierce as an NYPD colleague.
Past Lives
Amazon Prime/Binge
Greta Lee in Past Lives.
Nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at March’s Academy Awards – star Greta Lee was inexplicably robbed of a Best Actress nod – Celine Song’s compelling romantic drama distils the fissures of time past and culture lost into a tellingly concise reunion. Having left South Korea with her family at age 12, now-married writer Nora Moon (Lee) is visited in New York by her childhood companion Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). Their reunion tests what might have been, and it’s told in a bittersweet, tender manner that examines the migrant experience and unacknowledged personal sacrifice.
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