It was my wife’s 32nd birthday last week, complete with the usual weeklong visit from the in-laws, so last week’s roundup got away from me! But I still managed to get quite a few pieces in at The Spool and elsewhere, including two (!) composer podcasts, TV reviews, and a chat with Starfleet’s newest (and prickliest) captain.
I came into my love of film and TV music largely through the bombastic sweep of Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner’s scores for Star Trek, so it was a treat to get to talk to another musical steward of the Trek legacy for my composer interview podcast, Right on Cue. This time, though, it was with Chris Westlake, who composes the surprisingly straight-laced and sincere score for the Trekkian animated comedy Star Trek: Lower Decks. It’s a great chat, where we talk about the varying eras of Trek music, the importance of keeping a musical straight face even—or especially when—the show you’re scoring is knee-deep in satire.
Speaking of which, I got to talk to two-time Grammy nominee Austin Wintory about the video game that landed him in the nominations for the Grammys’ first-ever video game score, Aliens Fireteam Elite. But really, it becomes a lovely back-and-forth about the importance of community in the scoring world; please give it a listen.
I was one of the many who initially dismissed FXX’s Dave as a cringey Atlanta riff in its first season, and shame on all of us, really. Turns out Dave Burd (aka Lil Dicky), a YouTube comedy rapper whose self-awareness endearingly complicates his innate privilege, knows exactly how to mine his own insecurities and ego into a brilliant look at the little agonies that come with chasing fame. Season 3’s no different, with a pressure cooker of a second episode that highlights the way Dicky (and we) re-edit our pasts to make them more palatable… or marketable for a music video. For Consequence:
“No one knows what the future holds for Lil Dicky, least of all Dave himself. Will he continue his meteoric success, or fall flat on his face through no one’s fault but his own? Or, most tragic of all, will he actually get famous, and lose whatever connection he has with the close group of friends so dedicated to securing his success (and, by extension, their own)?”
Much as I loved Victor Fresco’s last sitcom, the deceptively heartwarming Better Off Ted, it just feels icky to apply its tale of megacorporate family dynamics to a warm and fuzzy Musk-esque billionaire played by the ever-ebullient Rob Lowe. Same goes for the rest of Unstable, a largely witless spinoff of the times Rob Lowe’s son John Owen (here looking like a boy sidekick from an adventure novel given life) trolled his dad on IG. As I say for RogerEbert.com, that’s just not enough to hang an entire show on.
“At its best, “Unstable” feels like a throwback to the kind of quirky network sitcoms that used to thrive in the aughts—“Raising Hope,” the aforementioned “Better Off Ted.” But this feels less like a clever riff on the ditziness of out-of-touch tech CEOs than it does a warmed-over vanity project for the Loweses, one that thrives when neither of them are actually on screen. Fresco’s fast-paced gags and droll witticisms about the vapidity of Big Tech are such a balm, they dramatically outpace whatever Lowe-on-Lowe action Netflix might be selling the show with. Frankly, I’d almost watch a second season with just these characters, instead. Leave the Lowes at home. “
Also on the Trek front, for Wealth of Geeks I interviewed Star Trek: Picard actor (and fellow Chicago boy) Todd Stashwick, who’s made waves as his fan-favorite fly in the ointment, Captain Liam Shaw. Together, we talk about how Shaw’s the hero of his own story, his own jaundiced view of Starfleet “legends,” and how he reconciles Shaw’s anti-Borg prejudice with the whole “hired the ONE former Borg in Starfleet as his XO” thing.
At least Ebert didn’t give me all lemons this month; I liked, though not loved, Anna Winger’s new show Transatlantic, a suitably gauzy period drama following the real-life undertaking of the Emergency Rescue Committee, which ferried European intellectuals out of Vichy France before the Nazis could get to them. It’s very Casablanca, along with its comparative aimlessness, though there’s a beautifully bittersweet queer romance here between Cory Michael Smith and Amit Rahav.
“When “Transatlantic” relishes in these moments of poignancy, it approaches the complexity that made Winger’s previous Netflix hit, “Unorthodox,” so successful. The performances are game—Jacobs’ alluringly contemporary performance earmarks just how out of place this Chicago dilettante is in the world of spycraft, and Smith’s Fry is appropriately conflicted between his duty to his mission and the forbidden love he’s found in Marseille. But the series sacrifices a bit of depth in exchange for accessibility, keeping its famous players at arm’s length and speedrunning through the honorable work the ERC did in real life. They’re ultimately small complaints; the series is entertaining and digestible in its own right. But it’s frustrating to see how those small tweaks could have elevated this show to true greatness.”