Review: Netflixs Tales of the City Is Messy, Well-Meaning Pride Month Programming
Theres a lot of backstory involved that the new episodes dont quite satisfyingly unpack, which ought..
Theres a lot of backstory involved that the new episodes dont quite satisfyingly unpack, which ought to leave the uninitiated a little confused. Theres also a wobbly sense of legacy concerning den mother Anna Madrigal (Olympia Dukakis), a trans woman who is a staple of the community, providing safe haven for a coterie of lost souls with her pot-smoking, non-nonsense, semi-tough-love. We get that Anna looms large over these peoples lives, because everyone keeps saying it. But its hard to really feel it; the series is too confused about how much it wants to yoke itself to whats come before.
And yet, its in harkening back to the past when the show is most effective. All the de rigueur Gen Z stuff is clumsily done: there are pained evocations of influencer culture and other now-isms, but this Tales of the City is otherwise curiously muted on the modern realities of San Francisco. It only passingly mentions the crushing grip of gentrification and the tech industry. The show is more concerned with utopia, which often means gazing in the rear view and seeing some glint of what a city and some of its citizens were before a plague knocked them off course.
That material works quite well. Tales of the City, particularly the fourth episode, has some truly striking moments in which characters reflect on their history—not in any technical, academic, starchy way, but with a swell of melancholy, the awed whisper of simply noting times passage. Which, for queer people who spent decades in the wringer, might be as much an exercise in Pride as the here-and-now rallying is. The show doesnt over-valorize the past, though. This Tales of the City is, among other things, about the ceding of the baton, realizing your own epoch era has maybe come and gone and letting others run off with it, hopefully contented with a lifes work and progress—but also, maybe not.
In one fraught scene, Michaels younger boyfriend, Ben (Charlie Barnett, from Russian Doll), gets into a dinner party fight with a group of older, white gay men—survivors of AIDS who take issue with the younger generations fussiness over language and privilege, which comes without a sense of proper reverence for queer ancestors who paved the way for all that debate. If you hear any of Maupins own griping in there (or anyone of his generations), its carefully offset by Bens justified outrage. The argument is naturally staged, with broad talking points filtered through personal perspective. Its especially bracing to hear a character played by Stephen Spinella spit out an invective about Angels in America, given that Spinella was in the original Broadway cast of that seismic AIDS-era play.
Indeed, Tales of the City is best when its grappling with the old tales of an old city, mulled over in the present dRead More – Source
