This is a Spout Mavens review (#1). For more information, read here.
As this is a Spout Maven review, and my first one, I feel I have to throw out some qualifiers for just this first entry. If you are a regular reader (thank you), you may have noticed that I tend to write my reviews more like true blog entries, at least in general, so that I can write from the first person and contribute feelings as well as thoughts, but for these reviews, I'll try to be more review-y than blogg-y. Also, because I tend to write blog entries rather than reviews, I like to talk about how I happened to arrive at watching the particular film in question, so that people understand where I'm coming from and any possible biases I might have going into the entry/"review." Since the Spout Mavens review screeners, i.e. films that probably not too many people have seen, I will forego this habit for these reviews. Also, since Spout Mavens get to keep what they watch, I will also forego discussion of my "test," i.e. whether I liked the movie enough to buy it. Yet, I will still write these reviews with the regular features that regular readers have come to expect from my verbose writings, including plot summaries and the film's position on the patented ratings scale (for a refresher on my ratings scale, read here.)
Terminal City is a television comedy-drama miniseries imported from Canada. As I am not from Canada, I had never heard of this show; the only actor I recognized in it is Gil Bellows, who some might remember from Ally McBeal. The ten episodes of this miniseries tell the story of an unconventional woman who likes to avoid bad news by refusing to answer the telephone, binge drinking, and hitting golf balls onto the roofs of houses down the hill from hers. Unfortunately, once Katie Sampson (Maria Del Mar) finally answers the telephone, she learns that the lump in her breast is likely cancerous, and that she must go to the hospital for a biopsy. It's at this moment that her precariously tethered but modern family--which includes her devoted but fragile husband Ari (Bellows); her pot-smoking, older-woman coveting teenage son Nicky (Adam Butcher); intelligent, sexually curious, and defiant teenage daughter Sarah (Katie Boland); Eli (Nico McEown), her 7 year old son obsessed with death and questions of faith; and her father-in-law Saul (Paul Soles), an Auschwitz survivor and devout Jew--begins to unravel. To further exacerbate the unraveling process, Katie stumbles onto a failing reality television series at the hospital called "Post-Op, "where a doctor turned emcee interviews patients at the hospital and discusses their treatment experiences. While being interviewed on camera, Katie's natural devil-may-care attitude informs her defense mechanism, as she starts cracking jokes, making light of what is likely her cancer, using profanity, and even showing the affected breast. Her winning charm and sense of humor catch the eye of the producer, Jane (Jane McLean), who then lobbies for Katie to assume hosting duties, decrying that Katie is born for television. And the viewing audience of her new and improved reality show, "No Show," couldn't agree more as her viewership expands, drawn to her natural charisma and to her personal tragedy. Of course, her family finds it harder to support her public examination of the experience of her illness and the effect it is having on their lives than her viewers.
Terminal CIty presents a hodgepodge of storylines in a surreal, almost stream of consciousness way, allowing for the emotional impact of each character's personal struggle with life and death to slowly crawl under the viewer's skin while contrasting that impact to the larger reaction to Katie's deteriorating condition. The trouble is, this type of presentation feels scattered and unfocused as the viewer attempts to make sense of what is happening. In other words, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.
The series feels like it begins in the middle, which would be fine except for the fact that the characters are not developed for several episodes, with the notable exception of Katie. When the series starts, the viewer quickly learns that Katie is not your typical wife and mom: she's hip, wise, damaged, and clearly afraid of the possibility that she might die, which is punctuated by the fact that she enjoys a healthy, loving relationship with Ari and her children. As the episodes progress, however, interweaving between confronting the reality of her situation, the manufactured reality of her television show, and the surreality of her circumstances, the viewer begins to learn that each member of her family is struggling not only with Katie's illness but with life, and some of those struggles are more compelling than others, depending on how the screenwriters or particular episode director chose to focus on each character.
The series was as likable as it was because, just as Katie is discovered for her winning charisma, Maria Del Mar gives a winning and powerful performance. She's a mess, but she's a mess that we can relate to, and Del Mar infuses her with energy and dimension and makes her story of coping with breast cancer original. Katie's funny, touching, tragically sad, angry--the entire gamut of emotions--and Del Mar plays the character with a true sense of fun, even when the illness worsens, and Katie's cognition and comprehension are affected by the drugs and the spreading of the cancer. She's the reason to watch.
On the other hand, the viewer never learns why the children and the other peripheral characters have found their separate activities and paths - and, sometimes, why the viewer should even care at all. It seems like the creator wanted to dissect parent-child relationships because that theme and dynamic recurs more than any other; however, none of the parent-child dynamics are really ever given a full examination and resolution, even if the resolution was designed to be open-ended.
For example, just taking into account the Sampson family, Katie and Ari seem to know about Nicky's drug use and do nothing about it and have the same reaction when he is caught having an affair with a woman twice his age; their reaction is to crack a joke and move on with their life or to joke about enjoying their own kid's drugs. Sarah tries to seduce her English teacher with blackmail and stalks him Fatal Attraction-style, yet there seems to be no basis for this and neither parent becomes aware of it. Nicky and Sarah seem to learn lessons but to what purpose; why did they need the lessons? One could argue that everyone deals with cancer and its possible outcomes differently, and that that's the intent of all of this, but there was no background offered as to why these kids would make these choices, or why the parents would be so obtuse as to not even notice them (even before the cancer is confirmed) or to be more affected by them, and to attribute it to the fear of their mother dying seems too convenient. The only compelling storyline from the Sampson children's perspective is little Eli who, raised Jewish, begins gravitating toward Christianity as his mother begins to die, trying to grapple with death and the differences between his faith and the faith of the New Testament, much to the chagrin of his grandfather. Of course, this story might have been more compelling if the viewer had been told what religion Katie was supposed to be (if any) and why the family elected to practice Judaism anyway and why Eli was drawn to Christianity and not another religion (like Islam, since Saul religiously - no pun intended - follows the conflict in Israel). In fact, this series' greatest failing is that it offers the sketch outline of most characters; some of the problems and antagonisms each character is dealing with or affected by; and then fails to give the character decent dimension, including, perhaps, some background information as to how s/he arrived at the problems or a logical conclusion to the dilemma at hand. Only Katie is fully developed as a character, which is why all of these other storylines are simply distracting and overly-complicate the series, making it feel scattered and unfocused. Also, the series' pacing and momentum slowed considerably (and grew more boring), for example, when the focus shifted to Sarah's unexplained conquest of her teacher or Nicky's dalliance with a 40-year-old suburbanite.
Further, aside from Del Mar and Bellows, who well portrayed Ari's touching devotion to his wife and sense of helplessness in the face of her illness and in light of his strained relationship with father Saul, the performances of pretty much all of the supporting characters left something to be desired. The children were extremely wooden and robotic, with the exception of some of the melodramatic antics of Sarah, which sort of fit because she's a teenager but sort of felt out of place because her motivations were frequently unexplained or not even implied. The performances of especially the TV crew and producer and the ghoulish network president, including a by-the-book floor manager and another pot-smoking assistant, did not resonate. They were clearly designed to be interesting caricatures thrown into the mix for good measure as affecting Katie's surreal reality but, as with the family, were never given any dimension and became too distracting.
The story, in fact, was further hindered by the need to introduce satire into a comedy-drama that would have worked better if it had been more about coping (vis a vis each family member, with better flushing out as to how they arrive at their individual reactions) than about the current voyeruistic culture. Yet, the creators seemed to want to, didactically, parallel the horrors of breast cancer with society's horrific obsession with watching other people's tragedies, personified by the network president (I think his name was Brendan) who continues to push for a show even if Katie dies. While this spin gives Terminal City a certain uniqueness, and another possible comedic angle, this slant was mismanaged and became as distasteful as the underlying statement behind it. Katie hosting the show was compelling, because it nakedly exposed her vulnerability and fears, but all of the background stuff was, again distracting and sometimes annoyingly so. The character of Henry (the pot smoker), for example, who invokes an image of Dazed and Confused rather readily, felt like an inane filler character that was never funny.
The production values were very good, but the series episodes were directed by a group of directors that did not seem to be consistent between episodes. My sense is that some directors tended to hone in more on the family dynamic while others focused on the television show dynamic, which also made the disjointedness between the comedy of the reality show and the drama of the cancer much more obvious. In fact, I just never felt like these two pieces really truly fit the whole time I was watching this series, even though the reality show is the gimmick of it. Also, the show had an interesting soundtrack that was sometimes pitch-perfect and, at other times, simply grating.
All in all, as scathing as this might have sounded, I think I ultimately liked Terminal City, at least a little, because it was fresh and had some original, heartfelt, and occasionally funny spins on what could be heartbreaking and tragic stories, but it also felt messy, dealing with many unresolved issues and storylines that were introduced, sometimes in what seemed like the middle of the story, that were never adequately developed in the show's ten episodes. Also, when the show wanted to be satirical and funny, it actually felt contrived and heavy-handed. Thus, I feel this Canadian miniseries deserves a 6.5 on the ratings scale for being between quite shaky but entertaining and cute but mediocre, as truly, Katie is the reason to watch, but the story is not well executed even if the concept is quirky and original. Terminal City may still be worth a watch, though, and might be very comforting to those who are experiencing this kind of illness, either first-hand or in their family setting. If nothing else, this series presents a hopeful perspective to an otherwise dire situation, even if it does so in a distractingly disjointed way.