The first, or maybe the second thing to be said about “The Artist,” a six-part comedy written and directed by Aram Rappaport, is that it streams from the Network, a free ad-supported streaming service Rappaport created to release his previous series, “The Green Veil.” The first three episodes premiere Thursday; the concluding three are due at Christmastime.
The second, or maybe the first thing to say about it is that it comes pulling a tramload of heavy talent — including Mandy Patinkin, Janet McTeer, Danny Huston, Hank Azaria, Patty Lupone, Zachary Quinto — which begs for it to be taken seriously, though that might not be the best way to take it.
Set in 1906, peopled with ahistorical versions of historical figures, the series is set largely in and around the Rhode Island “country home” of Norman Henry (Patinkin), identified by a title card as “an eccentric robber baron,” and seemingly what we’d call a venture capitalist today. (And one seemingly in need of capital.) Norman begins the series dead, carried out rolled in a carpet and set on fire like a Viking, before we skip back in time, meeting his wife, Marian (McTeer), who narrates from her journal and advises “the reader” that it is only on the final page that “you might be well enough equipped to tell fact from fiction, hero from villain.” I’ve seen only the first three episodes, so I have no idea, apart from where the story misrepresents its real-life characters. But that’s just poetic license and, of course, perfectly acceptable.
The staff, for no evident reason, apart perhaps from the house lacking “a working kitchen,” lives in tents on the front lawn. They’re called inside by bells, attached to cords running out the windows, labeled the Maid, the Ballerina, the Boxer, the Doctor. The ballerina, Lilith (Ana Mulvoy Ten), is a sort of protege to Henry; she believes he’ll arrange for her to dance “Coppelia” back home in Paris, the fool. (Their scenes together are creepy.) Sometimes we see her naked (though tastefully arranged) in a metal tub. Her dance instructor, Marius (David Pittu), is waspish, bitter and insulting. The boxer is a sparring partner for Marian, who works out her aggression in the ring. She’s told us that she loathes her husband, and he her (though he professes his love in a backhanded way).
And then there’s the eponymous artist (Huston), eventually identified as Edgar Degas, real-life French Impressionist, who was not, in fact, literally stumbling around Rhode Island in 1906, and certainly not accepting a commission to paint French poodles. (So much French!) You are free to make the connection between the show’s ballerina and those he famously painted, and her nude in the tub with his masterpiece pastels of bathing women. But apart from bad eyesight, a hint of antisemitism and Huston muttering in French, there’s no substantial resemblance to the genuine article. Here, he seems half out of his mind, or half sober. He is quite concerned with getting paid, and I don’t blame him.
The news of the day is that another person from history, Thomas Edison (Azaria) is coming to the house, looking for an investor for his new invention, a Kinetophone, a peep show with sound, like a turn-of-the-century take on a virtual reality headset. (There was such a thing; it was not a success.) This sets up a long flashback in which we learn that Marian and Edison knew each other in college, and that he betrayed her. Next up are Evelyn Nesbit (Ever Anderson) and her mother (Jill Hennessy), who have booked it out of New York after Evelyn’s unstable husband, Harry K. Thaw (Clark Gregg), shot architect Stanford White in the rooftop restaurant of White’s Madison Square Garden. That happened.
It’s a loud show, with much shouting and some brief violence, which, in its suddenness, verges on slapstick, and some less brief violence which is not funny at all. There is a superfluity of gratuitous profanity; F words and the less usual C word fly about like bats at twilight, clutter up sentences, along with many rude sexual and anatomical imprecations. Most everyone is pent up, ready to pop. At the beginning of the series, setting the table for what’s to come, Marian declares, “This is not a story in the conventional sense”; it’s “a cautionary tale,” but “not a tale of murder. This is a story of rebirth,” presumably hers. There’s a feminist current to the narrative: The men are patronizing and possessive, the women — taken advantage of in more than one sense — find ways to accommodate, manipulate or fight them, while holding on to themselves.
One can see why Rappaport might have had trouble landing this series elsewhere, or preferred to avoid notes from above. Aesthetically and textually, it’s the sort of absurdist comedy that used to turn up in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, something like the works of Robert Downey Sr. or William Klein, or maybe an ambitious film student’s senior thesis, given a big budget and access to talent; in its very lack, or perhaps avoidance, of subtlety it feels very old-fashioned. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it bad, or for that matter good, but it seems to me the perfect realization of the creator’s idea, and there is something in that. And there are those three concluding episodes, which will bring in Lupone and Quinto, their characters yet unknown, and may move the needle one way or the other. In any case, it’s not something you see every day.
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