ssummer, and viewing is easy. Which is a relief, considering the heat dome conditions that have made outdoor recreation in much of the eastern half of the U.S. feel like playing in a furnace. Among June’s best new TV shows are documentary series about disco and a Renaissance fair. (Both are fairly substantive, but feel relatively lighthearted for a genre whose favorite subject matter is serial killers.) Julio Torres returns with another comedy that finds ethereal humor in the precariousness of an artist’s life. Queen chronicles the coming of age of a wounded but charming young man in his early 20s. There’s even a new Star Wars show based on a swap of twin sisters.
The Acolyte (Disney+)
The best thing about the latest Star Wars The spin-off is that you don’t have to be Yoda to understand who everyone is, what’s going on, and how the show fits into Disney’s (or whatever) 100-year plan for Lucasfilm. It is because The Acolyte takes place a century before the rise of the Empire and its countless blockbuster stories, when the Jedi Order is thriving and the galaxy is at peace. Our heroine is Osha (Amandla Stenberg), a young woman who abandoned her Jedi Knight training and is arrested for a murder that was actually committed by a twin sister, Mae (also Stenberg), who Osha had long believed to be dead. Mae’s quest to assassinate several Jedi leaders as retribution for a past mistake is intriguingly confusing Star Wars‘standard moral dichotomy between light and dark. Other reasons to be optimistic about the series: it was created by Russian doll mentor Leslye Headland, and the charming cast includes Carrie-Anne Moss, Charlie Barnett, Jodie Turner-Smith, Manny Jacinto and squid game star Lee Jung-jae.
Disc: soundtrack of a revolution (PBS)
Music documentaries are everywhere these days, and many of them are fascinating. But how many actually embody, rather than simply describe, the spirit of their theme? In the case of the club, that feeling is one of ecstasy, and the three-part PBS documentary series Disc: soundtrack of a revolution is at once a serious, politically engaged, and culturally aware genre story and a pleasure bomb, clouding your living room with hi-hat glitter and metallic confetti. Told largely by the DJs and singers who invented disco in the ’70s, the series not only immerses viewers in the dancefloor atmosphere, but also looks at influential tracks – from Cameroonian musician Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa” to Donna The summer masterpiece, “Love to Love You Baby,” to explore each artist’s innovations.
The triptych structure is perfectly suited to Discotheque, which opens with an episode charting the rise of sound in gay nightlife; followed by an account of an imperial era defined by black and female artists like Gloria Gaynor, Labelle and Candi Staton (who gives a wonderfully candid interview); and a finale that laments the music industry’s money grab (see: Village People, “Disco Duck”) and celebrates the continued evolution of dance music. In recent years, we have seen a crucial recontextualization of disco as a movement started by black, Latinx, queer, and female artists, and then simultaneously co-opted and demonized by the male and white mainstream. Discotheque brings an unusually nuanced perspective to this revisionism, noting both the upsides and downsides of the genre’s gentrification and never losing sight of music as a business.
Ghosts (HBO)
Los Espookys co-creator and SNL alumnus Julio Torres is back on HBO with his weirdest and most wonderful creation to date. Ghosts (Spanish for ghosts) takes its title from a quasi-autobiographical screenplay by writer-director Torres, Julio, who makes Crayola, at the beginning of the six-episode series premiere, a light-colored crayon with that spectral name. But this applies equally to the series’ characters, eccentric dreamers adrift in a society eager to commodify their identities and aspirations. The premise does Ghosts at once a shining specimen of weird TV and a manifesto arguing for the existence of this possibly dying art. [Read the full review.]
Queen (Hulu)
Hulu’s wonderful new dramedy Queen opens with a medium close-up that brings viewers face-to-face with the show’s eponymous heroine. Queenie Jenkins, 25, is staring at the ceiling, her braids sprawled across a white pillow, a tangle of necklaces brushing her collarbone and an expression of idle bewilderment distorting her features. In a voiceover, as the camera pulls back and we see that she is in the middle of a gynecological exam, she lists the many “things I should have done today” – shaving my bikini, for example.
It’s hard to imagine a more intimate introduction. And that is appropriate. Based on the famous 2019 novel of the same name and created by its author, Candice Carty-Williams, Queen deeply investigates the subjectivity of its title character, a Londoner of Jamaican descent who works on social media for a newspaper, but dreams of earning a subscription. [Read the full review.]
Ren Faire (HBO)
You might think you know what to expect from a documentary series called Ren Faire, but you are almost certainly wrong. In Fascinated and the crossword chronicle Wordplay for Trekkies and the live action RPG document Darkonthe Y2K era set the template for campy, warm-hearted nonfiction films about nerd subcultures. Ren Faire, the insightful and surprisingly moving three-part portrait of the Texas Renaissance Festival as it approaches its 50th anniversary, is not that kind of story. That’s it Successionbut with corsets and chain mail. [Read the full review.]
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
