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Hollywood Tv Show Review

Rain Dogs Review 2023 Tv Show Series Season Cast Crew Online

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Rain Dogs Review 2023 Tv Show Series Season Cast Crew Online

With a deceptively simple plot, a somewhat evasive tone and a cast of stars who are far better known on the Other Side of the Pond, the new half-hour dramedy Rain Dogs may be a tough sell for HBO.

Allow me to try: Rain Dogs is The Last of Us with poverty instead of mushroom zombies. I could add that it’s also a fine economic counterbalance to the satirical affluence of The White Lotus and Succession, but nah. Let’s go with The Last of Us as my primary point of comparison. Sure, that’s inviting disappointment for a handful of [million] video game fans, but if it gets some additional viewers to check out a rewarding, but undeniably tough, little show, it’s probably worth it.

On a more practical level, series creator Cash Carraway is essentially giving The Object of My Affection — you may remember either Stephen McCauley’s novel or the Jennifer Aniston/Paul Rudd film — a strychnine-laced reboot.

Daisy May Cooper, heading for a big American breakout this spring with Am I Being Unreasonable? coming to Hulu in April, plays Costello, an aspiring writer struggling to make rent working a booth at a London peep show. Really struggling. The series, in fact, begins with Costello and daughter Iris (Fleur Tashjian), nearing her 10th birthday, getting kicked out of their scuzzy flat and beginning an eight-episode odyssey for domestic stability. The Tom Waits song of the same name isn’t featured in the series, but both titles conjure a similar image of displacement and literal and emotional sheltering.

Costello, sober for three-plus months but always teetering, has a very unusual support system of people who can help her, but only so much. That group includes Gloria (Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo), working at her father’s funeral home and prone to waking up in random phone booths dressed for the previous night’s escapades, and Lenny (Adrian Edmondson), an ailing artist whose main representational subject is vaginas.

The X-factor in Costello and Iris’ life is Selby (Jack Farthing), introduced on the brink of being released after a one-year prison stint for a violent assault. Selby is wealthy, gay, thoroughly self-destructive and just as thoroughly toxic when it comes to his best friend Costello. At the same time, he’s a fiercely devoted paternal figure for Iris, willing to do anything to help her, even if his interventions invariably lead to disaster.

Yes, I know that description doesn’t necessarily give off that Last of Us vibe, does it? But think of Rain Dogs as an almost (and sometimes entirely) picaresque mother-daughter vagrant journey across England. Iris isn’t exactly humanity’s only hope, but she’s the thing that’s keeping Costello (and Selby) going. Costello and Iris aren’t the only people struggling in this landscape, though, and in each episode they find a different place to rest their heads, encounter different extremes and threats — from sexual predators to the imperfections of the British safety net to that inevitable stop that looks like it might be utopia but, instead, might cost everybody their souls. It’s all set against a backdrop of a modern London where full-time employment isn’t a guarantee of being able to afford housing and where the opportunities that pay the best — the rewards and desperation of sex work play a major role here, as it did in AMC’s criminally ignored Mood — are the opportunities that come with unfair stigmas.

It’s a premise and structure that let Carraway, writer of all eight episodes, steer into the messiness of her main characters, who from the outside appear to all be addicts and deviants and even from the inside don’t always look like the right village to be raising this child. There’s a repetitiveness to Costello’s cycle of decisions, but Carraway is careful to position the slippery slope of destitution and wrong calls within a working-class British tradition that ranges from Dickensian workhouses to Loachian factory towns. The show’s position — and the position that Costello often references with an encyclopedic range of pop- culture knowledge — is that the aesthetic of filmed poverty tends toward gritty realism and doesn’t allow for the fanciful and figurative leaps that heroes from other tax brackets can experience. Now is this true? Having watched ample amounts of Roseanne and Shameless and plenty of British blue-collar shows, I’m not so sure. But delusions of self-importance are a part of Costello’s character.

Yes, I know that description doesn’t necessarily give off that Last of Us vibe, does it? But think of Rain Dogs as an almost (and sometimes entirely) picaresque mother-daughter vagrant journey across England. Iris isn’t exactly humanity’s only hope, but she’s the thing that’s keeping Costello (and Selby) going. Costello and Iris aren’t the only people struggling in this landscape, though, and in each episode they find a different place to rest their heads, encounter different extremes and threats — from sexual predators to the imperfections of the British safety net to that inevitable stop that looks like it might be utopia but, instead, might cost everybody their souls. It’s all set against a backdrop of a modern London where full-time employment isn’t a guarantee of being able to afford housing and where the opportunities that pay the best — the rewards and desperation of sex work play a major role here, as it did in AMC’s criminally ignored Mood — are the opportunities that come with unfair stigmas.

It’s a premise and structure that let Carraway, writer of all eight episodes, steer into the messiness of her main characters, who from the outside appear to all be addicts and deviants and even from the inside don’t always look like the right village to be raising this child. There’s a repetitiveness to Costello’s cycle of decisions, but Carraway is careful to position the slippery slope of destitution and wrong calls within a working-class British tradition that ranges from Dickensian workhouses to Loachian factory towns. The show’s position — and the position that Costello often references with an encyclopedic range of pop- culture knowledge — is that the aesthetic of filmed poverty tends toward gritty realism and doesn’t allow for the fanciful and figurative leaps that heroes from other tax brackets can experience. Now is this true? Having watched ample amounts of Roseanne and Shameless and plenty of British blue-collar shows, I’m not so sure. But delusions of self-importance are a part of Costello’s character.

Rain Dogs Review 2023 Tv Show Series Season Cast Crew Online

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