Review: Amazon pilots for fall 2015: The long and short of ‘Edge,’ ‘Patriot,’ ‘Good Girls Revolt’ and more

Amazon Studios, the third big streamer of original television-esque content along with Netflix and Hulu, issued another batch of pilots Thursday for public inspection and comment. It's something of a stunt, this self-serve focus group, but it fits the comment farming and recommendation algorithms upon which the company built its retail business.

As in older sorts of television, bad pilots can become better series ("Mozart in the Jungle," I mean you); and good pilots (Whit Stillman's "The Cosmopolitans," salut) don't get picked up. But as the streamworks have become places to do different kinds of work, and get noticed -- hello, Emmy-winning "Transparent" -- bigger talent wants to get involved. The latest batch, while not universally successful, represents a wide range of subjects and approaches; all are ambitiously produced, and most come with impressive names attached.

Three of the pilots run around an hour; three are half that. (There is also a new batch of kid-show pilots I may get around to reviewing.)

Taken from the writing of George G. Gilman (a pseudonym of British pulp novelist Terry Harknett), "Edge" is a post-Civil War revenge fantasy that comes on all Cormac McCarthy-meets-Quentin Tarantino, all the description some viewers need to sign on and others to get rid of their computers so as not to see it even accidentally. (I am more in the latter camp; but for work, I'd have split as soon as I realized they were going to shoot that dog.) Max Martini stars as a former Union officer out to avenge the death of his brother amid a scramble for Old West treasure. The action is well staged and there is (briefly) the lightning presence of Yvonne Strahovski playing a variation on her old "Chuck" character. But this is one of those uncomfortable combinations in which the brutality we're supposed to read as "realistic" is contradicted by the super-anti-heroic invincibility of its death-dealing central character. The bodies pile up, and blow up, and it is just a big bloody mess, with a lot -- a lot, really a lot -- of collateral damage about which no one involved, on-screen or behind it, seems much bothered. (It's the point, I know.) The bad guys just kill people straight out.

A Western town blows up real good in the Fall 2015 Amazon pilot “Edge.”

(Robert Lloyd)

A Western town blows up real good in the fall 2015 Amazon pilot "Edge." (Charles E. Peters)

Similar reservations (to a much lesser extent) also pertain to "Patriot," a title I think not without irony, about a spy in crisis (Michael Dorman), who sings out his pain in folk songs: "I got some really bad intelligence/Shot an old man hotel maid/Who was just making the physicist's bed/And my evacuation team/parked on the wrong street/And was arrested by the secret king's police/And got a fair dose of white torture/Which is supposed to completely erase your sense of self.") Pulled back from Amsterdam, where he has "been getting baked/Just looking up at birds" he gets a new assignment from his spook boss and father (Terry O'Quinn) to move some money around in order to short-circuit Iran's nuclear program; things go wrong fast. The script, by Steve Conrad ("The Pursuit of Happyness"), who also directed, uses the frequent dodge of surrounding its flawed hero with even more flawed characters, in order to make what's unpalatable about him relatively more palatable. But Dorman's sleepy performance, which feels different and interesting, carries much of the weight. And there are funny little grace notes in the dialogue that make this more compelling to me than its premise or action ordinarily would. As a bonus, Dorman and O'Quinn sing a lovely version of Townes Van Zandt's "If I Needed You." (They're Texans.) Michael Chernus is also good as Dorman's hapless congressman kid brother, whose seat a hapless Congress at least makes plausible.

Anna Camp, Erin Darke and Genevieve Angelson fight for equal treatment at a newsmagazine in the fact-based Amazon pilot “Good Girls Revolt.” (Jessica Miglio)

Anna Camp, Erin Darke and Genevieve Angelson fight for equal treatment at a news magazine in the fact-based Amazon pilot "Good Girls Revolt." (Jessica Miglio)

Adapted by Dana Calvo from former Newsweek staffer Lynn Povich's 2012 book about a 1970 gender discrimination suit at her old magazine (here called News of the Week), "Good Girls Revolt" can be seen as a kind of sequel to "Mad Men," if that show hadn't already managed its own self-critique. It's a good subject, set at a time of social change and action -- until the suit, women at Newsweek could research stories, but never got to write them; sexual harassment was more or less institutional. And a good cast, including Anna Camp, Genevieve Angelson and Chris Diamantopoulos. But the production is comically hyperbolic, the dialogue power-point pointed, and for a show at least partly about journalism, it's oddly careless with details. Employed as a kind of harbinger of raised consciousness, Nora Ephron (played by Grace Gummer, whose mother, Meryl Streep, played a fictionalized Nora Ephron in the movie "Heartburn") passes through the magazine six years after she worked at Newsweek, introduced as a Wellesley grad when, in actuality, she'd filled out the decade with magazine and newspaper writing and was on the verge of publishing her first book. Much of the action in the pilot centers on finding out who killed Meredith Hunter at the Rolling Stones' 1969 Altamont Speedway concert, wrongly located, in the very first frames of the episode, as being in Oakland; later it will be important to get the testimony of a backup singer in Santana ("The police blamed the hippies, but she blamed the Hell's Angels that were hired as security"), a particularly tough job given that the band didn't have them.

Christina Ricci plays Zelda Sayre, the future Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the Fall 2015 Amazon pilot “Z.” (Richard Foreman).

Christina Ricci plays Zelda Sayre, the future Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the fall 2015 Amazon pilot "Z." (Richard Foreman).

"Z," adapted by Nicole Yorkin and Dawn Prestwich ("The Killing") from Therese Anne Fowler's historical novel, takes us to Montgomery, Ala., where the future Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald (Christina Ricci) is still plain old Miss Zelda Sayre, except for not being plain or old. The novel goes all the way to Scott Fitzgerald's death (and the pilot begins in the ashes of the sanitarium where Zelda died several years later); and the TV series, if it becomes one, may have similar chronological ambitions -- Ricci, who is completely credible as a teenager, is 35, so she can cover those bases. But for the moment we are back, rather convincingly, in 1918, when young Zelda swims naked in the pond, dances close with soldiers on their way through Montgomery to World War I, spurning local boys as "three-minute eggs," smokes cigarettes and drinks gin, much to the displeasure of her father the judge (David Strathairn, the very picture of exasperated paternal disapproval). Notwithstanding the odd exhalation out of "Gone With the Wind" by way of Tennessee Williams ("Oh good lord, smell that sweet alyssum, it always reminds me of mama in the garden at Mineral Mount"), this feels unusually on-point and un-mannered for an American period piece; a central scene set at a dance is especially good; the steps feel lived in, not just learned, and there is an edge of hysteria to the action that suggests it had been going for hours before the camera started rolling. The eventual author of "The Great Gatsby" does not much appear -- we meet him reading "Sister Carrie" while a fellow recruit flirts with some local flibbertigibbets ("Scott here is a Princeton man"), and later he will ask, at a different dance, "Who's that saint?" ("That's Zelda Sayre, comes the reply, and she's no saint.") Tim Blake Nelson ("Anesthesia"), Nicole Yorkin and Dawn Prestwich ("The Killing").

Tig Notaro, right, with Casey Wilson, stars in a comedy based on her life in ‘One Mississippi,’ one of the Fall 2015 Amazon pilts. (Patti Perett)

Tig Notaro, right, with Casey Wilson, stars in a comedy based on her life in "One Mississippi," one of the fall 2015 Amazon pilots. (Patti Perett)

In "One Mississippi," Tig Notaro (writing with Diablo Cody) offers a semi-autobiographical take on her life back home on the Gulf Coast after the sudden death of her mother, while still recovering from medical emergencies of her own; it's a comedy. Viewers who have seen Kristina Goolsby and Ashley Yorke's documentary "Tig," from earlier this year, will be familiar with the real story and may experience a slight sensation of cognitive dissonance -- events are reordered, characters renamed from the people they're partially based on -- as well as wonder what it was like to write or play these scenes, to lie in a hospital bed next to an actress playing your own dying mother. The show, which allows itself small, sweet excursions into magic realism, is best when Notaro, one of our great comics, talks longest: It begins with her telling a story about how as a child she would line the halls of her house with stuffed animals and "pretend that they were each patiently awaiting their reservation at the world class restaurant that I owned and operated... Whatever the assortment, some if not most, found themselves waiting up to four hours just to be seated -- it was honestly that good," concluding, "If my comedy and storytelling career does not pan out I can always just pull the old stuffed animals out and get the restaurant started again." (Her delivery might be described as an aggressive deadpan.) Casey Wilson plays her girlfriend, Noah Harpster her brother and John Rothman her pathologically reserved father, a man with a personality "somewhere between room temperature and sleet" who tells Tig, "Technically, we're not related anymore." Nicole Holofcener directs; Louis C.K. is an executive producer. "Sometimes reality even when it's imperfect is more beautiful than anything we can imagine or write," some character says (my notes don't reflect who), which sums it up nicely.

Flea, left, and Shaquille O’Neal are among the celebrity imaginary friends sweetening the life of a teenager (Lewis Pullman) in “Highston,” one of the Amazon’s Fall 2015 pilots. (Greg Gayne)

Flea, left, and Shaquille O'Neal are among the celebrity imaginary friends sweetening the life of a teenager (Lewis Pullman) in "Highston," one of the Amazon's fall 2015 pilots. (Greg Gayne)

The charming "Highston" comes from "Little Miss Sunshine" co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (with whom I have some extracurricular acquaintance) and "Nebraska" writer Bob Nelson. An imaginary friends comedy in which the imagined friends are real celebrities, it has something of the whimsical pictorial formality of a Wes Anderson picture, and a shared love for the weirdo and the whimsical. As in most such stories -- "Harvey" being the classic example, but "Don Quixote" fits the bill, too -- in which the suggested cure feels worse than the disease, it's not a real picture of mental illness, but rather a kind of metaphorical rejection of the ordinary. (We regard the imaginary friends as real, which also makes them magic.) Lewis Pullman, who comes across as a younger, more cheerful version of "Rectify's" Aden Young, plays the eponymous teenager, whose famous friends vary from day to day and offer him advice; Madonna, we're told, told him "to stay in school and always wear a condom"; he and Bill Gates talk about girls; Stephen Hawking is "smart on personal matters, too." On the day we meet Highston, Flea has his ear ("I was wondering where all matter comes from," Highston asks the purple-haired bassist, who will tell him, "You're the sanest person I've ever met -- except for Iggy Pop, of course.") O'Neal joins them later to give Highston dance instruction ("Remember what Martha Graham said, we learn by practice") and then to jam, and finally to make you wish for a whole series of O'Neal and Flea pictures. Chris Parnell and Mary Lynn Rajskub are lovely as his parents, concerned but also easily drawn into their son's unreality. ("Shaq is here?" Rajskub exclaims.) The always interesting Curtis Armstrong is his uncle, in a world of his own.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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