The Bingeworthy Breakdown is an occasional look at new and returning TV shows. An estimated 500 seasons of scripted TV will air in 2017, and we’re here to help you sort the must-sees from the can-skips, because life is way too short, and Peak TV way too crowded, for investing in a show you’re not going to love. This week, we explore Netflix’s “Gypsy,” starring Naomi Watts, which hit the streaming service on June 30th.
Happy July! How’d you spend your pre-Fourth weekend?
*grunts* Need coffee.
Now you’re just speaking in non-sequiturs.
You would demand caffeinated beverages, too, if you’d spent any portion of your recent free time mainlining Netflix’s punishing new series, “Gypsy,” straight into your eyeballs.
How colorful.
Well, look: I’m not the type to binge watch as a general rule, with very rare exceptions — like that one time we got free HBO for 48 hours and watched the first season of “Westworld” without stopping, and…
Stay on track, Andy.
Okay, right, so: Binge watching. I think the concept of binging is unhealthy no matter the context, but, as a pop culture critic, I’m immediately put off by the thought of habitually sitting on a couch and consuming somewhere in the neighborhood of six to ten hours of media in a single day, especially when that media is as frustratingly lethargic as “Gypsy.”
That’s harsh. Do I even want to know what this “Gypsy” show is about?
Let me sum it all up for you: Jean, a New York City-based therapist, decides, out of the blue, that her life isn’t exciting enough, and so she cooks up an alias for herself and begins crossing lines and violating boundaries in the patient-doctor dynamic, notably pursuing a fling with a patient’s ex-girlfriend, Sidney — a barista, musical aspirant, and free spirit. Basically, she’s just a manic-pixie-dream-girl with an added manipulative streak, and if there’s one core detail about “Gypsy” that’s actually compelling, it’s the use of that trope in a female-driven and female-led narrative; normally, the MPDG pops up in movies and television to give befuddled, idling men a romantic shot in the arm, new purpose, a fresh identity, und so weiter und so fort. Here, the MPDG performs mostly the same function, but the perspective is different.
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You’ve nearly sold me. Who’s in it?
Naomi Watts stars as Jean. Billy Crudup plays her workaholic-but-committed husband, Michael, “Kingsman: The Secret Service” co-star Sophie Cookson plays Sidney…
So, with a cast like that, how could this thing possibly go wrong?
With surprising ease. “Gypsy” is an erotic drama, and erotic dramas tend to have a good deal of overlap with thrillers in the great genre Venn Diagram. By their very nature they demand a sense of danger, or at the very least an edge; they don’t need to go full-on Brian De Palma — in fact, nobody should even try to go full-on De Palma unless they are De Palma, or possibly Park Chan-wook — but as eroticism frequently confronts forbidden and prohibited desires, they can’t help but foment suspense amidst an atmosphere of sexual tension. Desire is an innately thrilling feeling. But “Gypsy,” for all of its pedigree, never actually thrills, on either technical or emotional levels.
It’s a shockingly languid product, moving at a glacial pace from scene to scene, from episode to episode; it inadvertently makes the case that not all television needs to be built around hour long episodes, as all ten of its chapters are (ballpark, anyhow; they’re in the range of forty-or-so minutes to just shy of sixty.) The length might actually be the main issue with “Gypsy,” now that I think about it. As each episode crawls along, the dearth of emotion, interior or exterior, grows more and more noticeable, and that, in turn, has the effect of exposing the series’ cumbersome pacing. Each element that’s off emphasizes the others. It’s kind of like a house of mirrors that highlights rather than exaggerates every flaw. Eventually, we see the thing for what it is: A bland, soapy imitation of the thing it wants to be.
Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad if “Gypsy” ever rewarded us for watching by showcasing at least some of the fun stuff we expect from stories of its make and model, but, much like “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the sex is rarely ever sexy. Mostly it’s awkward. (Jean and Michael liaise with one another in a hotel room for Kinky Adult Role Play Time™ at around the season’s halfway point and, oh man, it’s on the same plane of clumsy as the sex scene in “Watchmen” set to “Hallelujah.”)