Crisis in Six Scenes

Crisis in Six Scenes

Written and Directed by Woody Allen

It has been a very long time since I watched a Woody Allen product.
Apparently I was never a big fan to begin with. None of the older movies were particularly favorites or anything and I just don’t watch as many movies as a lot of people. I still don’t understand how people have the time to apparently see all the movies plus endless hours of continuing series stories that have been popular for the past decade.
But I have access to Amazon Prime on this lovely large TV we have now and had read about Crisis and how bad it was and was curious enough to have a look, at least for a half hour. I’m often up for a good trainwreck involving a privileged celebrity. That’s part of the game isn’t it?

The series is set in the 1960s. I had read, I thought, that Miley Cyrus played a hippie who comes and disrupts a middle class family's home and life. That didn’t sound particularly interesting to me, but it turns out to be much more than that. She plays a revolutionary on the run and needing to hide out. With this situation the series ends up having a great deal of left wing political content as she converts the woman of the house, and Woody Allen’s character’s spouse, played by Elaine May, to the cause of revolution as well as their soon to be married grandson.

I was surprised by this. I had never thought of Woody Allen as being particularly political just a wealthy class filmmaker lacking these enormous concerns. But here there is a lot of political content, the need for revolution to set things right. This might be a another reason that the series was so disliked. And the revolution people are all more or less sympathetic characters with free rein to state their case. This is an oddy in popular entertainment, always has been and I certainly didn’t expect it from the pen of Woody Allen.

But is it good? Is it “funny”.
Well, ultimately as the thing gets going it is.
The final two 23 minutes episodes in the brief 6 part series are really quite funny and clever, even a bit suspenseful. I laughed.

There is something else unique and groundbreaking about this. Has there ever been a series written, directed and starring an 80 year old? The other lead Elaine May who plays his younger wife, is 85!!!
This alone makes it a unique product.

There is another mid-octogenarian starring in a series with Rita Moreno on the Netflix reboot of One Day At a Time. But that show is so old school, complete with annoying laugh track, that I can’t watch it. The one I saw wasn’t very good.