A new Netflix documentary series, “Penguin Town,” gives the reality-TV treatment to one of the camera’s favorite birds. It features a colony of penguins that descend every summer on Simon’s Town, South Africa, to make baby penguins, mingle with the humans and try to avoid predators.
“There are a lot of movies about penguins,” narrator Patton Oswalt notes in the first episode. “Penguins on ice, penguins in the snow, tons of marching…Meet the endangered African penguins. Around here, they’re known as: jackass penguins.”
The series follows a number of penguin families and characters including the Bougainvilleas (the “soul mates”), the Culverts (the “newlyweds”) and Junior (the “misfit”). There’s also a pack of bad guys, including a mongoose and assorted seagulls. Like any reality-TV show, “Penguin Town” is full of drama and may or may not eventually feature at least one single dad.
Here’s a little bit of the reality behind some other titles streaming this week:
New release: ‘Bosch’
New release: ‘Bosch’
(Amazon Prime Video)
When
Amazon
first started commissioning TV shows, it made pilot episodes available for the public to chime in on.
In 2014, titles included “Transparent,” about a family whose patriarch comes out as transgender; and “Bosch,” about a Los Angeles cop, based on Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels. “Transparent” brought home the first Golden Globe for best TV series for a streaming service, and “Bosch,” starring Titus Welliver in the title role, has become Amazon’s longest-running series.
The seventh and final season of “Bosch” arrives Friday to a time when the conversation around law enforcement is vastly different than when the show was born. In the pilot episode, Detective Bosch is exonerated in the shooting of a suspect. The new season begins with his partner, Detective Jerry Edgar, being exonerated in the shooting of another suspect.
Was the national conversation about police shootings a factor in the making of the new season? Mr. Welliver said the new season’s objective was to tell a story inspired by Mr. Connelly’s book “The Burning Room,” not to make the show as topical as possible.
“Our show is very even on the ground. It represents law enforcement and society in a very realistic and truthful way—good, bad and indifferent,” Mr. Welliver says, adding: “I’ve always said that I feel like ‘Bosch’ is really just a show about the human condition and the backdrop of the show is a guy who is a cop. And what it’s really about is a guy who’s trying to navigate the world, both dark and light, and to kind of keep his soul intact.”
Although the series is ending, “Bosch” won’t be gone for long. A new, untitled Harry Bosch series, also starring Mr. Welliver, is being made for Amazon’s free, ad-supported streaming service, IMDb TV.
New release:
‘False Positive’
New release: ‘False Positive’
(Hulu)
In “False Positive,” a new horror movie that begins streaming Friday on Hulu, Ilana Glazer plays Lucy, a woman struggling to get pregnant who turns to a famous fertility doctor for help.
Dr. John Hindle (Pierce Brosnan) is handsome, confident and reassuring. But when Lucy becomes pregnant, she is faced with an agonizing decision and the possibility that the doctor might not be the benevolent force that everyone—including her husband, Dr. Hindle’s former colleague—claims he is.
Ms. Glazer is a comedian best known for co-creating the series “Broad City,” and “False Positive” is the first feature film she has co-written, in addition to her starring role. Thanks to a couple of delays in the film’s release, she found herself promoting the film while she was 38 weeks pregnant. Although Ms. Glazer said at least one nurse she spoke with could relate to what unfolds at the end of the film, she said she didn’t encounter any of the sinister actions that Lucy faced.
“The cosmic timing of it,” however, Ms. Glazer says, “it’s evidence to me, personally, that God remains the most twisted comedy writer.”
New release:
‘The Ice Road’
New release: ‘The Ice Road’
(Netflix)
After screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh and director Michael Bay finished “The Rock,” the pair took a meeting with Joe Roth, then chairman of Walt Disney Studios, where the executive asked him what stories he had in the hopper.
“Well,” Mr. Hensleigh remembers telling him, “an asteroid’s coming and NASA can land on it, but they don’t know how to drill. So they have to get these Houston oil drillers. So, it’s the highest tech and the lowest tech.”
The meeting, he said, lasted 20 minutes. Mr. Roth was in, and he even had a title: “Armageddon.”
Mr. Hensleigh’s new movie, “The Ice Road,” features a similar mashup of high and low tech, with one disparate group of experts coming to the aid of another. This time, instead of NASA being bailed out by oil drillers, the only hope for a group of miners trapped in a diamond mine in northern Canada is a pack of truck drivers crazy enough to drive across an ice road much too late in the season with the gear needed to save them.
Mr. Hensleigh, who both wrote and directed “The Ice Road,” says he has long wanted to make a film inspired by “The Wages of Fear” (HBO Max), Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 film about a group of truckers hired to transport nitroglycerin. He loved the way it was stripped down to the “nail-biting tension.” After watching the reality series “Ice Road Truckers” enough times, he says, he figured out how to create his own take on the idea.
“It just clicked,” he said. “The Ice Road” stars Liam Neeson and Laurence Fishburne, and begins streaming Friday on Netflix.
Streaming Notes:
•The White Stuff: Reached for comment, Joe Roth says “Armageddon” wasn’t the only movie he has named in a pitch meeting. Mr. Roth explained that when the Wayans brothers were shopping for a producer for a new project, they told him the idea—a pair of Black, male FBI agents go undercover as white women to solve a case—and he told them he had a title, but if they were going to use it, they had to work with him. “White Chicks” (Amazon) was a box-office hit.
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Mr. Roth, who now produces at Roth/Kirschenbaum Films, says a good movie can be “broken” by a bad title, but a good title can’t save a bad movie. However, he said, a solid title that connects with the key art on a movie’s poster, trailer and TV spots can give the film a better chance. A good example, he said, is the poster for “Anger Management” (HBO Max) starring Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler.
“If you saw Nicholson and Sandler nose to nose with the title ‘Anger Management,’” he says, “I think you’re coming.”
•Pilot Season: Early shows that Amazon greenlighted after taking your opinion into consideration—although how much audience feedback mattered is, um, unknown—are still streaming on Prime Video. The series include “Red Oaks” about the members and employees at a middling country club; “Alpha House,” a political comedy starring John Goodman about a group of congressmen who live together in a house in Washington, D.C.; and, of course, “Transparent” created by Joey Soloway, one of Amazon’s—and streaming’s—most celebrated series.
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