In the olden days, the Academy Awards were followed by a rush to movie theaters.
And now? We’ll just amble to our living rooms, where most things are streaming.
Yes, the key Oscar-winners are there. Peacock has “Oppenheimer” and “The Holdovers,” Hulu has “Poor Thiings” (and adds “Anatomy of a Fall” on March 22), Max has “Barbie,” Amazon Prime and MGM+ have “American Fiction,” Netflix has the delightful winner for best live-action short, “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.”
But even without the Oscar films, this is a packed weekend for streamers. Three music-based films arrive Thursday – Taylor Swft’s concert film on Disney+, a Brian Jones/Rolling Stones documentary on Hulu and the “Girls5Eva” series on Netflix. They’re joined by two seven-part mini-series – “Apples Never Fall,” Thursday on Peacock, and “Manhunt” (shown here), Friday on Apple TV+. Let’s look at those two:
“MANHUNT”
Fresh from playing a hero in “Masters of the Air,” Anthony Boyle (shown here) hit the opposite end of the moral universe. To try to understand John Wilkes Booth, he dug into his letters.
“At 15, he’s rambunctious,” he told the Television Critics Association. “He’s going to fairs; he’s mooning people. He was a bit of a wayward lad.”
At 19, his writing turned angry or violent. “By the time he’s 25, he’s writing, ‘The Black man is enslaving the White man in America.’ You’ve got this descent into madness.”
At 26, he killed Abraham Lincoln and fled. His injured leg was patched up by Dr. Samuel Mudd, a controversial figure in history.
Matt Walsh, who plays him, said there were indications that Mudd shared the “tremendous sympathy for the South” that was found in parts of Maryland.
He also found letters in which Mudd tried to cancel a subscription to a Christian magazine that had changed its position and opposed slavery. “He kept trying to cancel it and they kept sending it to him, which was slightly comic.”
But the heart of the story is Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who led a fierce (and successful) search for Booth. Tobias Menzies plays him, with one concession: “The photographs we have of Stanton are very whiskery …. We took some license with that.”
“APPLES NEVER FALL”
There were no such problems here with re-creating history: “Apples” is fiction (based on a novel by “Big Little Lies” writer Liane Moriarty) about a tennis family and the secrets revealed after the matriarch (Annette Bening) vanishes.
There were no letters to read, but lots of tennis to learn from a coach.
Some took to it. Jake Lacy told the TCA he and the coach “continued playing on weekends,. It was a blast.”
Alison Brie said she had no such impulse. “Never figured it out. They said, ‘You know what, you don’t play very much in the show and we can put a ball in digitally. Why don’t you just learn choreography?’”