Tag: TV

Like every ‘80s and ‘90s kid, I grew up with Harrison Ford as the chief avatar of cool manhood. Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Blade Runner, Witness, Air Force One, et cetera. 

But admittedly, it’s been a little bittersweet watching Harrison grow old, like we’ve all got to in the end. He kept on as an action hero as long as he could, but the somewhat desultory return of a tragedy-wracked Han Solo in Star Wars sequels and a final Indiana Jones movie (which I admit I pretty much forgot about as soon as I saw it) were pretty faint flickers of that whip-cracking adventurer we all remember. By the time Ford was turning red and hulking up in a Marvel movie, I felt like it might be time for him to quietly turn down the action hero roles. He often seemed bored in these later movies. 

But now at 83 years old, Harrison Ford has surprised me with his fantastic turn as part of a sitcom ensemble of all things, in the warm ’n’ witty Apple TV series Shrinking, which has just kicked off season 3. Ford costars with the show’s co-creator Jason Segel as his therapist mentor Paul, and he’s a cranky delight. A cozy comedy/drama set in a therapists’ office, Shrinking, co-created by Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence, is one of those shows that embraces humour and sadness, often in the same scene. 

Ford’s Paul is the mentor to Segel’s fumbling younger therapist Jimmy, but he’s also battling recently diagnosed Parkinson’s disease, and entering into a late-in-life love affair with his former neurologist. Ford is braver and funnier in Shrinking than he’s been in ages, and got a well-deserved Emmy nomination for his work (he should’ve won). 

A little bit of vulnerability has always been a key part of the Ford charm – the way his Indiana Jones would wince when he got bruised and battered, the haunted charisma he brought to The Fugitive. With Shrinking, Ford is embracing his early 80s and showing us a man painfully facing his own mortality, as his body breaks down on him slowly. Dwarfed by the 6’ 4” Segel in many scenes, a smaller, wiry Ford looks his age, but if anything Shrinking has given his acting more power than it’s had in years. 

Shrinking is a show blessed with a top quality ensemble and snappy, sharp and quippy writing, from the enjoyable gawky Segel to reliable sitcom stars like Scrubs’ Christa Miller as a pushy neighbour and the great Ted McGinley, who’s been in everything from Happy Days to Married With Children and is doing his own best work in years as chill retiree dad Derek. The Daily Show’s Jessica Williams is a snarky delight as well.

Yet it’s Ford, with such a rich and storied screen history behind him, who stands out the most on Shrinking. Harrison Ford gets underrated as an actor – his sole Oscar nod was for Witness, although frankly The Fugitive, Mosquito Coast, and his still somehow underrated performance in Raiders Of The Lost Ark should’ve gotten him nominations as well. 

It’s a show that’s happy to get sappy – the main characters are all processing their own various traumas along the way – but I find its view ultimately kind of optimistic about how we can all get better, and that’s comfort food in this dark timeline the world seems to be in. 

Ford, as always, underplays with tremendous effect, knowing how to use a tiny gesture or raised eyebrow – his Parkinson’s tremors, his frustration with having to curtail his therapy career, his joy at finding a new wife and his fears over how long it will all last. It’s a tricky line to play such a character and not make it a mawkish bid for sympathy – and Shrinking sometimes does get a little too sentimental for its own good. But Ford makes Paul human – short-tempered and irritable, yet still finding acceptance with his makeshift family. And there’s no star ego here – he seamlessly meshes into the Shrinking ensemble and is a generous scene partner – his scenes with Segel’s teenage daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) are always strong. 

At 83, you wouldn’t fault Harrison Ford if he just retired to his ranch in Montana or something. Instead, this consummate professional is giving us the gift of an action hero growing old gracefully, facing whatever comes next with honesty and humour — and in the process maybe showing us his most heroic portrayal of all. 

Lately, I’ve been dreaming of the stars. 

I’ve been feverishly catching up with the four seasons to date of Apple TV’s For All Mankind, after putting it off for ages. One of the things that appeals to me about it is the insistence in this space exploration epic of dreaming big, daring big, in a way that our somehow smaller world doesn’t feel like it does any more. 

I’m a sucker for alternate histories, and For All Mankind paints a compellingly fascinating picture where the Soviets landing on the Moon before America does has a ripple effect on global history.

It’s a world where there’s no Watergate, 9/11 attack or assassination of John Lennon. Instead, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul were both killed!

It’s a world where Presidents Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart and Al Gore all end up in the mix of history with Reagan and Nixon. Oh, and there’s no public internet or social media, which actually might not be a bad thing when you think about it. 

This alternate reality also proves itself to be somewhat more progressive than the real one, although not without its speed bumps. After Russia lands a woman on the Moon, a spooked NASA assembles a crew of women astronauts to one-up their rivals, decades before women actually went into space. For All Mankind also dips into race and sexual equality – in this world, the Equal Rights Amendment passes, one of the top astronauts is a Black woman (an excellent Krys Marshall), and gay equality unspools in startlingly different ways than it has here.

The real-world President Kennedy’s famous quote – “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard” – sums up the vibe of For All Mankind, of the hopeful engineers still beavering away in real-life space programs, and in a hundred other wide-eyed speculative fictions about man in space. It shows a world where striving to do the hard thing fundamentally changes the course of history. 

Like many of us, I’m drawn to the idea of man out amongst the stars, even if in reality it seems as far away as ever. I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s terrific Mars trilogy a few years back, and recently just devoured the excellent non-fiction Space Race: The Epic Battle Between America and the Soviet Union for Dominion of Space by Deborah Cadbury, which sheds a lot of light on the early years of the space programme and particularly the terrible price Soviet citizens paid to try and stay in the game. 

There’s a lot of dark, bleak science fiction out there, of course, and there’s certainly a place for it, but at the moment, give me some optimism things might get better. Good science fiction, at its best, gives us something to dream about – as in the endearingly dorky future of Star Trek, or the colourful chaos of Guardians of the Galaxy. I like watching aliens eat people’s faces as much as anyone but also, I like the idea of boldly going where no one has gone before.

Idealism seems pretty passé in 2025, where even lofty talk of utopian futures is usually tempered with a healthy dose of talk of vengeance on your enemies and crushing dissent. In a world that feels like it’s getting a little more unhinged by the week, I like to imagine missions to Mars and cruising amongst the asteroids.  

We haven’t been to the moon since 1972, before many people today were even born, and only four men who walked on the moon are still alive. In amongst all the stunning incompetence of American politics at the moment, it looks like another mission may finally come soon, more than 50 years later — which would be something to see, wouldn’t it? 

For All Mankind isn’t a rose-coloured look at the future – its alternate history is drenched in plenty of blood and horror, terrorism and distrust, where man (spoilers ahead!) does make it to the Moon and even Mars but constantly comes up against the same conflicts that keep screwing us all up on Earth. But through it all, even at the worst moments, there is the desire to dream big, and do big, hard things. 

For All Mankind does get a bit goofy and far-fetched the further ahead into its alt-history it goes, with some of the more daring episodes approaching Star Trek levels. Some of the characters become annoyingly soap opera-ish over time. Lead actors Marshall, Joel Kinneman and Wrenn Schmidt are generally terrific, even as their characters get slathered in awkward makeup as decades pass on the show, but some of the other actors play with a broad bluntness that verges on the cartoonish. 

None of that really matters, though, when the space race kicks in and For All Mankind’s vision of a different, more adventurous world kicks in — when the doing hard things is just what’s expected. Go hard, go big, just go there.

None of us like to go to the hospital, right? I mean, I spent a few nights in one several years back over some health issues and to be honest, florescent lights and hospital gowns still give me the willies.

So it’s weird, then, that my favourite TV programme of 2025 so far is a white-knuckle ride through 15 hours or so in a heaving hospital emergency room. 

The Pitt caught me off guard, because I’m not really a hospital-TV show guy. Sure, I watched ER a fair bit back in the day, along with everyone else, but gave up somewhere before season 28 or however long it ran. I’ve seen a handful of episodes of House but never watched a single Grey’s Anatomy or Shortland Street or The Good Doctor.

Yet The Pitt is addictive, anchored by a charismatic performance by ER veteran Noah Wyle as a scruffy and exhausted attending physician at a bustling Pittsburgh trauma hospital. 

The central conceit is that The Pitt is set in one incredibly busy day at the hospital, told over a series of episodes set from 7am to 10pm. It instantly gives The Pitt a propulsive energy that means you immediately want to know what’s going to happen next and helps damp down the soap-opera sappiness that muddles many medical shows. Brought to you by many of the people behind 1990s ER, it’s dense with an impressive medical detail that never distracts from the fundamental work – saving lives. 

Hospitals are busy, overworked and understaffed places, in New Zealand and everywhere else, and in a single day The Pitt deals with accidents, traumas, overdoses, pregnancies, shootings and worse. Everyone here is having a bad day, and yet despite how dark it gets The Pitt summons up a lightness of spirit echoed by its workers – the only possible way to get through a day at the hospital. 

The Pitt feels like a microcosm of America in 2025 – broken, hurting, but still hunting for that essential decency despite unfortunate events constantly crashing our way. Without being overly preachy about it, it hits on hot-button issues like abortion, opiate abuse, gun violence, pandemic trauma and anti-vaxxers. 

Wyle, who once upon a time was the fresh-faced newbie in ER, brings years of experience being a ‘pretend doctor’ to his role, and anchors the series with his battered idealism. But there’s a lot of great acting here, including Isa Briones as a cocky intern, Katherine LaNasa as the charge nurse and Fiona Dourif as a harried resident with a troubled past. 

I’m constantly awed by people who give their lives to the medical profession, enduring hard hours and traumatic experiences. By taking a single day and showing how chaotic and important work in the ER is, The Pitt is vastly entertaining and harrowing at the same time. It’s extraordinary.