“The woman with the money”: what’s wrong with the drama about the suffering billionaire

In the prime of her life, Molly Novak (SNL star and Paul Thomas Anderson’s beloved woman to Maya Rudolph) is like the heroine of the Menshov drama – after twenty years of marriage and a high-profile divorce with her husband’s betrayal, she’s convinced that life is just getting started after she’s 40. In her case, this fact is literal: breaking up with her businessman husband brings her $87 billion in split properties. Almost drowning in her pain (and money), Molly suddenly learns that she has been the owner of a large charity for several years. She is ridiculous under the taunts of her ex-husband and those around her, but she is trying with all her heart to be a real businesswoman and prove that she can do more than just throw billions to the wind.

Stories about revenge for the rich have recently become a real guilty pleasure for viewers. After all, wealthy people disconnected from reality are the main enemies, and the working class suffering from their whims are the victims of tyranny and madness. Starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes, the upcoming movie The Menu is a fresh example of the future, in which wealthy customers at a quaint restaurant on a remote island are targeted by a crazy chef. If “Woman with Money” and “Menu” are filmed, we can safely say that we will see enough similar stories in the coming years.

However, let’s jump right back to the series, which accelerated from a completely ridiculous position: hero Rudolph, in a caricature way, laments this fact with her then-husband (most recently Apple TV star + star of “Separation” Adam Scott). The pool inside a luxury yacht is somehow small and suitable for washing your dogs. It is unclear how foreign audiences will perceive this, but Russian-speaking audiences who know firsthand about private jets for dogs of the great powers should smile nervously at the moment.

The director and showrunner of the series, Alan Young, knows enough about comedies: before that, he worked on the sitcom “The Good Place”, where after death the characters are responsible for the actions committed in life. Parks and Recreation”, where they’ve been hilariously sticking around for season 7. Thus, “A Woman with Money” is a symbiosis of the moral tone of the first show and the caricature of the second.

At first glance, it seems that the writers have gone too far in absurdity. However, those who see last videoThe model that Kendall Jenner couldn’t manage to cut cucumbers for because she didn’t know how to do it would definitely recognize real people in the show’s cartoon portraits. And it’s worth paying tribute to Young, who sometimes has some irony about modern celebrities pretending to have fallen to Earth from another planet, it’s all the best for him.

But behind every joke (sometimes very successful) there is a serious footnote in the margins that speaks to common truths: being selfish is bad, so is disrupting the eco-friendly atmosphere of the office, money does not bring happiness, and it is. It’s never too late to change. This morality and deliberate simplicity of the message is what “A Woman with Money” “hangs” as it slides from a project with good potential to an advertising corporate video about the importance of values. In the middle of the road, the series is completely drowned in the moral lesson that you want to open all the windows, otherwise it would be so stuffy.

Moreover, such a dramatic medium doesn’t coexist badly with the clichés presented in the show itself: yes, there’s a lot of variety here (there’s even a trans person, MJ Rodriguez from Pose), but it’s placed in a distorted coordinate system. The cutest and for some reason forever dissatisfied hero is, of course, a gay Asian (it’s time to find the first person with this stupid “belt” and ask him for everything) and a cheerful, good-natured fool, chubby dark-skinned. In all this “diversity” there is still a lack of concise and strict Latin Americans. Although, wait and they found a place – they serve the spoiled main character 24/7.

So this “sketch” turned out to be a successful puzzle somewhere, but often not. Because it doesn’t tell the audience anything new, because a good joke stays the same as long as the ending is impossible to predict.

On June 24, a TV drama will premiere on Apple TV+ where the rich cry too but wipe their tears with a pile of hundred-dollar bills, as in the famous meme from “Welcome to Zombie Land.” socialbites.ca’s film critic Elena Zarkhina talks about how the show, which the rich get what they deserve, came about, and how this narrative is sometimes drowned in extreme moralism.



Source: Gazeta

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