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| 'It feels like a mushroom trip': this cult sci-fi comedy is a phenomenal TV treat | by Stuart Heritage May 2, 2022 | Funny, brave, breathtakingly beautiful: Undone’s second season is a mind-warping joy. Its creator explains how she wrote a time-travelling comedy about generational trauma Kate Purdy sits upright, bespectacled and sensibly dressed, in a room containing an intimidatingly vast writing desk, completely unaware of how excited I am to see her. The second season of Undone, the mind-bending mental illness sci-fi comedy drama she co-created with BoJack Horseman’s Raphael Bob-Waksberg, has just come out on Amazon Prime. A few weeks ago, I was emailed a preview screener and clicked on it out of idle curiosity. I devoured the first episode. Then the second. At some point during the third, I missed a work deadline. But I carried on gulping down the episodes, slackjawed with amazement. Because, while I liked Undone’s first season, the second is phenomenal. Every element has been honed to the point of high art. The jokes are funnier. The dramatic lurches are braver. The visuals – rotoscoped and fluid – are even more breathtaking than before. It somehow manages to be several things at once. It’s an exploration of mental health that plays out like a crime procedural. It’s a meditation on the psychic wounds left by decades of generational trauma, but it’s also a wisecracking, globetrotting romp. Almost as soon as our Zoom conversation begins, I start babbling about how quickly I gobbled the season up. Continue reading... | | | Reward System by Jem Calder review – generation Zzzz | by Holly Williams May 2, 2022 | Six interlinked stories aim to capture the uncertainty of young adulthood today with mixed results These six short stories are almost a novel, interlinked by characters who drift and reconnect with one another in the way friends do, living a big-city, post-university life. And this is Calder’s canvas: young adulthood, and a generation simultaneously bound to one another via social media and yet lost in a disconnected modern world. It comes, helpfully, with a glowing quote from that generation’s chronicler-in-chief, Sally Rooney, who calls Reward System “an exhilarating and beautiful book”. They’re not necessarily the two adjectives I find myself reaching for. Calder’s stories are impressively detailed in their fine-grain attention to the banal stuff-of-life and his characters’ inner agonies – from panics over not being able to remember if you locked a door to awkward social interactions in the workplace. But he writes with a cool, contemporary detachment rather than much heat. Continue reading... | | | | |
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