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In Constellation, a new conspiracy-based psychological thriller series created by Doctor Who alum Peter Harness, Noomi Rapace plays an astronaut who returns to Earth after a disaster while in orbit, only to learn that key pieces of her life are missing.
Although director Michelle MacLaren stressed that this program is “based in reality,” it does “pull on drama, thriller [and] horror.”
“The more you can get your audience to connect to the reality of it, the grounded-ness, to connect emotionally with the characters, the more we get to take you on an adventure,” she said.
To add to the fear factor: there is a bit of truth to this story.
Harness said the impetus for the story was his “being desperate to find out what happens to people after they come back from space, after they’ve seen Earth beneath them and been completely separate from anything they’ve ever known.” In doing this, he said, “I began to understand that there were these odd, little, spooky stories about what astronauts go through in space … they do hear dogs barking and sometimes they see weird things outside the capsules.”
“Obviously, that [sounds like] a sci-fi show,” he continued. “But that has spooky elements in it as well, and that leads almost naturally into a conspiracy about facts being covered up. But for me, what I think is a fairly relatable story of a parent trying to reach a child, and a child trying to reach a parent, and the kind of fault lines in that relationship.”
Constellation: Season 1 (2024) premieres Feb. 21 on Apple TV+.
Maya Rudolph and Joel Kim Booster star in Loot on Apple TV+ (Photo by Apple TV+)
The Apple TV+ comedy Loot, which is created by Parks and Recreation and Forever writers Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard, stars Maya Rudolph as the scorned ex-wife of a tech wiz (Adam Scott). The first season saw Rudolph’s Molly coming to terms with her divorce, her single life, and the massive fortune she accrued in the divorce settlement. The second season picks up after the first season’s cliffhanger: with Molly deciding how best to give away her money.
In that sense, Loot sets itself apart from other shows that skewer the rich, like the HBO shows Succession and The White Lotus.
“I think we’re the only show that explicitly says billionaires should not exist,” deadpanned Joel Kim Booster, who plays Molly’s trusted assistant Nicholas.
Yang said that this comes down to “a question of tone.”
“We want to be a hard comedy in a lot of ways,” he adds. “We want to satirize, but we also … think about how can any of this change and how does that begin? So, I think, the speech that Molly gives at the end of Season 1 is just putting it all out there … And then sort of tonally again, it’s this sort of bigger, faster, funnier, audience-friendly comedy that we really enjoy writing, and I think really suits our cast.”
(Photo by Apple TV+)
By this, he meant, that Loot is also a workplace comedy. Molly founded a charitable foundation, a fact she’d forgotten about until after she’d gone on a divorce bender. In addition to Nicholas, her workplace colleagues include foundation director Sofia Salinas (Michaela Jaé Rodriguez), Molly’s cousin Howard (Ron Funches) and the slightly square but lovable accountant Arthur (Nat Faxon).
And Hubbard said that this season will be about showing Molly’s team activating her vision.
“It’s actually one thing to say ‘I’m going to give away my fortune’ [and] it’s another thing to do it in a way that makes sense,” he said, adding that “it’s that challenge of doing this the right way. I think what’s so fun about how Maya plays Molly is that you can say that ‘I’m going to be better, and I don’t care about these things, and I don’t love some of these like trappings of wealth,’ and trying to remove them from your life is hard, you know? And that’s something we have fun with, the character of Molly.”
The creators and cast also appreciate the irony that this show airs on the streamer wing of one of the biggest, and most profitable, companies in the world.
“They let us do it!,” laughed Yang.
Loot: Season 2 (2024) premieres on Apr. 3 on Apple TV+.
In The New Look, Damages and Bloodline co-creator Todd A Kessler examines the life of French fashion designer Christian Dior (portrayed here by Ben Mendelsohn). But this isn’t just about runways and making it work. Dior lived and worked in Nazi-occupied France. He also had two important women in his life: The French fashion designer Coco Chanel (played by Juliette Binoche), a legendarily self-made business woman and covert Nazi agent, and his much younger sister, Catherine (portrayed by Maisie Williams), a French Resistance fighter.
“This is a time in history where every person who was alive was affected, and what we’re experiencing in the story is two extraordinary individuals and how they survived, the choices that they made, and then what happened after the war, or after France was liberated,” Kessler said of his historical drama, which is based on actual events. “They’re all in the same crucible, and we then follow the stories of Christian Dior and Coco Chanel.”
The show also brings up the debate of whether it’s possible to like the art and detest the artist.
“There is the work itself, and then there is the person and/or the journey, and then there is also, crucially in the context of what we’re doing, a narrative that we’re laying out,” Mendelsohn said of this debate. “I think that you can admire the work, you can be moved by the creation, and you can have a sense of that person behind it or not. It doesn’t stop the power of the creation.”
He added that personal feelings about the creator are “dependent on any number of things.”
(Photo by Apple TV+)
“We’re not trying to paint sort of a moral story here,” Mendelsohn said. “We’re just really trying to look at the circumstances and people that are trying to find their way through it and how they do it, coming from where they come from. We’re not waving a finger. And I think that’s really important to understand that we love them, we love these people, and you can have all sorts of things that you get wrong, and c’est la vie.”
And, especially for Chanel, it’s hard to ignore the impact she had not just on fashion but on women’s liberation.
“She really changed women’s behaviors and the way of seeing women,” Binoche said of Chanel. “During World War I, she got rid of the corsets, made the dresses a little shorter, cut her hair. Wearing pants was a big thing for her. She changed women’s behavior because, during the first war, women had to be the active ones because the men were at war with the Germans, and so she really took that occasion in order to really make a big movement. That’s why at the beginning of the second war, then she stopped everything. But she’s always had a sense of elegance and behavior.”
The New Look: Season 1 (2024) premieres Feb. 14 on Apple TV+.
Joel Edgerton stars in Dark Matter on Apple TV+. (Photo by Apple TV+)
Michael Douglas stars in Franklin on Apple TV+. (Photo by Apple TV+)
Jake Gyllenhaal in Presumed-Innocent on Apple TV+. (Photo by Apple TV+)
NBC/Peacock | AMC | Apple TV+ | NatGeo | FX/Hulu
