Well, we were due for a dud.
Up until now, the episodes I’ve been reviewing from this second Twilight Zone season have been, at minimum, pretty solid… which is unexpected, given what a mixed bag season one was. So it’s almost reassuring in a way that “Ovation” is as blah as it is. The mediocrity provides a necessary contrast, reaffirming that the likes of “Downtime” and “The Who Of You” were actually good.
Let’s dispense quickly with the best parts of “Ovation”—namely Jurnee Smollett and Tawny Newsome, two versatile actresses who make everything they’re in better, even when the material’s not so great.
Smollett here plays Jasmine, a struggling busker who seems to have caught a lucky break when a mega-star pop singer named Fiji (Sky Ferreira) hears her sing out on the street and gives her a lucky medallion. Fiji then promptly steps in front of a bus, and all the adulation she’d been receiving—and apparently hating—transfers almost immediately to Jasmine, who becomes an overnight sensation after she’s invited to compete on an American Idol-like show called Ovation. The medallion seems to compel anyone in her vicinity to applaud and cheer everything she does—sometimes so loudly that no one can hear when she actually misses notes and forgets the words to her songs.
Newsome plays Jasmine’s older sister Zara, a successful medical professional who thinks Jasmine has been wasting her life chasing her musical dreams. Zara initially doesn’t even seem that impressed when her sister becomes a star on TV… though we find out later that Zara’s indifference may just be a passive-aggressive form of jealousy. When Jasmine gets sick of being idolized—even quicker than Fiji did, apparently—she gives the lucky medallion to Zara, who uses it herself to transform into the next big thing, Mynx.
There are some strong moments scattered throughout “Ovation.” The episode gets off to an effectively unsettling start when a fashion photographer tells Fiji. “You are a beautiful octopus, you are about to feed on your prey… Imagine who you’re about to devour.” (Cut to: Jasmine, about to receive a gift that’s going to ruin her life.) There’s also a wonderfully disturbing image later, when Jasmine rushes to Zara’s hospital and a comatose patient in the middle of open heart surgery rises and starts clapping for her.
“Ovation” was directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, who made the cult films A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and The Bad Batch, and who has also directed episodes of Legion, Castle Rock, and, yes, The Twilight Zone. Amirpour takes some unusual chances with camera angles and framing, often pitching everything slightly askew or bunching characters into parts of the frame where TV characters rarely dwell (except maybe in Mr. Robot and Atlanta). Those chances don’t always pay off, but they are signs of life in an episode that otherwise only really has its main cast going for it.
Yet even with an unexpected final ten minutes that sees Jasmine first retreat from public life and then become a violent stalker of Mynx—whom she stabs to death, unaware she’s killing her sister—too much about “Ovation” is drearily predictable. The kind of fun “how would this actually work?” details—the ones evident in the earlier episodes this season, which show the writers, cast, and crew really thinking through their premise—are largely absent.
There’s a little bit here about the money that comes with fame, and a little bit about the expectation that Jasmine look sparkly and sexy whenever she’s in the public eye. But even with over 40 minutes of screen-time to burn, the writers don’t seem to have thought enough about the particular circumstances of Jasmine’s rise and fall, beyond repeatedly painting “being a celebrity is a shallow and unrewarding endeavor” in a broad brush. The whole arc of the episode is just: A nobody becomes famous due to some strange magic, then discovers fame sucks.
Cue Jordan Peele, whose outro this week is just a narration-free slow clap. I can’t decide if that’s a clever way to end “Ovation” or just a tacit admission that there’s just not much to say about this one.
Stray observations
- The easter egg clue in the press kit for this episode is a simple one: “For one penny, they will be able to look into the future.” I didn’t even need to Google that line to know it’s from “Nick Of Time,” a Twilight Zone episode that always creeps me the hell out when it pops up on MeTV. It’s thematically similar to “Ovation” too, in that it’s about people in thrall to an object—a cheap novelty fortune-telling machine in the older episode’s case—that seems to be determining their fate.
- Thomas Lennon plays the host of Ovation, and sports a mustache that makes him look a little like Paul F. Tompkins. Later, Tompkins himself appears, playing a talk show host. I wish I could say there was some reason why two comic actors who look so much alike are playing different roles in this episode, but I’m stumped. It’s just kind of randomly confounding.
- Next up: “Among The Untrodden.”
45 Comments
I have no doubt that a life in the public eye comes with it’s own unique challenges and miseries that those anonymous nobodies outside looking enviously in are ill-equipped to fully appreciate unless they experience it firsthand. But that said, as one of those anonymous nobodies, allow me to just say this:Hollywood, we get it. Fame sucks. So either take those millions you get overpaid in addition to fame and go do something else, or suck it up and change the record, because frankly, you’re just coming off as self-pitying at this point.
Aww man, Hollywood made me realize I’ll never be self-actualized if I have no worries about money or sex ever again…I guess I’ll go back to feeding my child paint chipsI bet those celebrities really envy me, the common man!
There ARE points that could make a compelling show and it sounds like the last ten minutes gets closer, like what makes the drive for fame curdle into insane possessive and eventually murderous jealousy? What causes people to seek this out when it plays out so poorly for so many? Stuff like that.Doesn’t sound like the episode hit those. I’d hazard the episode would have been more interesting if the person receiving the medallion had literally zero talent or desire. It might have pushed it over into the “comedic episode” roster, but having someone with zero interest in the process and zero ability to actually perform the job could’ve made for a more insightful show.Of course, it’d probably end up looking like this, but hey:
What’s always interesting to me is whenever you listen to anyone in the industry talk about the pitfalls of being an actor/singer, it almost always sounds like the studio politics are the absolute worst part, yet that’s never ever explored. You could do a really interesting Josef K/The Trial thing with an artist up against a faceless court of studio heads.
These anti-Hollywood celebrities right wing rants are more tiring than celebrities complaining.
Anti-celebrity I’ll cheerfully concede, but I’m really struggling to see how you got anything “right-wing” out of anything I said, unless you for some reason think that criticising anything to do with Hollywood is in and of itself a fundamentally conservative thing to do or something.
Yes.
Well, okay. You do you, I guess.
I’ve said for a long time that, for a proper tale on how celebrity and power corrupts your soul, you should read the life of Roman emperor Tiberius by Suetonius. Tiberius seems to be all right at the beginning of his reign, then he gradually turns into a creep, just because he has absolute power and can do whatever he wants. He can make any of his fantasies real without ever facing any consequence. And that makes him a monster, who kills people out of boredom just to see what happens next.For many, being famous results in some similar arrested development. You want something? You get it immediately, without ever paying, a dozen times a day, and you take it for granted. You’re a guy and you find the girl dancing a few feet away from you at the club attractive? Just stare at her, and she will most likely come at you. And it’s when she’s not interested in you that you find it strange and unfair, and you can turn violent, because you get everything else in your life on a silver platter.Sure, a few people are disappointed when they’re ultimately celebrated by others just because of their fame rather than because of their actual achievements, like Jasmine in the episode, but it’s the way your desires get magically fulfilled that seems the most soul-crushing part. And it gets even worse when the fulfillment doesn’t work anymore. These two aspects were naturally much developed by Rod Serling in the original show, so it’s especially disappointing to see the writers hammer some point that was addressed much better 60 years ago.
It took me awhile to realize the episode was NOT called “Ovulation.”
The title could have been a rather obscure dig at the people who follow the famous, as “ovine” is the adjective that means “related to sheep”
this show is a waste of videotape
I have this mental image of the producers instructing the writer’s room ‘Make the story more ham-fisted. We’re writing for an American audience so nuance and subtlety won’t work!’
That’s generally been this show’s mantra from the start, though. I’ve yet to see an episode where I haven’t rolled my eyes at least 80 times.
Seeing how everyone thinks this episode is about the clapped celebrities and not the celebrity clappers, I’d say they were too subtle.
This was easily the worst of the bunch. Slack AND obvious, and unlike the Peele-written “Downtime”, the episode doesn’t lean into its absurdity to create an off-kilter vibe. There’s no element of humor – even in the “tense” driving scene, where the truck is veering all over the road and the heroine is careening around the cabin while plaintive singer-songwriter music is blasting, fails to be funny OR suspenseful. It’s just leaden all the way through. At no point is it surprising or effective. Did anyone not see the ending coming from the second she gave away the coin?I’m guessing nobody’s behind the wheel of these scripts, someone really should have pointed out that “Smollett becomes agitated while reading a magazine as the suspenseful music swells for a good 30 seconds” might not actually work in practice. Or in theory!I was really down on this season but the next couple I’ve seen have been strong, some have been actually scary!
Also it’s apparent they have a lot of cash to blow on set design, but having your professional busker (??) live in the ultramodern apartment from About A Boy is… a choice, even when she’s living with family. A real problem with this episode is the lack of stakes – there’s not even a sense, really, that Jasmine knows exactly what she wants before she gets what she doesn’t want. We don’t see her being demeaned for her talent, or that she’s talented but can’t catch a break, before her talent becomes irrelevant to her success – her sister says it’s beneath her but in a passive-aggressive way, and that’s about it. And she’s clearly living comfortably before.So what does she gain when she gains fame? What does it mean to her to be famous? What dream is curdling here? I have no real idea, and when she can’t give up the coin the only thing I can think of is that the thing itself is exerting power over her, which is not interesting.I’ll give them this – the cold open, after the photo shoot and before the premise becomes thuddingly obvious, is the only point at which the episode is truly unsettling, because it’s the only time it doesn’t draw attention to what’s happening. Fiji walks to the makeup chair, and the camera is centered on her while every single person on the shoot follows her there, which is kind of odd, and you get to realize that the clapping isn’t stopping. That’s weird! That’s effective! Why build an episode of TV around something you can only effectively use once, in the first 5 minutes of your 40-something minute runtime?
The opening was very nice, but a cursed-object story should really loop back on itself. At the end of the episode the audience should be saying “Ah, that’s what drove Fiji to suicide.” But here it’s like “Wait, why didn’t Fiji just go live in the woods for awhile first?”
Jasmine’s interactions with her sister were so over-the-top that I thought the deal would be that the public would love her, but that her loved-ones would hate her. And those are decent stakes (although too similar to the Comedian).I’d love to know what story the writers actually thought they were telling here.
I thought it was weird how we were introduced to the sister basically slamming her to their dad (although, we didn’t know it was her sister, so I thought it was a stepmother, especially after the dad said, “You’re not her mother” or something like that.) Then, next time we see them together, the sister is super supportive. That was a bit of whiplash.
I also found it strange how quickly it got to her. I mean, she won the show, complained a little about how she messed up but they still applauded for her, apparently made a record that was still brand new when she got fed up. I mean, she was early enough into it that she thought she could go for a run anonymously. She wasn’t really even hounded all that much. (Although, I did think it was weird in a good way how all her friends just sent her clapping hands texts.)
Paul F Tompkins definitely deserves better
I haven’t watched this, but surely that hospital patient was sedated rather than comatose?Also, I learned the other day that Jurnee Smollett’s siblings are named Jojo, Jazz, Jussie, Jake, and Jocqui, and I kinda want to punch her parents.
Yes, sedated. They even showed the doctors operating on him at the beginning of the scene. He also didn’t get up. He just raised his hands in the air and started clapping.
Black mirror did this theme better.
I was thinking exactly the same thing about Tom Lennon and Paul F Tompkins!
Woof.That came waaaay too soon after the Comedian. And while Noel didn’t like the Comedian, I thought it was at least decently spooky morality play (and in retrospect was one of the stronger episodes of the very weak first season).I guess that hollywood-folk kindof only know about hollywood? So they’re bound to write about a lot of aspiring standup comics, aspiring actors, aspiring singers, etc. But we really didn’t need to go through this all again, but with even less of a story.
“she gives the lucky medallion to Zara, who uses it herself to transform into the next big thing, Mynx.”
Didn’t she give it to her to throw in the river, and we were convinced that she did throw it in the river (or at least I was)?“You are a beautiful octopus, you are about to feed on your prey… Imagine who you’re about to devour.”Kind of a setup for one of the other new episodes perhaps?
We don’t see it leave Zara’s hand, just her arm swinging in the background. Jasmine obscures the shot in the foreground.Frankly, when Jasmine said “I can’t do it, you do it” I immediately expected the ending we got.
Yes. Another obvious thing missed. Jasmine even says, “I can’t do it, you do it” or something very similar.
I do enjoy that this season they’re willing to go with shorter episodes and not always relying on a stinger. But, yeah, this was the weakest link of what I’ve watched so far. I have a hard time believing any musician who busted their ass that long for their art would be satisfied with absolutely empty fame. It would be one thing if it was just amplifying the response to her talent but when they have people applauding even when she’s not playing I can’t imagine that actually would be addictive.
The unconscious man clapping mid-surgery was my “oh, for fuck’s sake” moment. The episode had been teetering on the brink of trash for me, and that shoved it unceremoniously over.
That said, I’m glad it was the only stinker of the first half of the season.
Thank you!! I am happy to know I wasn’t the only one who had an issue with that scene. Almost turned it off at that point.
Complete opposite reaction. The operated-upon-man suddenly clapping even while still unconscious was the show being over the top and knowing it, and it worked for me. I legitimately laughed out loud at it.
I was really hoping that the twist in this episode was going to be that Fiji really was a beautiful octopus, somehow transformed into a human being, and she had to find her way back to the aquarium
Ovation was horrible. And incredibly annoying, I mean seriously. The first episode was the 5 star episode for me. I can relate to that guy lol Among the Untrodden was great as well. Still have a few more to go.
Thomas Lennon plays the host of Ovation, and sports a mustache that makes him look a little like Paul F. Tompkins. I saw PFT on the opening credits and I thought: “damn, he looks different. Did he lose weight?”
Nope, just Tom Lennon holding onto his Reno 911 mustache / hair dye
Paul F. Tompkins and Tawny Newsome were part of the main cast for Bajillion Dollar Propertie$, and this cast still regularly gets together for some live improv performances even if the TV show itself was canceled. It was also produced by Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, who often guested as rival real estate agents Serge and Gio.
This was a hilarious show, Amazon is selling it now (it was very hard to get as the “network” it was on went under or something. It was too good for Seeso! Probably, I’ve never heard of or seen anything else by them.
This is definitely the worst of the season. For one thing, having everything revolve around an American Idol style show is 15 years too late to be relevant. But the ending was so telegraphed it was 10 minutes of marking time until it was revealed the sister was Mynx. Not that it didn’t make any sense that a cover story about the singer had no pictures of her. There’s nothing worse than belaboring a twist ending that is both obvious and boring.
Worst episode so far. Another be careful what you wish for story set in American Idol times.
The most interesting thing about this episode was Jordan picking up the coin and the lack of his outro. Obviously, fame is something that has sunk its teeth into Jordan. Did he signal that even he would have a tough time letting fame go?
“she gives the lucky medallion to Zara, who uses it herself to transform into the next big thing, Mynx.”Uh, no. She gives the medallion to Zara, but not to keep. She can’t throw it into the water so Zara says that she will do it, so she gives it to Zara for her to throw. It looks like she does, but based on the ending, she obviously keeps it.
The two best parts of this episode were (1) the patient undergoing open-heart surgery applauding along with everyone else (while still unconscious), and (2) Peele appearing for his normal end-of-episode narration, but remaining silent as he picks up the coin, pockets it, and slips away. I laughed at both of these moments, but other than that …It is painfully clear once Jasmine is isolated in the cabin that there’s another shoe to drop, and once we see the “Mynx” headline it’s painfully obviously that Mynx is the sister. Why Jasmine doesn’t suspect this, who knows? Zara was the one who “threw” the medallion away. Also, in all the time she’s in her self-isolation, she doesn’t contact her sister or father (or anyone she knows) who tells her “Oh, by the way, Zara is a big singer now”?Also, why does she want to kill Minx? She misses being a star at this point, but as far as she knows Mynx didn’t take her fame away. She got rid of the medallion and that’s what caused her to lose her fame. From what I saw, she never sees any pictures of Mynx in the magazine wearing the medallion, so it’s not like she thinks Mynx stole the medallion (and her fame). She just decides to kill a random famous singer for … reasons.
Until we got the clip for the Ovation show where Jasmine described her childhood, I thought Zara was her mother and not her sister. Maybe I missed a word in Zara’s conversation with their father (which Jasmine overhears when she first enters her home), or in the conversation in the kitchen between Zara and Jasmine, but I didn’t hear anything that indicated they were sisters. The conversation between Zara and the father that Jasmine overhears is very much like a couple discussing their adult child that is living with them, not one sister talking about her sister to their father.