What We Don’t Know About Woody Allen’s Amazon Show is What Makes It Interesting
A short, vague preview of Crisis in Six Scenes.
Woody Allen’s newest project is a six-episode TV show called Crisis in Six Scenes. It will be the auteur director’s first foray into the small screen. It was picked up by Amazon Prime Streaming back in January of 2015 and not much was heard about it again for a while. That has finally changed with the revelation of the release date and the first sneak peek into the mysterious project, but even now things are scant at best.
The first sneak peek into Crisis takes the ‘peek’ a little too literally. At around 1 and a half minutes, we get very little about what this show is actually going to be about. The sneak peek starts out with footage from anti-Vietnam War protests and a narration about the 1960s. The rest of the clip shows Woody Allen’s character sitting in the barbershop attempting to explain to the barber that he wants his hair cut like a picture of James Dean that he’d cut from a magazine. The barber insists that Woody Allen will never, ever, look like James Dean.
Even the description of the sneak peek video posted to YouTube by Amazon gives very little in the way of explaining what this show is going to be. The official plot description is: “Crisis in Six Scenes is a is a comedy that takes place in the 1960’s during turbulent times in the United States and a middle class suburban family is visited by a guest who turns their household completely upside down.” Not that we even see this suburban family or guest in the clip.
If we relied on the clip alone, we could safely assume that Woody Allen is the only person in this show. However, we do not have to, but the cast is still quite odd. The show stars – alongside Allen, of course – Miley Cyrus, Elaine May, John Magaro, and Rachel Brosnahan. I honestly can’t wait to see Miley Cyrus and Woody Allen working together. What a world we live in.
Regardless of whether or not this show is any good, Amazon will undoubtedly need to do damage control once it airs. With the ongoing controversy and allegations swirling around Woody Allen, he hardly seemed like a safe choice to begin with, something that the Amazon executives are doing their best to avoid acknowledging. When the head of Amazon Studios, Roy Price, was confronted with the question about keeping on a director accused of child molestation at a Television Critics Association event last summer, he called Woody Allen “one of the greatest filmmakers America has ever produced.” He ultimately dismissed the relevance of Dylan Farrow’s accusations to his company by saying: “I think you have to look at the whole picture, focus, yeah, take everything into account. Our focus is on the fact that he’s a great storyteller.”
Great storyteller or not, accusations of this sort have a way of tarnishing not only those implicated but everyone around them. One could even argue that Allen’s particular brand of humor was not made for the Netflix-and-chill world. Only time will tell how Allen has adapted to the smaller screen or whether or not his jokes will even hold any weight anymore or if people will even watch something made by him in light of these allegations.
Crisis in Six Scenes goes live on Amazon Prime Streaming on September 30th, 2016.
Related Topics: Amazon, Comedy
