Tales of the City: Coming Home (2019)
June 9, 2019 11:20 AM - Season 1, Episode 1 - Subscribe

After two decades away, Mary Ann Singleton returns to Barbary Lane for Anna Madrigal's 90th birthday party, meeting new tenants and being confronted with decisions she made long ago. The first of ten new episodes now streaming on Netflix.
posted by roger ackroyd (4 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
I didn’t watch the finale season because I got binged out but I only saw all of this show about two years ago. I read the synopsis and it seemed like it strayed from the stories about human relationships and slipped into shocking revelations just for tha hell of it.

I love these characters.

I forgot how much of the dialogue was unspoken yet so expertly communicated by the ensemble cast.

The first episode is Damn near perfect and I am forcing myself to watch one ep every other day so I don’t binge and get a glut of emotions.
posted by Faintdreams at 9:36 AM on June 10, 2019


I've read the recent books and really am appreciating the show. As a San Franciscan and fan of Tales of the City I'm very pleased.
posted by larrybob at 9:54 AM on June 10, 2019


I don't want to start off in a negative way, but I really didn't like this. The one guy from Looking is an amazing actor, but I found it really hard to like any of the other characters, and that scene inside of a Thai restaurant run by monks read very much like an East Coaster's cartoonish stereotype of the Bay Area to me. (I have thoughts on the rest of the season too, but I don't wish to spoil anyone.)
posted by whir at 9:35 PM on June 17, 2019


I guess there aren't going to be further installments on Fanfare, but overall, I'm a bit let down. I'm factoring in that the original was a seminal moment for QUILTBAGs of my generation, and I'm allowing for this to be a thing of its own in a universe disconnected from the original—the apparent retconning of the original time and the uneven age changes from the books and original three series is often jarring—but I feel like the scriptwriter was just too green for this project and tossed out good stuff (poor books-Wren in this, alas) and TV-fied Anna into something just too metafictional and hard to recognize.

While a too-young and too-jacked Mouse feels a little off-axis as a Maupin stand-in, Murray Bartlett did a great job inhabiting that character and, by the end, was entirely believable in that role to me. Page, on the other hand, perfectly combines the can't-put-a-finger-on-why off-putting quality of a young Jessica Harper with the walking-Valium-tablet torpor of a Space: 1999-era Barbara Bain. She did the same thing (for me) in Umbrella Academy, so I guess she's the go-to these days for that perfect flavor of omniglum.

It's an entirely parallel universe to the original work, or at least a major fork thereof, but that might not be horrible if the writer can mature a bit before a future installment and embody more of the soapy, breezy original character of the source material. I don't regret watching it, but if it's going to be the start of an ongoing thing, I hope some of the rough edges get sorted out.
posted by sonascope at 1:03 PM on June 28, 2019


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