![]() Gyllenhaal speaks the thoughts of Eileen, her ambitious middle-career prostitute, with the kind of sleepy high pitch and mishmash of phonetic cliches designed to mark the character as a resident of New York's outer-borough lower class. The problem comes when she starts talking. Each slouch of the shoulders, each shuffle of the feet embodies the sagged and addled decadence of 1970s New York. In The Deuce, another current darling of the critics, Maggie Gyllenhaal offers an expert demonstration in the use of physicality to convey mood and place. But in Ozark, all we ever see is Jason Butler Harner busting a gut to convince us he's something other than a paid performer. Acting is the opposite of a high school math problem: you should never show your work. Every one of his scenes bears the strain of a great effort to emote. Whether darkly muttering, eyes closed, through a motel room blowjob or yelling "FAAAAHK!" after dragging his addict mother from her dealer's house, Harner delivers the most self-consciously actorly of bad acting jobs. ![]() Sharon Blackwood's performance as the overbearing mother of a gormless local real estate agent is equal in ridiculousness to the manner of her character's death - mid-argument with her son, she sticks her fingers into her ears, walks onto the road shouting, "La la la," then gets cleaned up by a passing garbage truck - but it's Jason Butler Harner in the role of a gay FBI officer with sociopathic tendencies who goes most entertainingly off-piste. Jason Bateman and Laura Linney decorate Ozark with their dry mastery of the actor's craft, but they're badly let down by a couple of their colleagues. ![]() But look at the recent output from the streaming services and you won't have to work hard to find actors actoring. True, this is nothing more than my opinion whether something constitutes good or bad acting is entirely a matter of personal taste. Bad acting, in short, is now a legitimate pursuit of the professional cultural elite. It enjoys both critical acclaim and mainstream popularity. No longer the preserve of amateur musicals and pornos, bad acting has come in from the margins. It's this second type of bad acting - reputable bad acting - that's leading the present flowering of the form. Thanks to our unflagging thirst for new shows, more shows, better shows, any shows, the so-called golden age of TV is dissolving into a new golden age of bad acting. Bad actors have never had it better never before have so many received so much for performing their jobs so poorly. As demand for acting grows, so do opportunities for people who are not very good at it. But it's also been good for actors - and bad actors in particular. This explosion in content has, we're often told, been a major boon for consumers. FX president John Landgraf claims we're approaching "Peak TV" - but he first made the argument two years ago. Much of this growth has been driven by Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and the other online services, which are on track to surpass the 93 series they collectively produced last year. Last year there were 455 original series on TV this year there are likely to be more than 500. ![]() The number of scripted original series on TV - across all platforms, from broadcast to cable and streaming - has nearly doubled in six years, according to FX Research, with no equalizing drop in the number of wide release feature films. The rise of the streaming giants has changed all that. ![]()
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