It’s not entirely clear why Woody Allen’s new show for Amazon Studios is called Crisis In Six Scenes. Although there are six episodes, each one contains multiple scenes taking place in different settings. And though I spent the best part of an hour trying to prove that each individual episode consisted of six scenes, reaching that number required some very creative accounting.
Allen himself stars as stoic military general Brad Jones. Just kidding: he plays a neurotic novelist-turned-TV writer named Sidney J Munsinger. Together with his wife Kay, a marriage counsellor, Sidney lives a quiet life in 1960s upstate New York, while the social revolution rages on outside.
Two worlds collide with the arrival of Miley Cyrus’s radicalised flower child Lennie, on the run from the law after shooting a prison guard. Her embrace of violent direct action sits in opposition to Sidney’s preference for passive intellectual debate, but any ideological wrangling takes a back seat to the show’s all-consuming desire to deliver the kind of gentle, good-natured humour that’s sure to play well in various international territories.
After a decade of poorly received contemporary-set projects, Allen has, of late, made a habit of retreating into the past, with films such as Café Society concealing his inability to write convincingly about the modern world. Allen’s feel for the 60s lends Crisis In Six Scenes verisimilitude far in excess of his efforts to document the 21st century, not to mention a great running joke in which Sidney’s hairstyle is compared to those of mid-century character actors such as Percy Helton and Franklin Pangborn, obscure then and entirely forgotten now.
Unfortunately, if Allen’s ability to write a decent one-liner has endured into his 80s, his ability to deliver them has not. Tasked with breathing life into his own words, he lapses into the shuffly mannerisms of a theatrical grandparent telling jokes over Christmas dinner, or an octogenarian director being asked whether he’s past his prime.
More damning is the show’s failure to engage with the medium in which it exists. Although its title suggests a playful exploration of TV’s narrative quirks, Allen’s first new writing for television in half a century feels more like a drip-fed feature film, in which 90 minutes of ideas are needlessly (and clumsily) spread across six half-hours. Indeed, the closest Allen has come to explaining the title is to say he wanted to make “a movie in six parts”. He’d have been better off making Crisis In One Sitting.
- Crisis in Six Scenes starts on Amazon Prime on 30 September
