Glowing recommendations.
I finished watching Netflix’s Sense8 this week and my brain can’t let go of it. Combines many of the things you loved and a few of the things you grew to hate about both Lost and Heroes, and then filters them through the intellectual, theological, and humanistic questions that drive the best work of co-creators The Wachowskis (The Matrix Trilogy) and J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5), with exciting stylistic and musical assistance from Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run).
I admire its ambition and its moments of excess. I admire the logistical acumen that it takes to film this sort of story in nine different locations worldwide. I admire that it doesn’t just push envelopes, but opens them. It hits buttons not only in my action-movie soul, but my crime-story soul, my conspiracy-thriller soul, my Chicago soul, my Indian soul, my fascination with the myriad of cultures that exist in our vast humanity. It is bold and messy sci-fi, often willing to forgo logical sense in favor of complicated emotional problems, the sort of television that occasionally sucker punches you with a memory you realize you’ve never heard somebody speak aloud.
And in particular, I feel privileged to meet a character like Nomi Marks, a transgender woman played with incredible pathos, steel, and charisma by transgender actress Jamie Clayton, who is so clearly the conduit through which Lana Wachowski is finally sharing parts of an autobiography she has not prior to now been ready to tell.
Get to it, post-haste.
Creative Control 