Crisis In Six Scenes: A Spoiler-Free Look At Woody Allen’s TV Series

This review originally appeared on Den of Geek UK.

In the world of chichi parties and exclusive product launches, there’s a buoyant market in celebrity personal appearances. A host will pay a star roughly the annual salary of your average Latin American dictator to turn up at their event and lend it the patina of glamor. It doesn’t matter what said celebrity does while they’re at the party, the key thing is that they’re seen to be there. So what if Beyoncé spends the entire contracted time checking her phone? They got Beyoncé.

That’s the sense coming from Woody Allen’s Amazon deal. As Allen tells it, the multinational giant “badgered and badgered [him] for two years, sweetening the pot until [he] could not afford to turn it down”. Sign the deal and he’d be granted free choice of series and episode length, period and setting, cast and content. In other words, it didn't matter what Woody Allen did with his first TV series, the key thing is that he was seen to be doing it at Amazon.

Allen evidently wasn’t sought for transferred glamor but transferred prestige. Whatever the last two decades have put his reputation through, his household name is synonymous with highbrow comedy. And in the world of too-much-TV, that’s the hat Amazon has picked out for itself to wear.

With Netflix plugged into the Marvel and nostalgic revivals machine, Amazon is carving out an alternative niche as the home of intellectual adult comedy and ambitious drama. Transparent and Mozart In The Junglehave brought it critical acclaim and awards by the barrowful. Witty middle-class neuroses are now to Amazon original programming what gritty New York superheroes are to its streaming rival.

Put it this way, Netflix signed Adam Sandler. Amazon signed Woody Allen. He’s a prestige buy that feels like a good fit with the identity the streaming service is forging itself.

All of which leads us to the conclusion that it doesn’t much matter to Amazon if Allen’s first TV series is any good or not. The deal paid for itself the moment the first press release went out and his comedy standing rubbed off on the brand. Nobody here was trying to launch a multi-season show or kick start a screen-writing career. Critically sink or swim, it’s all the same. The success or otherwise of Crisis In Six Scenes is immaterial.  

Unless, of course, you’re a viewer looking for a fun way to spend a couple of hours watching TV, in which case you’ll want to know that there are certainly better options out there. (The aforementioned Transparent is one, to pick a truly great show from the same stable.)

Crisis In Six Scenes is missable to anyone who isn’t a Woody Allen completist. Comically mild and only intermittently funny, it’s an unadventurous rehash of familiar themes, characters and one-liners.

Set in 1960s New York, Crisis In Six Scenes is about the havoc young political revolutionary "Lenny" wreaks on the comfortable if neurotic life of novelist Sidney Munsinger. Twenty-three year old Miley Cyrus plays the former, with eighty year old Woody Allen playing the latter. To everyone’s great relief, Lenny and Sid’s relationship is an entirely platonic, hostile one.

The repeated gag here is the clash between revolutionary ideologies—Mao, Marx, Guevara—and the bourgeoisie. Sidney’s marriage counsellor wife Kay (comedy veteran Elaine May and hands-down the best thing in the show) has her head turned by Lenny’s ideas and in turn passes them on to the members of her chintzy, pastel book group. There’s comedy in a gaggle of wealthy elderly ladies being turned on to insurgent politics but not quite as much as Allen seem to think.

Kay’s brief marriage counselling sessions with clients are one highlight, but even that spark of humour is stamped out by overuse in the show’s farcical final episode.

The script is jagged with witty one-liners and Allen’s familiar patter. There are some rare, great lines, and the best of them are spoken between Allen and May, two almost unrivalled comic writer-performers it has to be said. It's very occasionally bubbling and bright, but on the whole, too many of the jokes are so mild they’re not quite worth the trouble of laughing at.

Scenes between Cyrus’ character and John Magaro’s Alan Brockman, the straight-laced, rich student lodging with the Munsingers as a favour to his WASP parents, are entirely laugh-free. The dialogue, which is as amusing as you’d expect to find two twenty-somethings mooning over Chairman Mao and swapping their favourite Frantz Fanon quotes, gives neither of them much of a chance.

Without Allen’s whining, nervous nebbish as her foil (she keeps eating his Fig Newtons. He’s incensed about it), Lenny is a fairly insufferable creation. Her talk of corporate America’s hypocrisy always feels as though it’s chugging towards modern-day relevancy but that train of thought never quite seems to pull into the station.   

More resonant is the portrait of Sidney as an unfulfilled writer. A former ad man whose arty novels have underperformed (“didn’t your publisher go out of business?”), even at eighty "S.J. Munsinger" still dreams of literary success. Specifically, he wants to be the next J.D. Salinger.

Instead though, in a detail that seems less a cheerful, self-referential poke and more revealing of Allen’s impatience with this whole enterprise, Sid finds himself facing the indignity of indignities: writing a television sitcom.

Crisis In Six Scenes is available now on Amazon Video.