Netflix’s New Show Is Hosted by a Complete Idiot. That’s Exactly What Makes It Great.

Television Philomena Cunk is back to take on the history of film. This time, you might actually learn something. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Sam Adams? Nov 15, 20265:50 AM Netflix Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In the history of jobs, no one has ever been as bad at theirs as Philomena Cunk. In the spirit of Diane Morgan’s fictitious TV host, who has presented herself as an expert on everything from Shakespeare to the Mona Lisa, I have not fact-checked that claim, trusting that an authoritative tone is enough to establish its veracity, or at least to keep my audience from scrunching up their foreheads and lunging for their phones. Cunk began life as a character on Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker’s week-in-review series Weekly Wipe, where her ill-informed musings jostled with the pungent commentary of a blokey comedian named Barry Shitpeas. But the people demanded more Cunk, and so she spun off into a series of specials and limited series: Cunk on Britain, Cunk on Earth, Cunk on Life—you get the idea. In a now-iconic blue dress shirt and blazer, Philomena Cunk might have looked the part of a studied authority, but she sure didn’t sound it: Morgan hails from just outside Manchester, and her native accent, sometimes thickened for effect, deliberately subverts the received pronunciation once synonymous with British broadcasting. The trick is that sounding like she couldn’t find Cambridge on a map allows her to play the fool with real-life experts who have no choice but to smile uncomfortably as she asks whether it’s true that “King Arthur came a lot.” The Cunk persona allows the shows to send up the shopworn conventions of the TV documentary form, as when Philomena stands among a series of low, ancient stone walls, and intones, “It’s hard to believe I’m walking through the ruins of the first-ever city—because I’m not. That’s in Iraq, which is miles away, and fucking dangerous.” Then again, why did we ever think that simply standing near the place where something happened gives a person any special insight? The newest contribution to Philomena Cunk’s catalog of anti-knowledge is Cunk on Cinema, a six-part series that arrives on Netflix on Sunday. Cunk corners a cavalcade of movie experts, including director Michael Bay, Die Hard screenwriter Steven E. de Souza, Project Hail Mary composer Daniel Pemberton, and several prominent British film critics, as she works her way from the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph all the way up to the dawn of generative A.I. And yet there’s something a little different about this installment, which is that, try as the series might to get everything wrong, it actually ends up being a tiny bit educational. Philomena Cunk might think that the name of Hollywood’s biggest Western star was “Wayne George,” but the series, perhaps in spite of itself, traces the same path as a decently informative survey class. Turn off the sound and ignore the puzzled faces of her interview subjects, and you might as well be watching a non-parodic recap of cinema’s first century. There’s a keen irony in the fact that a series whose host is concerned she won’t understand 2001 if she hasn’t seen the first 2,000 movies also likely represents the first time many of the movies it cites have appeared on Netflix, a service whose conception of movie history otherwise peters out somewhere in the 1980s. Cunk on Cinema’s interviews are a different story. The character thrives in interaction with subjects who don’t seem like they’re on to her, duped by Morgan’s slow-witted persona into thinking she must be the one who doesn’t know what’s going on. (The historian who balks at Cunk’s insistence that the ancient Romans invented anal bleaching looks as if he can’t decide whether to storm out or lose his mind on the spot.) But considering that every film critic I know lost their mind when Philomena Cunk’s next subject was announced, it seems safe to assume that Cunk on Cinema’s participants knew exactly what they were in for. They’re pretty good at playing it straight, but that delicious bafflement is nowhere to be found. In Bay and de Souza, Cunk appears to have found genuinely unsuspecting marks, but either Hollywood types have less tolerance for bullshit or they’re simply less painfully polite. Bay corrects Cunk when she asks why directors say a C-word at the end of every take (hint: it’s not cut) but eventually seems so confused he simply doesn’t know how to proceed. “These are strange questions,” he observes. De Souza simply starts to seem angry, refusing to humor Cunk when she tries to show him the A.I. video of Buster Keaton she made on her iPhone—proof positive, as far as she’s concerned, that the Kansas-born legend spoke with a Cornish accent. (Apparently Slate’s Dana Stevens was not consulted.) At barely 90 minutes (each mini-episode is about a quarter of an hour), Cunk on Cinema runs the length of a fluffy rom-com, and yet it touches a surprisingly number of the requisite bases—any time you think, Oh, I guess they’re not doing X, it shows up a few minutes later. And for all its studied stupidity, the series doubles as a pretty good look at the history of movies. Sure, Philomena Cunk refers to Russian pioneer Sergei Eisenstein’s most influential film as “Batshit Pumpkin”—and does it while standing beneath a marquee that spells out Battleship Potemkin—but at least she gets the clip right. Comedy History Movies Netflix United Kingdom