#Apocalypse starz series#
#Apocalypse starz tv#

Aside from acting class (led by a predictably duplicitous acting teacher played by Mary Lynn Rajskub), Carly tries to please her boring actor-boyfriend, Jethro (Desmond Chiam), who’s so focused on his career he prefers having sex in a position that lets him keep an eye on his phone. While Uly isn’t lusting after Gabriel (Tyler Posey), his latest cyber hookup that’s turned into a full-blown romantic pursuit, he’s chatting with Carly (Kelli Berglund), an aspiring actress who makes extra money by going on webcams for horny paying customers. Roxane Mesquida in “Now Apocalypse” Katrina Marcinowski Whether it’s just to “avoid boredom” or “feel alive,” Uly follows his whims wherever they take him - often toward semi-anonymous sex. Narrating via a video diary he’s making, Uly knows his “gigantic adventures” are going to get him in trouble one day, but he can’t help himself. The premiere, “The Beginning of the End,” starts with Ulysses (Avan Jogia), commonly called Uly, having sex with a married guy and escaping just before the hubby comes home. That doesn’t mean there’s a lack of brash, strange moments.

#Apocalypse starz series#

Plagued by the same problem facing many feature film writers who decide to try their hand at TV, the familiar 10-episode Starz series is so focused on delaying whatever weird apocalyptic payoff it’s hiding that the early episodes never introduce an enticing, enlightening, or all that enjoyable story at all. In fact, through the first three episodes, an “inciting incident” is entirely absent.

#Apocalypse starz tv#

on Starz.For a TV series promising immediate action in its title, Gregg Araki’s “ Now Apocalypse” sure takes its sweet time getting to the apocalypse. “Now Apocalypse” (30 minutes) premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. Viewers who aren’t feeling the creator’s particular groove can’t be blamed for checking out of a show that so intentionally allows style to prevail over substance, and often forgets to check in with the apocalypse it has promised in its title. Perhaps Araki is saving the really trippy stuff (the rise of the lizard creatures, maybe) for “Now Apocalypse’s” back half, where one hopes that the pace will pick up. During their furtive first encounter, Ulysses experiences something more intense than an orgasm the show suggests nothing short of a cosmic unleashing.Īraki’s libertines are fun to follow as they romp and revolve, but what happens to them seems a little too shallow, too prolonged and too low-stakes. Using a dating site and a peppering of text messages, Ulysses pursues a mysterious but unreliable beauty named Gabriel (“Teen Wolf’s” Tyler Posey). They’re all trapped in an excruciatingly cool Spotify playlist the only way out, it seems, is through near-constant sex. Much of the first half of the story is squandered on the basic banter of beautiful people, shot through Araki’s Skittle-colored visual style and hipster sensibilities. His longtime roommate Ford (“Awkward’s” Beau Mirchoff) is a gym hunk deep in puppy love with a frosty, Frenchy astrobiological theorist named Severine (Roxane Mesquida), who is involved with a top-secret project at a lab. Ulysses’s best friend Carly (Kelli Berglund) thinks he may be taking too many puffs off his cannabis pen she’s an underemployed actress who gets by performing sex acts on her laptop for pervy customers.

Or maybe it’s the sort of thing John Waters would be making if he were young again.Īt 59, Araki’s no spring chicken, but he does stick to the vision he set out with in the 1990s, when his provocative indie films (“The Living End,” “The Doom Generation”) were hailed as examples of a “new queer cinema” movement that looked beyond tortured coming-out dramas and instead presented sex-positive stories about characters who don’t necessarily stick to their places on the orientation spectrum. Weird as it wants to be (and therefore tonally inconsistent), the show is what you might get if a sex columnist were forced to write the screenplay for a cheap sci-fi flick.

At least, that’s what I gather from the five episodes (out of 10) made available for review.

It’s a half-hour mash-up of millennial relationship shenanigans interrupted by the suggestion that the world will soon be overrun by libidinous lizard monsters who find humans good, giving and game. The modern manners of sexual fluidity get a rigorous workout in filmmaker Gregg Araki’s series “Now Apocalypse,” premiering Sunday on Starz.