TV Talk: Loving ‘I Love That for You,’ rejecting ‘The Offer'

The spigot of new content available via cable and streaming services continues to flow this week, but consumers may start to see such gushers subside in the future after Netflix announced last week its first subscriber loss in a decade, sending the company’s stock price tumbling and taking the value of other entertainment companies that have heavily invested in streaming lower, too.

In addition, Warner Bros. Discovery announced it will shut down its CNN+ streaming service this week, one month after its debut, and the company decided to cease developing new scripted original series (re: expensive shows) for TNT and TBS.

Conventional wisdom seems to be quickly shifting to the idea that “peak TV” has finally peaked.

‘I Love That for You’

Vanessa Bayer’s most memorable character from her 2010-17 stint on “Saturday Night Live” was the perpetually awkward Jacob the bar mitzvah boy, and she leans into a similar gawky uncomfortableness in “I Love That for You” (on streaming and Showtime on demand Friday; 8:30 p.m. Sunday, Showtime).

Bayer plays Joanna Gold, who, like Bayer, grew up in Cleveland and overcame childhood leukemia.

Now an adult, Joanna works at Costco and still lives with her over-protective parents (Bess Armstrong, Matt Molloy) and has unrealistic expectations when dating. After getting dumped while claiming to be the one doing the dumping, Joanna decides to pursue her life-long dream of applying for a job as a host at a Pennsylvania- based home shopping channel.

“Who wants to live in Pennsylvania?” her mother says. “There’s so much fracking, you can’t drink the water!”

When Joanna lands the job at Special Value Network, she meets her idol, long-time host Jackie (Molly Shannon, playing a character not too far removed from her role on “The Other Two”), who warms to Joanna’s flattery and takes the new co-worker under her wing.

But Joanna soon encounters a challenge: The network’s icy CEO Patricia (scene-stealer Jenifer Lewis, “Black-ish”) insists every on-air host must have a personal story as part of their persona, which leads to complications for Joanna.

Created and written by Bayer and Jeremy Beiler (“SNL,” “Inside Amy Schumer”) and directed by Michael Showalter (“Search Party”), “I Love That for You” traffics in uncomfortable comedy that is less discomfiting than, say, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” thanks largely to how likable Bayer’s and Shannon’s characters are.

In addition to Lewis, whose Patricia has some fun interactions with her senior assistant (Matt Rogers) and receives texts from Mt. Lebanon native Mark Cuban, the series also provides a role for Paul James (so good on “Greek”) as a nice-guy production assistant who Joanna has a crush on.

In addition to exploring what it means when companies commodify and exploit employees’ personal stories — Patricia was happy to have Jackie talk about her family on the air but Patricia does not want Jackie to talk about her divorce on TV — “I Love That for You” also examines Joanna’s stunted-by- childhood-cancer inner life. Who is she beyond a cancer survivor? Does she even know of an identity outside of that?

The show approaches these themes with a deft subtlety but it’s enough to ground it and make the cringe comedy more palatable.

‘Under the Banner of Heaven’

Based on the Jon Krakauer book of the same name, this steeped-in-religious history limited series is inspired by a true 1984 story that follows a Mormon police detective, Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield), as he investigates the murder of a mother and her infant child that appears to be tied to a fundamentalist sect.

Now streaming, the seven- episode limited series was adapted for Hulu by writer-director Dustin Lance Black (“Milk”), who was raised in the LDS church. It’s somewhat rare to see popular entertainment focus on a character — Garfield’s Pyre — going through a significant crisis of faith, which helps this crime thriller stand out.

The series delves into the Lafferty family and their movement from the Mormon mainstream to a stricter, more rigid sect. When the focus is on Pyre, interrogations and the investigation, “Under the Banner of Heaven” can be a harrowing deep dive. But flashbacks that depict how tenets of the faith were rooted in the church’s history, while relevant to the characters’ motivations, leads to some plodding pacing.

‘The Offer’

Paramount+ has gone all-in on series based on existing intellectual property (“Star Trek”s galore, the “iCarly” reboot, “The Real World: Homecoming”). So one has to admire the hutzpah of IP-happy Paramount+ for finding a way to revisit “The Godfather” without making “The Godfather IV.”

Instead, Paramount+ decided to do a “Godfather”-adjacent series, “The Offer,” which is now streaming and goes behind the scenes to chronicle the effort to adapt the first “Godfather” film from the Mario Puzo (Patrick Gallo) novel. (The “Godfather” film trilogy is also on Paramount+.)

If you create a Venn diagram of fans of “The Godfather,” fans of Hollywood behind-the-scenes stories and fans of mob stories in general, I’m not sure how many people would be interested in all three — but that’s what Paramount+ appears to count on.

Unfortunately, the resulting product is frequently too on-the-nose.

If there’s any reason to watch, it’s for the performance of actor Matthew Goode as legendary Paramount executive Robert Evans. When Goode’s magnetic Evans is on screen, “The Offer” becomes compulsively watchable. But most of the story is told from the point of view of cog-in-the-machine Al Ruddy (Miles Teller), the “Hogan’s Heroes” co-creator who went on to produce “The Godfather.”

“The audience has to be moved,” Evans exclaims. “That’s how you make hits!”

Other than the scenes with Evans, there’s little to be moved by in this wan series, an offer viewers can easily refuse.

Kept/canceled

Peacock picked up a second season of “Wolf Like Me;” Freeform did the same for “Single Drunk Female.”

CBS renewed “Blue Bloods” for 2022-23, its 13th season.

Netflix canceled “Raising Dion” after two seasons.

Channel surfing

The May sweeps period runs April 28-May 25, and WPXI-TV, which once perpetually deployed contests to convince viewers to watch its newscasts, seems to be getting back into the sweeps contest game with a gift card giveaway in its newscasts (looking back at past columns, it appears WPXI hasn’t held a sweeps contest since 2005). … A new episode of Joe Wos’ “Cartoon Academy,” this time on playful pets, premieres at 8 p.m. May 5 on WQED-TV and on WQED’s YouTube channel. … WTAE-TV received three 2022 National Headliner Awards, including first place nationally among local TV stations for breaking news with its coverage of shots fired inside Ross Park Mall in May 2021.