Steve on TV: Norman Lear leaves us with a ‘Clean Slate’ to push boundaries 

Steve Murray’s monthly musings on TV in Atlanta and beyond.

Southern family ties get another sort of treatment on Prime with an original series. Set in Alabama but shot in Savannah, Clean Slate is the last series the late, great Norman Lear was attached to as one of its many executive producers before he died in 2023. 

Created by its star, Laverne Cox, Slate is a reminder that, even if Lear was pushing boundaries on TV (introducing social issues in All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons, etc.), he was doing so from inside the system. Even his best shows had to deliver their messages constrained by the sitcom format, with its canned one-liners and reliance on “colorful” character types and child actors with the sort of brassy showbiz polish that would make Mama Rose quail. 

All of those old-school elements are in place here, so fair warning for anyone who wants something more progressive in the structural framework of their comedies. The content, though, is warm and timely. 

Cox plays Desiree, returning many years later to the small town where folks once knew her as Desmond. Her transition is news to her crusty old dad, Harry (comic George Wallace). But the show’s nice surprise is that Harry does his best to welcome and adjust to his unexpected daughter. That means he, like the viewer, has to put up with Desiree’s very dated therapy-speak and stale quips like, “Where there’s a will, there’s a gay.” You won’t necessarily believe that Harry and Desiree are actual family. He barks his lines like he’s standing behind a mike, and Cox, well … let’s just say she’s a stronger role model than she is a comic actor. 

For all its limitations, Clean Slate is the sort of show we need, now more than ever. Last I checked, trans people have never threatened the United States with nuclear weapons. But while any mention of transgender history is being stripped from national documents, our president is taking meetings with Vladimir Putin. Might as well invite a muddy alligator into your bed.  

::

Prime: You’re Cordially Invited

And speaking of gators, half of Prime Video’s You’re Cordially Invited is a familiar but nicely played comedy about a Southern family wedding, white middle-class variety. The movie’s other half keeps disrupting it with sloppy slapstick, including a collapsing dock, creepy karaoke duets and a bout of, yes, muddy alligator wrestling in a hotel bed.  

Written and directed by Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Bros) and filmed in Atlanta and locations around Lake Oconee, Invited has a mildly high-concept premise that seems surefire. Planning the wedding of Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan), the daughter he’s raised on his own, Jim (Will Ferrell) books Palmetto House, the quaint lakeside inn where he married his dear, departed wife. 

By mistake, the inn double books that weekend for the wedding of the kid sister of controlling reality TV producer Margot (Reese Witherspoon, doing absolutely nothing new with her standard alpha role). Her sister Neve is played by Meredith Hagner, a ringer for the young Kate Hudson. (Playing a babydoll sociopath, she walked off with all her scenes in the Apple TV+ series Bad Monkey.)

Anyway, Jim and Margot first bump heads as they discover the booking mix-up at the inn’s front desk and argue their case to the flummoxed manager (Macon native and 30 Rock veteran Jack McBrayer). Choosing a bipartisan path, the novice wedding planners agree to share the weekend and split the venues. Bad behavior ensues. 

The film is strongest when it focuses on Margot’s family, crystallizing into a fine comedy of (Southern) manners. Leading the way, as Margot and Neve’s mother, the great Celia Weston gives a master class in the genteel art of the passive-aggressive undercut, sweetly finding fault with everything and everyone she encounters. Especially Margot. 

As third sister, Gwyneth, stand-up Leanne Morgan also nails a particular type, responding to a simple “how are you” with a litany of poor-pitiful-me-isms. Then there’s the fourth sibling, Colton (Rory Scovel), the one with all the kids whose names no one can quite remember. Though he has the least to do, Scovel delivers a nice sketch of the self-assured brother whose self-proclaimed business savvy proves to be a load of bull. Rounding out the clan, Jimmy Tatro gives good comic value as Dixon, Neve’s sculpted, good-ol’-boy fiancé. A Chippendales dancer always looking for an excuse to strip, he’s also the most level-headed member of this wedding party.

Then there’s the other half of the movie, designed to let Ferrell do some broad, overly familiar stuff. Alligators, karaoke and collapsing docks ensue. Your mileage will vary.  

While Invited plays out mainly at the lakeside venue, the script includes the occasional Atlanta reference, including one that bombs. After getting tired of being asked how Los Angeles’ headline troubles (fires, landslides, etc.) have affected her, Margot retorts, “How’s Atlanta? Have you been affected by the racism?” Maybe the tone-deaf dis of the city is because writer-director Stoller was born in the United Kingdom, raised in Miami and went to school at Harvard; there ain’t much South in his bio and it shows. The line inadvertently underscores the largely white demographic of the movie’s own cast, at least on Margot’s side. That’s balanced out a bit by Jim’s half-Asian daughter, her Black fiancé and their posse of protective POC Gen-Z besties. 

As walking brands, the two stars do what they’re supposed to do without much variation or surprise. (Witherspoon has a drunken toast scene that may remind you of her slurring, “do-you-know-who-I-am-officer?” video taken during her DUI stop in Atlanta some years ago.) Because the movie pitches Margot and Jim against each other, it also has to find a way to bring them together in honored, generic romcom fashion in the final act. Unfortunately, a Ferrell-Witherspoon pairing is like trying to mate an amiable rescue mutt with a prissy, AKC-registered Bichon Frisé. It’s possible, yes, but it ain’t pretty. 

Netflix: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Finally, and this has nothing to do with Atlanta, but I’d be remiss not to recommend the eight-episode adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The late Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez’s groundbreaking 1967 novel is the sort of book designed for that description: impossible to adapt for film. And yes, the writer’s magic realism is tricky to translate. (Exhibit A is the genuinely awful 2007 movie version of Love in the Time of Cholera.) But Solitude, made in García Márquez’s native Colombia by South American filmmakers, finds simple, stunning ways to bring the first half of the book to the screen. It’s close to perfect. 

::

Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous column here.