Jason Momoa was born in Honolulu and is of Native Hawaiian descent. For him, the success of Chief of War, a new historical drama series on Apple TV+, is very important. Elsewhere on streaming platforms, Leanne, a new comedy from Netflix, has caught our eye.
Chief of War (Apple TV+)
Momoa wrote and directed this ambitious historical drama, and he plays the main role.
To him, this is a high-stakes project. Momoa himself was born in Hawaii and has recently admitted that he fears backlash from his Native Hawaiian community if the series is poorly received.
In the show, viewers are taken to the late 1700s and early 1800s when a noble warrior, Ka’iana, tried to unite the warring kingdoms of the Hawaiian islands so that they faced the imminent threat of colonization together.
The Polynesians are shown a great deal of respect, it seems. The first two episodes were filmed entirely in the critically endangered ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i language.
Leanne (Netflix)
Southern comedian Leanne Morgan has spent the last 25 years in standup and was lately simply raising her kids in Tennessee. Now, though, she has her own Netflix sitcom.
The show is actually based on Morgan’s hit Netflix special, I’m Every Woman. It is about picking up the pieces of your life after your husband of 33 years leaves you. Yup, you’re a grandma, and you’re back in the dating pool.
“This is something I’ve dreamed of since I was a little girl, and it was just as exciting as I imagined,” Morgan told Netflix about adapting her stand-up comedy into a series.
“Learning a new medium was definitely a challenge – memorizing new scripts every week was totally new for me – but I loved it.
My Oxford Year (Netflix)
This romantic movie has been anticipated by many genre lovers and certainly looks like it could become a hit for Netflix. That’s also because the film is based on a popular novel of the same name.
The flick stars Sofia Carson as Anna De La Vega, an American freshly arrived at Oxford University. Almost immediately, she meets Jamie (Corey Mylchreest), and they begin a fun fest.
But Anna plans on returning to New York, and Jamie doesn't plan on going with her. As that fateful day of departure approaches, things start to get messy.
Marc Maron: Panicked (HBO Max)
Details about the content of the special are actually lacking but HBO describes the show saying “comedian and podcaster Marc Maron offers up his nuanced perspective on our increasingly uncertain world.”
That the world definitely is. In the press release, Maron raves about the upcoming production and says, “HBO gets me.”
We’ll see whether the audience does, too.
Maron even managed to obtain permission to use Taylor Swift's track Bigger Than the Whole Sky in the special. But he also calls Adolf Hitler a “d**k” and says that average Americans have been “annoyed into fascism.”
Naming the Dead (Hulu/Disney+)
Now that is something we’re extremely impatient to see. A new investigative series from National Geographic dives deep into the unfortunate fact that across the US, more than 50,000 bodies remain unidentified – unmourned and unnamed.
The six-part series follows the groundbreaking work of the DNA Doe Project, a trailblazing nonprofit that uses genetic genealogy to help law enforcement crack the country’s most confounding cold cases.
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