What to Watch the Week of May 21: The Vanderpump Rules Reunion, Love & Death’s Finale, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Goodbye
This week is loaded, starting with Love & Death’s finale on Max this Thursday. If you haven’t gotten caught up on the David E. Kelley limited series starring Elizabeth Olsen, Lily Rabe, Jesse Plemons, Patrick Fugit, Tom Pelphrey, and more, do so now. The finale is one of the most intense and stunning hours of television I’ve seen.
Viewers will see the struggle between Candy Montgomery and Betty Gore that led to Gore’s death, and it’s gruesome. “The scenes in the laundry room were the most upsetting I’ve ever shot in my entire career, for everyone involved,” executive producer and director Lesli Linka Glatter tells Glamour. “I’ve blown a lot of shit…but it was nothing like this. This was from-the-heart pain because we know it was real.”
Lily Rabe, who plays Betty Gore, tells Glamour that her hope is viewers watch the finale with room for interpretation “because only one of those women walked out of that house that day, and we only have one woman’s testimony.”
Linka Glatter agrees. “We wanted the audience to feel complicated over Candy. To me, some of the second part of the series is Candy’s struggle over her own sense of horror at what she did and wanting to, in some way, pretend it never happened. I mean, she was a terrible murderer. She didn’t clean up or try to hide her tracks, and she also couldn’t admit to herself or anyone around her what had happened. I really believe something cracked in her, even though we only know it from her point of view.”
“We cannot resolve what cannot be resolved,” Rabe adds. “And we are not trying to do that. But there’s a tremendous pain in that because you want to get to the end of the story, not the end of a life. What happened is that we got to an end of the life and we’ll never know the end of the story, but her story ended. That is painful and that’s the tragedy.”
In other TV finales, it’s time to say goodbye to Midge Maisel and the colorful and complex world that Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino so brilliantly brought to life over the past five seasons on Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. There are still so many loose ends to tie up, but Rachel Brosnahan says not to worry.:“Amy wrote the last episode, so I had no doubt whatsoever that she would nail it and land the plane exactly the way the show deserves.” Check back next Friday as we break it all down.
On a lighter note, The Little Mermaid swims into theaters this Friday with Halle Bailey as Ariel and Melissa McCarthy as Ursula. I haven’t seen the new live-action film yet, but Bailey’s under-the-sea red-carpet style is already a winner. Check out her seashell look at the Los Angeles premiere, her London premiere style, and of course, her seafoam green gown at the Oscars.
