She charismatically dazzles while grooving and shimmying along to “See Saw” for a TV performance.
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Aretha flashes her genius (get it?!) as she sings songs back note by note after hearing them one time, plays piano by ear without knowing how to read music, arranges every aspect of each track, and sings “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied)” and “Rock Steady” under Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler’s ( David Cross) watchful eye. She has commanding stage presence, and in every one of the seven episodes provided for review, she steps onstage or into a recording studio and makes it her own. Which isn’t to deny that Erivo (who has won an Emmy, Tony, and Grammy, and was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actress and Best Original Song for 2019’s “Harriet”) is a phenomenally talented singer who puts her own spin on many of these songs.
And “Genius: Aretha” leans hard on its lead actress’s singing prowess to pass the time instead of engaging in steadily proactive character development-as “Billie Holiday” did. “Genius: Aretha” relies on gorgeous costume design and an ensemble cast to distract us from the scarcity as its center-as “Billie Holiday” did. “Genius: Aretha” bounces between the singer’s troubled adulthood, in which she is abused by her first husband Ted White ( Malcolm Barrett), and her troubled childhood, in which she was manipulated by her father, popular pastor and radio personality C. Billie Holiday,” and what she again fails to do with “Genius: Aretha,” is imagine a reality in which a woman’s relationship with a man was not her defining characteristic. A lot of that is historically accurate, and it would be irresponsible, perhaps, to ignore the facts that Holiday was raped as a child and developed a heroin addiction to deal with the pain and was undervalued by the music industry, or to ignore the reality that Franklin was raped as a child and started drinking to deal with the pain and was undervalued by the music industry.īut what Parks failed to do with “The United States vs. Both focus on immensely talented women who are undone by their codependent relationships with terrible men, with their all-consuming desire to be loved, and with the racism they faced from white people.
Billie Holiday,” also wrote the majority of “Genius: Aretha’s” eight episodes. This makes sense once you realize that Suzan-Lori Parks, who recently employed this same split-timeline, heavy-on-the-trauma approach in the “The United States vs.
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Instead, the priority here is that “strong woman” image, and the result is a series that comes to life whenever Erivo performs a musical number and then slumps into listlessness whenever else. And so “Genius: Aretha” puts Erivo’s version of the titular character through the wringer while the actress herself struggles to sincerely communicate any of the contrasting feelings-anguish or joy, anxiety or delight-that she must have experienced. But this project makes the same mistake so many other TV series and films also do when they try to tell the story of a “strong” woman: It focuses far too much on her relationships with bad men. Erivo is a gorgeous singer, and she exudes strength, self-assurance, and formidability.
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