True Story

Are we still surprised that comedians and comic actors can turn their hands to drama? Or are we sophisticated enough to know now that if you can do comedy, you can do anything. It’s trying to go the other direction that generally holes performances below the waterline.True Story Season 1 Download 

True Story (Netflix) is here to add to the mountain of evidence that comedy-to-drama is a road worth travelling. The hugely successful US standup and comedy film star Kevin Hart plays a fictionalised version of himself – a hugely successful comic called the Kid riding high after a part in a billion-dollar superhero film – who returns in triumph to his home town, Philadelphia. The first episode opens with him speaking to an unseen therapist. “People think that they know me because I made them laugh or because they’ve been to a show. But they don’t know what I did to get here. Or what it takes to stay here.”We flash back to one week earlier, where the hour-long episode (the rest are around half that length) properly begins. The Kid is finishing up his 20th appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and he and his entourage are dealing with intrusive fans in Pennsylvania as they settle into the Four Seasons ($5,000 a night, “but I haven’t paid for a room in years”) in advance of concerts he will give in the city.The setup – and the marketing and publicity – have been clearly aimed at encouraging the viewer to think of Hart and the Kid as one and the same (in real life, Hart is a frequent guest on DeGeneres’s show, and was born and raised in Philadelphia) and of the series as autobiography-with-plausible-deniability. So it comes as a surprise that things develop quite so rapidly into a wholly implausible crime caper.Waiting for the Kid in his hotel room is his beloved but burdensome older brother, Carlton. He is played with matchless intensity by Wesley Snipes, who gives him a simmering rage at the Kid’s success that looks a lot like sheer malevolence. It’s a barnstorming, scene-stealing performance from the get-go and Hart – in, remember, his first dramatic role – does phenomenally well as both the actor and the brother who has to avoid being annihilated by the mere force of Carlton’s presence.