Martin Scorsese's Fran Lebowitz Netflix docuseries Pretend It’s a City is deeply pleasurable

TIME

Over seven episodes, the iconic director and the humorist, commentator, chronically blocked writer, sometime actor and Manhattan fixture discuss a range of topics. "Although the full series runs slightly shorter than the director’s Netflix gangster requiem The Irishman, the episodic format serves a purpose beyond luring in viewers who might balk at a 209-minute movie but would happily binge through seven half-hours of TV," says Judy Berman. "Each organized around a loose cluster of themes—money and its New York handmaiden real estate, Lebowitz’s love of smoking and hatred of wellness culture—the episodes resemble chapters of her books. In artfully constructed montages, the subject holds court in chats with Scorsese as well as on talk shows and at speaking engagements from the ’70s through the present. She moves through cleverly chosen locations in the pre-pandemic city, struggling to deactivate the video screen in a cab, wandering around the Queens Museum’s scale model of the five boroughs like a flâneur Godzilla. We watch her entertain interlocutors from Alec Baldwin to Spike Lee (who gamely challenges her insistence that sports are for children) to her late friend Toni Morrison." ALSO: Lebowitz discusses Pretend It's a City and the U.S. Capitol takeover, which she describes as consisting of "every stupid thing."