Pretend It’s a City; Netflix Based on: it being Fran Lebowitz

Pretend It’s a City; Netflix
Based on: it being Fran Lebowitz

Is anyone better than Fran Lebowitz at talking about New York? She walks around the city, she criticizes everyone and everything, she settles into a table at The Players to chat with her old friend Martin Scorsese: this simple formula made for some of the most engaging literary television from 2021. Fans of Lebowitz will find familiar fodder here—the seven-part series itself is named for the way Lebowitz would admonish the phone-clutching wanderers who constantly bump her on the sidewalk—and those new to the humorist’s work will find plenty to amuse them, too. Coming in the middle of our collective COVID winter of hell, this series offered some rare kind of hope, promising a future in which public life would mean connection, absurdity, and humor again. (For extra credit, search for Public Speaking, Scorsese’s excellent 2010 documentary on Lebowitz.)  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor