Here comes the third round of Amazon pilots, even before we’ve seen the fruits of the second. The first gave the world Garry Trudeau’s (neologism alert) Republicom “Alpha House,” whose second season began filming in July. Jill Soloway’s “Transparent,” one of four green-lighted pilots from the last batch, arrives as a series to stream via Amazon.com in late September.
It’s useful to remember that pilots are only pilots. They are ideas made flesh to see whether those ideas are good or not, or how they might be tweaked in order to become good. The twist with Amazon’s endeavor, which is as much of a marketing idea as a process, is that the public is invited into the process early, to rate and comment on the works.
Stillman, whose movies have the quality of seeming at once unreal and naturalistic, is a filmmaker whose approach remains remarkably consistent from picture to picture.
Here, the characters have a lot of theories about life, which they compulsively share in dialogue whose proper cadences seem slightly out of time, as if you had stumbled into a lost world where some earlier form of English was still spoken. The cast includes Adam Brody and Carrie MacLemore, who were in “Damsels,” and Chloe Sevigny, who was in Stillman’s “Barcelona.”