New to Lightbox in February

January 16, 2018 0 Comments

A crime procedural starring Law & Order’s Chris Noth, a Twilight Zone-style anthology, a highly acclaimed Hulu comedy, and the latest seasons of Mozart in the Jungle and UnREAL will premiere next month on Lightbox.

Gone stars Noth as an FBI agent who recruits a self-defence expert (The Path’s Leven Rambin) he rescued years earlier, when she was abducted as a child, to help solve missing persons cases.

The 12-episode series is an NBCUniversal co-production with French and German broadcasters that had its world premiere in November on Australia’s Foxtel, where its subscription TV viewership has declined from 62,000 to 38,000.

Dimension 404 is a Black Mirror-lite, “jauntily light-hearted and stuffed full of special effects and recognisable faces,” said The Atlantic.

This isn’t television born out of anxiety about the internet so much as high-gloss content born from the internet itself, chock full of nostalgia, splashy visual tricks, and affirmation … That it was able to attract the kind of ensemble cast that it has—Modern Family’s Sarah Hyland, Glee’s Lea Michele, and Community’s Joel McHale, among others—is due to its concept, which is terrific, if wholly unoriginal.

“An anthology horror series like so many before it, Dimension 404 takes as many nods from The Twilight Zone and Tales from Crypt as it does Black Mirror (the show it will be most compared to),” said Forbes.

However, where those shows took their material seriously, Dimension 404 never loses its sense of heightened, fantastical nonsense… which is the best thing it could do.

Lightbox gets the jump on Amazon Prime with one of the latter’s own commissions: season four of Mozart in the Jungle.

Amazon Prime’s NZ rights are for only the first three seasons — although these are in 4K-HDR whereas Lightbox’s streams are limited to HD.

Also new on the comedy front will be season-three episodes of backstage dating show show romp UnREAL and the first two seasons of Hulu singles series, Casual, which The Hollywood Reporter summed up as “funny, strongly realised, self-assured and a joy to watch. You want another when the last episode is over.”

There will be plenty more of those to come, with Hulu having commissioned a fourth season for 2018.

Other February highlights include the launch of The Good Doctor and the box set of Community.