Thank God for asthma!

Continuing my trip up Empire's top 20 TV shows of 2025

#5 :  Mr Scorsese

Not the only unexpected Marty delight to hit Apple TV — or indeed this list — in 2025 (see entry #4), Rebecca Miller’s Mr. Scorsese is, as our glowing five-star review attests, “so kinetic and compelling that it could be mistaken itself for a Martin Scorsese Picture.” Neither hero-worship hagiography nor run-of-the-mill talking-heads piece, Miller’s five-part limited series instead takes the man and his movies together to craft a richly textured portrait of her subject. In one direction we see how a crisis of faith conjured Raging Bull, and in the other we see how the darkness of Shutter Island literally reduced Marty to a panic-attack-suffering wreck. And interspersed throughout are extraordinary, candid reflections from Scorsese himself, and from his collaborators and peers — from Spielberg and De Niro and DiCaprio, to Daniel Day Lewis and Spike Lee and Ari Aster. What more can we say? This one’s pretty damn good, fellas.

Three in a row for Apple TV and this is one that I didn't even know existed - I'm not at all surprised to see Empire pick it, but I'm not convinced it will hold too much of a wider appeal.

Well, at the age of 83, there's no doubt the man has lived a long and interesting life and, to his credit, he certainly remembers an awful lot of it. And, not so much to the season's credit, boy oh boy is he given the opportunity to demonstrate exactly how much he remembers of it. The series goes into excruciating levels of detail - which I can understand it we're talking about Taxi Driver or Raging Bull, but when it comes to his '70 film Boxcar Bertha (about which John Cassavetes told him "Marty, you've just spent a whole year of your life making a piece of shit") we really don't imho need to spend quite so much time on it.

I certainly agree with Empire that it's not "hero-worship hagiography" (with the man himself happy to admit he's not perfect) but it won't surprise you to hear it's not a hit piece either - there's definitely a hint of "his faults are only the result of his strive for perfection" and obviously most people (and they have a good mix of celebrities and friends) are more than happy to be very nice about him. I struggle slightly more with their contention that it's not a "run-of-the-mill talking-heads piece" - the talking heads are a major component of this and whilst it's not completely run-of-the-mill, it certainly doesn't display Scorsese levels of ingenuity.

And, to be honest, that's absolutely fine because it's tasked with giving us insights into the man's life and work and it definitely does that - your level of interest in this will very much depend on your tolerance for the minutiae of Marty's life. I enjoyed what I watched, but after two episodes I just didn't feel the need to watch any more - I'm sure the other episodes will be just as watchable and I might dip back into them at some point (but I wouldn't bet on it).

I like the fact that we've got a non-fiction entry in the top ten, but the quality here lives in the contributors and the content of Mr Scorsese's life. I'm sure Rebecca Millier is very talented and she (or, more probably, many others) have certainly put the effort in, but I'm also sure that a lot of people could make a decent show giving the access she had. And I don't feel that she did anything particularly remarkable with it, so there would be no danger of this making my top 20 of the year. If you're a fan of the man or film-making in general, then I guess this is probably a must-watch, but for us lesser mortals it feels like a cut down feature-length version might have been more palatable/less impenetrable.

#6 - Enjoyably confusing