We’re running headlong into the May 31 end of the 2026 Emmy eligibility period, so it’s no surprise to find three new productions with Emmy potential releasing: one-off streaming films “Miss You, Love You” on HBO and “Propeller One-Way Night Coach” on Apple TV along with Season 2 of Tina Fey comedy “The Four Seasons” on Netflix.
‘Miss You, Love You’
An old-fashioned two-hander, “Miss You, Love You” is the kind of small, intimate comedic drama that doesn’t get made often enough. It feels like it could have been a stage play and serves as a terrific showcase for stars Allison Janney and Andrew Rannells.
Blunt, sarcastic and grieving, widow Diane Patterson (Janney) takes umbrage when her son sends his Hollywood assistant, Jamie (Rannells), to attend to her needs after the death of her husband, her son’s stepfather.
Over a week, Diane and Jamie get better acquainted through sometimes darkly funny circumstances — it’s wonderful to see Bonnie Hunt show up as a nosey neighbor/church lady — as they confess secrets and ultimately build a tenuous connection.
Written and directed by Jim Rash (“Community”) and premiering at 8 p.m. Friday (HBO, HBO Max), “Miss You, Love You” was inspired by Rash’s father’s funeral when his sister “had a work thing going on, so she brought her assistant who I didn’t know, no one knew — he didn’t know anyone in the room — and I thought that was such an interesting lens to see when we’re … at our best and worst as we deal with our emotions. … Then I just started pulling and crafting the story of Diane based on little things from my own life. Jamie is a lot of me.”
Rash said the script began as a play, but during the pandemic, he turned it into a screenplay. Filmed over 17 days in Albuquerque, N.M., sometimes in unusually long 15-minute takes, Janney and Rannells approached the project like a play and spent January 2024 memorizing the script before arriving in New Mexico to film.
“I’ve never been offered a role of this size,” Janney said in a virtual news conference earlier this month. “And the scope of Diane’s journey is quite extraordinary, and I was a little intimidated. … Everything about Diane, all the different layers and the dark humor, was so appealing, ’cause Jim’s writing is so perfect and there’s not any fat in there anywhere. It’s just all this resentment and anger underneath and getting to take it (out) on this perfect stranger was heaven. Who gets to be that mean? I think the fact that he is a stranger (made for) the perfect dynamic for her to just take everything out on him. And, as a result, they learned a lot about each other.”
Rash said with a stranger, the characters want to be the hero in their own story and get caught in their own lies or their own perceptions.
“You’re gonna go, ‘Can you believe they did that?’ But as soon as they find out the other person’s story — in this case, they would go, ‘Oh my God, that’s much more complicated, and I wouldn’t have said that you were right to do that,’ ” Rash said. “That’s both the beauty of talking to a stranger and the danger of talking to a stranger.”
‘Propeller One-Way Night Coach’
Written, directed and narrated by John Travolta, this one-hour short narrative film delivers a nostalgic ode to the golden age of air travel.
Based on a 42-page novella Travolta published in 1997, “Propeller One-Way Night Coach” follows young Jeff (Clark Shotwell) and his mother (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett) as they travel cross-country from New York to Los Angeles in December 1962 with stops along the way, including a delay due to snow in Pittsburgh.
Streaming Friday on Apple TV, “Propeller One-Way Night Coach” is a family-friendly film that gives a little bit of “A Christmas Story” vibe thanks to Jeff’s looking back as an adult narrator and some gentle humor, including a running gag about chicken cordon bleu as an airline food staple.
Travolta, who has a brief cameo at the film’s conclusion, is a known airplane buff, but it turns out he’s also a commercial airline enthusiast, as evidenced by his surrogate, Jeff, and Jeff’s excitement over traveling by airliner.
Travolta’s biggest misstep: When Jeff first sees the TWA plane he will fly in, the soundtrack swells with “Rhapsody in Blue,” which has been United Airlines’ sonic branding since 1987, an odd choice that threatens to take viewers out of the film if they scratch their heads over the TWA visual paired with United’s theme song.
‘The Four Seasons’
Season 2 of Netflix’s “The Four Seasons” follows friends Kate (Tina Fey), Jack (Will Forte), Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), Danny (Colman Domingo), Claude (Marco Calvani) and Ginny (Erika Henningsen) as they adapt to life after the death of Nick (Steve Carell) in Season 1, traveling and growing together as they move into new phases of their lives.
“Let’s shake the Boggle board of what pairings (of characters) we have not seen much of,” Fey said in a virtual news conference last week about how the writers changed things up in the six-episode second season.
“Four Seasons,” now streaming, also explores new locations —— the Jersey Shore, Claude’s homeland, Italy — and tackles new issues, including whether Danny and Claude want to start a family. But what continues to make “The Four Seasons” so compulsively watchable is how it accurately captures small but relatable details about middle-aged friendships and relationships.