Emmy FYC: Riley Keough in "The Girlfriend Experience"
Friday, June 17, 2016 at 3:30PM We're sharing Emmy FYCs as nomination balloting continues. Here's our much missed contributor Matthew Eng (who now mostly resides at Tribeca Film)...
Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz’s The Girlfriend Experience, the glossy and gripping new series loosely “suggested by” Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 feature experiment of the same name, has, in all honesty, about the same chance of becoming a serious Emmy contender as Fuller House. This is in no way a blight on the series so much as an indicator that a work like The Girlfriend Experience, which airs on STARZ, is at once too under-the-radar and, more significantly, too polarizing to appeal to the Television Academy, who probably wouldn’t even know how to categorize a half-hour drama that sports a restrained tone, a notoriously well-known premise, and a uniquely challenging connection between protagonist and audience.
It’s on this last front that The Girlfriend Experience has made its most provocative and absorbing strides. And that’s largely due to the perfectly-cast Riley Keough, who turns in the type of confident, commanding, and utterly distinctive star performance that immediately makes one question and reformulate every preconception ever held about this actress, still best known as one of Mad Max: Fury Road’s rebellious war-brides, although The Girlfriend Experience (and a well-received turn in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey) are destined to change that...