All That Jazz And Then Some

Fosse/Verdon goes deep on its subjects.

- Matt Zoller Seitz

IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE more delectable bait for fans of Broadway and Hollywood history than Fosse/Verdon. Based on the biography Fosse, by Sam Wasson, this eight-part FX miniseries isn’t content to dramatize the volatile artistic and romantic partnership between Bob Fosse (Sam Rockwell) and Gwen Verdon (Michelle Williams), dancerschoreographers who became cultural powerhouses, nor to get the choreography and costumes right, nor to cast the story’s big-name supporting characters, including Neil Simon (Nate Corddry), Paddy Chayefsky (Norbert Leo Butz), Liza Minnelli (Kelli Barrett), Ann Reinking (Margaret Qualley), and Ben Vereen (Ahmad Simmons), with performers who feel cosmically correct but aren’t doing impersonations. (Butz’s humanist bulldozer Chayefsky, in particular, is rich enough to merit a spinoff.) No, this series is hard-core showbiz history, each frame deserving of footnotes. It delves into the type of marginalia that would obsess only a person who owns multiple shelves of Broadway books and is worried that the filmmakers might not get Fosse’s fedora or Verdon’s hairdo exactly correct as captured in photos from 1973, the year Fosse won a triple crown of directing awards for Cabaret (Oscar), Pippin (Tony), and Liza With a Z (Emmy).

If you are that person, breathe easy: Fosse/Verdon is a steam-heat soak in fanatically exact period detail, plus speculations and educated guesses that might have come from adviser and co-executive producer Nicole Fosse—Verdon and Fosse’s daughter and arguably the series’ third protagonist (we watch Nicole grow up, though not in linear fashion; the story jumps through time as in a Fosse picture).