Sundance 2025: Big Swings Pay Off in the Episodic Program | Festivals & Awards

Sundance is a Film Festival with two capital Fs, but each year they also feature a handful of shows via their “episodic” category. The 2025 entries succeed when they take big artistic risks, while the timid approaches feel just that. It turns out having a cinematic approach to TV pays off.

In the pilot showcase, two sitcoms gave just tastes of what they may become: Erin Brown Thomas’ “Chasers” and Joanna Leeds’ “BULLDOZER.” “Chasers” follows 20-something up-and-comers in LA as they seek to make it big and, preferably, figure out who they are along the way. The show centers Sophia (Ciarra Krohne), a mousy musician, who doesn’t quite fit in with the Hollywood crew she’s trying to hang with. A little predictable, the pilot suffers from centering a white every-girl instead of focusing on the more interesting and untold stories around her.

In contrast, “BULLDOZER” has some real laughs and surprises in its exploration of mental health and self-sabotage. Leeds stars as Jo, a woman with some profound mental health challenges, pulled from her house on suicide watch and continuing to make some truly insane decisions after that. Shout out to Kate Burton who leads the pilot’s most hilarious scene, confronting Jo with her past mistakes. It’s awkward comedy at its best, which makes sense for Leeds who also worked on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

Around 30 minutes each, it’s too early to tell on both of these shows. Thankfully, we got more time with “Never Get Busted!,” a documentary that’s having a lot of fun with it structure and subject. Using retro fonts and an old west motif, it tells the story of Barry Cooper, a bombastic Texan with a heart of gold. A former narcotics officer, he becomes a hero by turning on his old colleagues, helping drug users avoid prosecution, and going after crooked cops.

“Never Get Busted!” plays with the traditional documentary format, giving subjects title cards and mythologizing its subject. And it mostly works—Cooper feels genuine on-screen, and, while a lot of the events take place in the ’90s and early 2000s, the show’s world with crooked cops and needless drug prosecutions is one we’re still reckoning with. 

“Never Get Busted!” does fall short in its racial analysis. They only mention race once—when Cooper calls his past self “a little bit racist,” despite what we all know about drug convictions and their disproportionate impacts on communities of color. By the end, someone even calls Cooper “one of the great godfathers of the anti-police brutality movement,” and I guffawed—because that is absolutely not true. Black folks have been working on the issue for literal centuries.

Still, “Never Get Busted!” has its heart in the right place and Cooper does make significant sacrifices for his cause. It’s a fun and compelling production that should hit a distinct note in our cultural moment, depicting as it does, a righteous white guy using reality TV tactics to expose police violence.

“Bucks County, USA.” has a more ambitious political agenda but, oddly, less to say. The six-part series shared its first two episodes at Sundance, all focusing on one of the most decisive counties in the nation: A jurisdiction in the swing state of Pennsylvania.

Our window in is two teen friends, Vanessa and Evi, whose parents are on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Kids are particularly salient to this story as Bucks County made national news for its school board election, thanks to venture capitalist Paul Martino investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in the race. Directors Barry Levinson and Robert May interview him, following him to lunch with his strategist and showcasing his wife’s candidacy for the board, in addition to his daughter Vanessa’s cross-political-divide friendship. Meanwhile, Evi, who wears poofy skirts to school every day, is outspoken on LGBTQ issues and so is her mom Lela. The grown-ups fight online about who’s actually trying to save the children while the kids visit candy shops together. 

Over the course of the first two episodes, we also meet a retired teacher named Kitty, who’s worried for LGBTQ students’ safety, and Vonna, a Trumper who’s nostalgic for her ’80s childhood, which she remembers as apolitical, among others.

Particularly in the first episode, “Bucks County, USA” uses an all-sides approach, giving everyone equal space to its two opposing viewpoints and fact-checking no one. Maybe I’m just too much of an idealogue but it feels false and pollyanna-ish. Some of these folks are lying, some are mistaken, and some are dangerous. But in a naive approach to its subject matter, “Bucks County, USA” insists, multiple times, that the problem comes from COVID and how community members lost their connections to each other in isolation.

The second episode gets better, complicating its initial proposition that all we need is for folks to talk to each other in person with open hearts and minds, instead of fighting online or shutting each other out. Two of the women try it and the exercise seems rather fruitless when there’s no shared set of facts for them to work with. 

The stakes are clearly high in “Bucks County, USA,” with the fate and soul of our nation up for grabs, not to mention our basic human rights. But this show has neither the courage nor the conviction to handle all that, having effectively bit off more than it can chew.

Reminding us that all was not well in our ’80s and ’90s childhoods, comes “Pee-Wee as Himself,” a stellar docuseries that is willing to push boundaries. It tells the story of Paul Reubens, giving us a look at the man behind the bowtie. The filmmakers did over 40 hours of interviews with Reubens, center frame looking straight at the camera. The comedian is wily, sometimes playing a long game, sometimes flirting, and sometimes making a direct bid for control.

In these segments, Reubens is clearly a man grappling with his legacy, a fact made even more poignant because he was also secretly battling the cancer that would kill him in the months to come.

Director Matt Wolf handles his story deftly, taking us through Reubens’ childhood up until the year before he died. Memorable stops along the way include the subject’s time at Cal Arts, where he could experiment with film and storytelling, performing in drag, and being “completely out of the closet.” Later, he pulls back on that side of himself, joining the Groundlings and if not denying his sexuality, not talking about it either. In the interviews, he refuses to label himself, even as he recounts the horrors of his first love dying during the AIDS epidemic.

I grew up watching “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” and remember when the scandal broke, that the actor had been arrested in an adult movie theater, allegedly exposing himself. As a kid, I didn’t really get it and the documentary doesn’t entirely clear up what happened. Reubens never sat for the last interview, the one that was supposed to cover that first arrest and a second one. So director Wolf relies on friend’s accounts, Reubens statements at the time, and of course, the public record.

When dealing with the second charge of possessing child pornography, which came years after Reubens had left Pee-Wee behind and found joy in taking on other roles, the docuseries is completely clear: Reubens was innocent, a victim of a vindicative acquaintance who weaponized homophobia against him. And while he avoided jail time on both charges, the damage to his reputation and sense of security was done. 

By the end, I felt ready to buy a “Justice for Paul Reubens” T-shirt and wear it around Park City (I did not check if they were for sale). Here’s a guy who partnered with Tim Burton on their first film, collaborated with the likes of Phil Hartman, and created a beloved character that’s still iconic decades later. But thanks to his pension for performance art and need for privacy, he wasn’t recognized at the time, and, more tragically, he had few protections when our justice system sought to criminalize him for his sexuality.

“Pee-Wee as Himself” is not a blame game but it is a righteous exercise in examining the failures and successes of the past. At first glance, I thought “Hal & Harper” would also be an exercise in chasing recriminations. From filmmaker Cooper Raiff, it tells the story of the titular brother and sister (Raiff opposite a fiercely intense Lili Reinhart) in two timelines—one when the siblings are in their early 20s and one as children.

It’s not immediately clear what happened to their mother, and I won’t spoil it, but she is absent, leaving Mark Ruffalo to raise the kids on his own. He fails at times, forcing them to grow up too quickly. Raiff dramatizes this point by having Reinhart and himself play their elementary-school selves. It sounds silly, but their large bodies and childlike mannerisms expose both their early state of development and the adult realities they have to deal with.

This choice also emphasizes the differences between the two siblings with Hal a people-pleasing goof and Harper a skeptical girl who keeps herself apart. Too often in adult shows, the kids are just one precocious mess, neither true people nor anything approaching actual children. But “Hal & Harper,” even with adults playing kids, capture the way childhood works and feels in a refreshingly candid manner.

Which allows the show to delve into family memory, the way some kernels from the past help define us while others fade away. Here, Raiff shows so much empathy for his characters who may be shaped by loss but are not solely defined by it.

It’s also funny. “Hal & Harper” masterfully weaves its tones, finding humor in the co-dependency of the siblings, even as it exposes the raw hurt underneath. The characters laugh and I laughed with them, their humor radiating off the screen. It’s an easy laughter because this is a show not about recriminations but finding ways to survive together. Yes, Ruffalo’s patriarch struggles as a parent of two young kids, a fact that haunts him in the current timeline. But the show treats him gently, giving space for his own feelings while unflinchingly looking at the impact of his actions.

As a parent of kids similar ages to the younger Hal and Harper, I was deeply affected by this show. I cried multiple times. By the final episode, not shown here at Sundance, I was straight up sobbing, so arrested was I by these characters’ journeys, their hurt, and their bids for wholeness. It was a good cry, a releasing set of tears, needed after spending six+ hours in the trauma of parenting fails.

At its best, Sundance is a celebration of filmmakers (including “episodic” ones) pushing the boundaries of their art in new and exciting ways. I’m happy to report that while not every selection in the episodic category lived up to that high bar, several did.