Crisis in Six Scenes: Can Miley Cyrus Make Woody Allen Relevant?

Amazon's curious decision to produce an original comedy series written and directed by Woody Allen didn't get any less curious with the release this week of a new trailer for the series. Crisis in Six Scenes is period piece that seems to want to take Allen back to an era closer to his heyday, but the series appears to be strangely lacking in Allen's strengths.

The series stars Allen and Elaine May as a 1960s suburban couple dealing with their wacky family and friends amid the turbulent events of the Vietnam War era. Miley Cyrus also stars as a young hippie who brings her own bit of turbulence into Allen's household.

Crisis in Six Scenes looks very much like what you would expect from a Woody Allen version of a sitcom. Allen himself appears to be playing his usual nebbishy character here, and he's surrounded by wisecracking characters, some of whom - including a slightly subdued Lewis Black - are not quite as low-key as the typical supporting actors in an Allen film. Cyrus is on hand, of course, to fill the role of the young starlet whose energy Allen tries to harness in all of his projects; it's telling that she gets billing in the trailer above even Elaine May.

But should Woody Allen be making a sitcom? Even in the brief trailer, Allen seems far out of his element playing a suburban patriarch instead of his standard neurotic New Yorker, and the jokes fall into a mushy middle ground between art-house sophistication and made-for-TV hilarity.

Crisis in Six Scenese debuts September 30 on Amazon Prime.