Pretend It's a City (Season 1)

Pretend It's a City (2021) is a Martin Scorsese docuseries you can watch online on iFILM. Across seven episodes, writer Fran Lebowitz roams New York and holds forth on everything wrong with it.

Lebowitz is the city's sharpest grouch, and each episode circles a single subject — transit, money, books, health, the art world. She grumbles about tourists, crowds and her own phone, while Scorsese laughs off-camera so hard it turns into its own running gag. Between conversations come archival clips, old Manhattan footage and guests like Spike Lee and Alec Baldwin.

It isn't really a show about New York so much as seven hours in the company of someone who saw straight through the place and never bit her tongue. Made for anyone who prefers wit, sarcasm and old-school Manhattan atmosphere to anything resembling a plot. Stream Pretend It's a City (2021) online on iFILM.