UPRIGHT
Sundance Now, 3:00 a.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: Australian Tim Minchin is a stand-up comic, an actor, and a composer. As an actor, U,S. audiences might remember him as Atticus in Californication. As a composer, he wrote the music and lyrics for the Broadway musical version of Groundhog Day. And now, in this new series import, he’s the star and creator, and one of the writers and directors, of Upright, in which a directionless young man goes on an extensive Australian road trip, aiming to transport a family upright piano to his ailing mother. Milly Alcock plays the spirited young woman he picks up, grudgingly and not at all amorously, along the way – and it doesn’t take long at all before Upright establishes its own irrepressible, attractive quirkiness. Watch for the scene when Minchin, as Lucky Flynn, gets lucky when he’s about to be assaulted by a biker gang at a remote bar stop – and evades being pummeled by getting to the piano in the back of his truck, and joining one of the bikers in a lively duet on “Heart and Soul.”