TV Reviews
Chicago Chefs Cook Through the Pain in FX’s Bittersweet Dramedy The Bear: Review
The Pitch: Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Shameless‘s Jeremy Allen White) is a young, ambitious chef who fled his working-class Chicago roots to spend a few years as one of the hottest chefs at a prestigious New York restaurant. Now, he’s returned home, feeling the joint stings of professional burnout, alcoholism, and (most importantly) the tragic death of his older brother by suicide. What’s more, Carmy’s brother left him the family business, a down-on-its-luck Italian beef joint called The Original Beef of Chicagoland. Now, he’s tasked with not just keeping the place afloat, but bringing his haute cuisine training to the restaurant and the gaggle of misfits that work there, from his hotheaded cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who manages the place with its tenuous link to coke dealers a...
The Barry Season 3 Finale Captures Keenly Why Connection Matters
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 3 finale of Barry, “starting now.”] It has always been a tricky thing, calling Barry a comedy, but the show may have left that word behind for good. The third season of the Emmy-winning HBO series has been awfully focused on consequences — or, more importantly, the ripple effects of a person’s actions in life, especially when those actions involve the death of another. And while we’ve been seeing those ripple effects all season long, primarily in the form of people trying to kill Barry (Bill Hader) as revenge for his past crimes, things really do come full circle in the season finale. Breaking it down, the narrative’s a relatively simple one, wrapping up key storylines across the season. Gene’s (Henry Winkler) career prospe...
Dirty Daddy: The Bob Saget Tribute Is a Messy But Loving Remembrance — Review
Bob Saget pulled off a remarkable trick over his long and busy career in comedy: He spent the late ’80s and much of the ’90s as one of America’s favorite professional genial dorks, playing a square dad on the cornball and often unbearably saccharine ABC sitcom Full House and ringmaster to America’s less professionally genial dorks — those suffering home-recorded mishaps on the same network’s America’s Funniest Home Videos. After those gigs ended, though, he directed one very funny and decidedly less clean comedy, Dirty Work, and word about his non-ABC comedy career spread: That Bob Saget fellow really works pretty blue! This was probably always true outside of his time on ABC — how many comedians can’t hit a blue streak sometimes? — but Saget seemed to particularly delight in puncturing hi...
Irma Vep is a Refreshingly Meta Take on the Lines Between Art and Life: Review
The Pitch: Mira Harberg (Alicia Vikander) is an A-list Hollywood action star, hot off a Marvel-like superhero film called Doomsday whose smash success is colored by losing her assistant and lover, Laurie (Adria Arjona), to the film’s director during the shoot. Licking her wounds, she takes a break from blockbusters to fly to France to shoot a limited-series remake of the 1910s French serial Les vampires, in which she’ll play the iconic cat-suited criminal Irma Vep. But the shoot is suitably manic and unpredictable, from its director, René Vidal (Vincent Macaigne), being such a volatile, insecure mess that the financiers won’t insure him to her prima donna castmate, to Vincent Lacoste’s Edmond, who keeps trying to change his dorky detective character to better flatter his machismo, and...
Norm Macdonald’s Posthumous Nothing Special Is Unlike Any Other Comedy Performance — Review
It’s hard to imagine a comedy set like Norm Macdonald’s latest and last. Nothing Special, a title that manages the Norm-like feat of simultaneous irony and honesty, was recorded at Macdonald’s home, without an audience, during the pre-vaccine pandemic days of 2020. It’s performed in the style of a webcast; MacDonald has a microphone, but he’s sitting down, focusing mostly on his face, as if Zooming into his own special. The press materials boast that it was done in “one take,” which is both impressive, in that Macdonald appears to do 55 minutes of comedy more or less extemporaneously without any breaks for laughs, and obvious, in that he’s occasionally interrupted, by a ringing phone or a barking dog. The comic had been preparing material for his next Netflix special, but, as very few peop...
Love, Death, and Robots: The 15 Best Sci-Fi Shorts, Ranked
Netflix’s flagship animated anthology series Love, Death & Robots has often been a hard show to love. On the one hand, it’s a dazzling showcase for VFX artists at the top of their field, adapting some of science fiction’s most interesting short stories to a new medium (not unlike the Heavy Metal comics from which executive producers David Fincher and Tim Miller derived the premise). On the other, that same love of Heavy Metal extends to the exploitativeness of many of its stories — especially in its first season, which never met a woman it didn’t like to punish, hypersexualize, or exploit for gut-wrenching violence. Still, despite the Reddit-iness of it all, there are still quite a few gems to be found amongst the Call of Duty commercials and Starcraft cutscenes, especia...
Stranger Things Stretches Out the Upside Down For an Endearingly Familiar Season 4: Review
The Pitch: While it’s been three years (and an entire pandemic) since we last saw Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), and the rest of the denizens of Hawking, Indiana in the third season of Stranger Things, for them it’s only been six months. The Battle of Starcourt Mall kicked off a host of changes for our heroes, both young and old, with Eleven choosing to move to California with the Byerses, leaving Mike, Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), and the others to struggle with the cliques and clashes of high school on their own. And growing up is hard, even for Demogorgon slayers — Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) has joined the basketball team in an attempt to shake off the nerd cred Mike and Dustin cling to, while Max (Sadie Sink) is still mourning the death of brother Billy last se...
Apple TV+’s The Essex Serpent Is Sumptuous, Supernatural Gothic Romance: Review
The Pitch: 1890s England: a time where the rapid rise of scientific knowledge — medicine, technology, archaeology — clashed with Christian superstitions and fairy tales. In the middle is Cora Seaborne (Claire Danes), a woman recently widowed from a wealthy, abusive spouse, who sees the opportunity to find out who she is and what she really wants out of life. A fortuitous report out of Essex gives her the chance: A winged, fanged “serpent” is reportedly snatching people up outside the sleepy port town of Aldwinter. Armed with her wits, her interest in “naturalism,” her curious son Francis, and adventurous maid/companion Martha (Hayley Squires), Cora leaves her comfortable London life to solve the mystery once and for all. But she quickly finds herself at odds with the paranoid, God-fea...
Conversations with Friends Review: Hulu’s New Sally Rooney Romance Gets Intimate and Messy
The Pitch: In 2020, a Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s sophomore novel took the spring by storm. Beloved by critics and audiences alike, Normal People launched Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones into immediate stardom territory, and with good reason — the limited series was both tender and excruciatingly heavy; romantic and frustrating; hard to watch and impossible to turn off. It only makes sense that Hulu would want to give it all another go with Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations with Friends. This story follows introverted poet Frances (Alison Oliver) and her ex-girlfriend, best friend, and muse all at once, Bobbi (a luminous Sasha Lane). The two become involved with an older married couple, Melissa (Jemima Kirke) and Nick (Joe Alwyn), and the messy threads that tie them all...
Jessica Biel Can’t Help Hulu’s Confused Candy Coalesce: Review
The Pitch: The story of Candy Montgomery is almost too gruesome and eerily-timed to feel true: On Friday, the 13th, one June in 1980, a pleasant, well-liked suburban housewife in a bucolic northeastern Texas town went over to her friend and neighbor Betty Gore’s house, and murdered her with an axe. She slashed her 41 times, 40 of them while her heart was still beating. Then, she took a shower in Betty’s home to clean off the blood, and drove back home to continue her day like nothing had happened… with Betty’s newborn infant crying in her dead mother’s home for thirteen hours before the body was found. Even crazier than that? Candy would end up being found not guilty. Naturally, it’s the kind of lurid true-crime story that would spawn not one, but two miniseries in our murde...
Better Call Saul Recap: There’s Proving and Then There’s Knowing
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Better Call Saul Season 6 Episode 4, “Hit and Run.”] Case Summary After last week’s seismic installment, Episode 4 of Better Call Saul was a bit more easygoing, even if things grow more and more uneasy for everyone. As the old saying goes, it’s not paranoia if someone is actually out to get you, and while things actually do seem to be going pretty well for Kim Wexler and Saul Goodman, attorneys-at-law, Kim at least is not sleeping easy these days. The centerpiece scam this time focused on Jimmy and Kim’s ongoing campaign to ruin Howard Hamlin’s reputation, which pays off last week’s key-copying adventure. While a blissfully ignorant Howard sits down for therapy, Jimmy uses his duplicate key for Howard’s car for a wild little bit of sketch...
The Staircase Takes a Winding Path Through the Infamous Michael Peterson Case: Review
The Pitch: It’s one of the most infamous murder cases in the 21st century: On December 9th, 2001, Kathleen Peterson (Toni Collette) was found dead at the foot of the staircase in her Durham, North Carolina home, having bled out from a suspiciously large number of head wounds. The only one home was her husband, novelist and mayoral candidate Michael Peterson (Colin Firth), who called 911 and explained through tears that she’d fallen down the stairs. But the event’s strain on the Peterson family compounds as Kathleen’s death opens up fissures between the blended family, to say nothing of the suspicion Michael faces as his wife’s possible murderer. As the trial heats up, and more secrets come out about Michael’s hidden life, the family — and the French documentary crew filming him and th...
