TV Reviews
Atlanta Season 3 Is the Best Sort of Television — Something Truly Unique: Review
One downside of the modern age of television is that it’s now not uncommon for some shows to take more than a year to return with new episodes. In the case of Atlanta, which debuted its second season in 2018, that wait was longer than most, but those four years were truly worth it. The Donald Glover-created series, returning for Season 3, remains as ethereal and shocking and fascinating as ever; having screened the first two installments, it’s a thrill to know that eight more are coming to engage and confound us. This will be a short review, because revealing too much about the first two episodes of the season feels like it would do a disservice to everyone involved, including the audience. But if the first two seasons of Atlanta did anything — hell, if the first few minutes of the Atlanta...
SXSW Review: Halo Feels Like A Reskinned Version of Sci-Fi Shows Past
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: In the mid-26th century, a sprawling human empire comes under attack from the mysterious Covenant, an alliance of alien races dedicated to a fanatical religion surrounding a race of ancient extraterrestrials and the artifacts they leave behind. To combat them (and, not coincidentally, the rough-and-tumble insurrectionists who resist humanity’s militaristic government, the UNSC), Dr. Catherine Halsey (Natascha McElhone) has created the Spartans — armored supersoldiers trained and tortured from birth to be the ultimate, emotionless killing machine. The biggest and most badass of them all is John-117, aka the Master Chief (Orange Is the New Black‘s Pablo Schreiber), who can dispatch a Covenant Elite and a colo...
SXSW Review: DMZ Creates a Compelling New World, But Only Feels Like the Beginning of the Story
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: The timing of DMZ is maybe not the greatest, depending on whether or not you’re up for engaging with a story about urban warfare at a time when that sort of literal real-life horror is headline news. But the new HBO Max original series, based on the DC comics series and executive produced by Ava DuVernay, still stands out for its compelling premise and dynamic cast, despite a few issues largely stemming from its format. New World Order: When we first meet Alma Ortega (Rosario Dawson) in the not-too-distant future, she’s working as a medic in an intake facility for those who have tried illegally to enter the United States of America — not to be confused with the Free States of America, because seven years ago, a ...
SXSW Review: WeCrashed Is Too Long, But Nails the Daffy Rhythms of the WeWork Scandal
The Pitch: How far can a startup run on vibes alone? Turns out, it’s however far $47 billion gets you, at least in the smoke-and-mirrors valuations of VC culture. After all, that’s the magic number WeWork CEO Adam Neumann (Jared Leto) and his kooky wife/chief branding officer Rebekah Neumann (nee Paltrow; yes, she’s Gwyneth’s cousin, played by Anne Hathaway) used to fool Wall Street for nearly a decade into thinking they were the next great world-changing startup. But within a year’s time, WeWork’s value plummeted, the Neumanns left in disgrace — though not without a $2 billion golden parachute — and the buzziest company in America became a punchline. What led to such a precipitous fall? That’s the question WeCrashed, Apple TV+’s latest push for the startup-grifter boom (after Netflix...
SXSW Review: Hulu’s The Girl From Plainville Is an Introspective Drama Uninterested in Excuses
The Pitch: Series co-creators Liz Hannah and Patrick Macmanus keep the true-crime story wave going with The Girl From Plainville, an eight-part limited series based on the “texting suicide case.” In 2014, Conrad Roy III died by suicide in Mattapoisett, Massachussets — this tragedy eventually garnered national attention as investigators learned of the role that the teen’s girlfriend, Michelle Carter, played in his death. Roy’s and Carter’s motivations were previously explored in Erin Lee Carr’s 2019 documentary, I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter – and, of course, in all the preceding media coverage of the groundbreaking case. But The Girl From Plainville uses artistic license to venture deeper into the minds of these adolescents, and track how a chance meeting in Flor...
Human Resources Review: An Overly Raunchy, Occasionally Thoughtful Big Mouth Spin-Off
The Pitch: Five seasons into the Netflix animated comedy Big Mouth comes Human Resources, a spin-off dedicated to exploring the workplace antics of Big Mouth’s hormone monsters. Not only does the show feature familiar Big Mouth hormone monsters Maury (voiced by Nick Kroll) and Connie (voiced by Maya Rudolph), as well as The Shame Wizard (voiced by David Thewlis), Love Bugs, and Anxiety Mosquitos, Human Resources also introduces dozens of new characters, including a “Logic Rock” named Pete (voiced by Randall Park), Petra the Ambition Gremlin (voiced by Rosie Perez), and many other fantastical creatures that represent the complex emotions of human beings. Rather than dwell on the pubescent confusion of adolescence, the creatures of Human Resources serve humans of all ages, and throughout the...
The Boys Presents: Diabolical Offers Wild Superpowered Raunch As We Wait for Season 3 — Review
The Pitch: Animated spinoff anthologies for popular nerd properties are all the rage, it seems; hot off the back of Star Wars Visions a mere few months ago, Prime Video’s hit superhero satire The Boys gets one in the form of The Boys Presents: Diabolical. Taking inspiration, presumably, from their other blood-soaked comic book adaptation Invincible, here we’ve got eight distinct stories, with eight distinct animation styles, telling stories in and around the show’s world of corporate-sponsored (and created) superheroes, and the intestine-strewn trails they leave in their wake. Across eight Adult Swim-sized stories, the anthology peeks into the following tales of superpowered mayhem: Advertisement • A Tex Avery-style silent caper with a Vought scientist chasing down...
Euphoria’s Season 2 Finale Was a Mess, and Not Even the Fun Kind
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 2 finale of Euphoria, “All My Life, My Heart Has Yearned for a Thing I Cannot Name.”] Euphoria hive, this is a dark time. Today, we truly have no other choice but to put our eye gems away and ask ourselves — what was that?! The Euphoria Season 2 finale, which aired February 27th on HBO, finally brought this chaotic, discourse-filled era to a nearly disastrous close. The episode was a dumpster fire of pacing issues and lacked the signature style that makes the show fun to watch in the face of absurdity. It’s almost impressive that the hour managed to both be overstuffed and completely devoid of any cohesion at the same time. It was the epitome of, “Go girl, give us nothing.” Advertisement Related Video Since its return on Ja...
John Mulaney’s Fifth Go-Around as SNL Host Proves to Be a Good Variant
This weekend’s John Mulaney-hosted episode of Saturday Night Live felt more affected than usual by outside circumstances—and not, thankfully, in the sense that it featured topical yuks in a political cold-open sketch. On the contrary, the show opened on a surprisingly somber note with a performance from the Ukrainian Chorus Dumka of New York, singing the Ukraine national anthem. While sometimes SNL’s dips into sincerity can feel maudlin, this time it was a blessed relief that the show didn’t feel the need to drag out any “doddering Biden” or “crazy Putin” gags. If anyone was counting on Mulaney to lighten the mood, well, he did, but on his own terms, performing a stand-up monologue where he discussed his recent off-camera struggles with addiction. Mulaney’s showcase monologue displaced the...
Space Force Season 2 Review: A Big Improvement That Leaves You Wanting More
The Pitch: The original pitch was simple: In 2019, the 45th President of the United States announced a plan for a Space Force branch of the U.S. military. To Steve Carell and Greg Daniels (who previously worked together on The Office), that sounded pretty ridiculous, so they successfully pitched Netflix on a satirical version of what such a “space force” would look like, with Carell as the general in charge. Unfortunately, Season 1 of Netflix’s Space Force… didn’t quite work. Despite the assembly of a surprise-packed ensemble, including awkward comedy G.O.A.T. Carell, human live wire Ben Schwartz, secret MVP Tawny Newsome, and wild card John Malkovich, there was something just off in how the writing and acting and directing jelled together — and to the credit of Carell and Daniels, they no...
The Best Way to Enjoy The Book of Boba Fett Is to Embrace the Mess
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the season finale of The Book of Boba Fett, “Chapter 7: In The Name of Honor.”] The funny thing about The Book of Boba Fett is that a whole lot of people would have been a lot happier if they’d just done something different with the title. While the series started off as a stand-alone tale of the famed bounty hunter’s (Temuera Morrison) transformation into a new kind of crime boss, as seen with Episode 5 the show took an abrupt turn by bringing back famed Space Daddy Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), with the second half of the season serving as a clear sequel to the end of The Mandalorian Season 2. Now that we’ve reached the end of the season, all that’s left to do is try to sort out what, exactly, happened here. Because nothing feels in ba...
Inventing Anna Review: Shonda Rhimes Reminds Us That She’s the Master of Captivating TV
The Pitch: If there is one constant running through the work of Shonda Rhimes, it’s this: Her instincts for what makes a good story are dead on. Not every show with her name on it is an out-of-the-gate hit like Bridgerton or Grey’s Anatomy — rest in peace, The Catch, a great little show about con artists that deserved more of a chance. But it’s impossible to say that a Shondaland series is ever boring. Speaking of con artists, though… Inventing Anna, the new limited series premiering this Friday on Netflix, represents Rhimes’ first Netflix project that bears her name as not just a producer, but a creator. And you can sense why she chose not to hand this project off to someone else, given how many delicate elements are involved in these nine episodes — primarily, the depiction of its two le...
