TV Reviews
Better Call Saul’s Mid-Season Premiere Proves That Compelling Prequels Are Possible: Review
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Better Call Saul, Season 4 Episode 8, “Point and Shoot.”] After tonight, the number of remaining Better Call Saul episodes can be counted on one hand, and “Point and Shoot” does an exquisite job of making clear why that is so simultaneously exciting and sad. While it’s yet to be seen if one of TV’s great artistic achievements will fully stick the landing, the beginning of the show’s final run of new episodes packs an entire season’s worth of stress into its slightly extended runtime, while also continuing to deliver the kind of nuanced, character-driven moments which make the show so unforgettable. It’s a pretty remarkable achievement given the nature of the series, which jumps back and forth occasionally in its timeline but for the bulk ...
The Rehearsal Confirms Nathan Fielder Is a Comic Visionary: Review
The Pitch: Comedy has long mined the rich vein of desire running within most average citizens for fame — or at least some kind of recognition. That yen for the spotlight is what allowed ’60s duo Coyle and Sharpe and modern day bellower Billy Eichner to turn “man on the street” interviews into improvised gold and fed the creation of far too many prank shows. It’s also a craving that Nathan Fielder has spent the last decade twisting to absurdist ends, both on his acclaimed Comedy Central series Nathan For You and in his behind-the-scenes work on shows like How To with John Wilson and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? In each one, everyday people willingly put themselves under the eye of a TV camera, often revealing too much of themselves in the process. The results are either damning, hear...
Stranger Things Season 4, Part 2 Serves Up Oversized Blockbuster Cheese for the Fourth of July: Review
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 4 finale of Stranger Things, “The Piggyback.”] The Pitch: This year’s super-sized season of Stranger Things felt, if anything, a confirmation of Netflix’s confidence in the series — marking it as their true blockbuster tentpole, the thing to keep people subscribing amid price hikes and a nagging sense of doubt in their catalog. The first seven episodes (all nearly feature-length) set up our rapidly growing set of chess pieces along four branching storylines: Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and her attempts to get her powers back, Joyce’s (Winona Ryder) quest to get Hopper (David Harbour) back from Russia, Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and crew fleeing from the authorities in California, and the kids of Hawkins facing down a sp...
What We Do in the Shadows Glides By on Vampiric Charm in Its Fourth Season: Review
The Pitch: When we last left the Staten Island mansion of What We Do in the Shadows in Season 3, the house felt a little emptier — Nandor (Kayvan Novak) had just departed for his “Eat, Prey, Love” (sic) tour of self-discovery, and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) swanned off to England in a wooden crate to join the Worldwide Vampiric Council, with Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) in unwitting tow. Laszlo (Matt Berry), for his part, chose to stay behind, not least because the dead body of Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) gave way to a new, childlike form (also Proksch, pasty round adult features grinning eerily atop a child’s body), which he had to take care of. Cut to a year later, and all that potential energy is lost: All Nandor got from his tour was an erstwhile friendship with a nice family from ...
Westworld Season 4 Review: A Welcome Fresh Start With Some Big Ideas to Explore
The Pitch: The third season of Westworld did not have a lot of luck on its side — specifically, the timing of its premiere could have been better, as March 15th, 2020 was not an ideal day to launch a new season of a TV show which, over the course of eight episodes, became a tale of society nearly descending entirely into apocalypse. But even since the first season, Westworld has experienced a lot of critical scrutiny, especially as the narrative has drifted further and further away from its original Michael Crichton inspiration of disaster at a high-tech amusement park for the ultra-rich. (Funny how Westworld literally is a response to one of Jeff Goldblum’s iconic quotes from another Crichton adaptation: “If Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.”) So wh...
The Obi-Wan Kenobi Finale Pushed Our Exhaustion With Prequels to the Limit
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the season finale of Obi-Wan Kenobi, “Part VI.”] Sure, it’s a metaphysical impossibility in the real world (for anyone outside of an X-Files episode), but it’s still a good thing that none of us know for certain how our friends and family are going to die. It’s the kind of knowledge that would hang over every interaction, make us wonder if every decision they make is one which will bring them ever closer to their ultimate fate — it’d be hard to connect with your friends and family, if you knew how they were all going to die. It might make it hard for you to care about what happens to them. Which brings us to the season finale of Obi-Wan Kenobi, an action-packed hour of television where all of its major climaxes had, for a Star Wars fa...
Only Murders In the Building Season 2 Continues the Twisty Mystery Fun: Review
The Pitch: When we last saw Charles Haden-Savage (Steve Martin), Oliver Putnam (Martin Short), and Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez), things weren’t looking great for the trio. Season 1 of Hulu’s Only Murders In the Building was a 2021 hit following the journey of the aforementioned crew as the grew from strangers and neighbors in glamorous New York apartment The Arconia to something of a chaotic family. After setting out to solve the murder of fellow Arconia resident Tim Kono by way of true crime podcast — and somehow succeeding in the matter — Charles, Oliver, and Mabel think all that’s left to do is pop some champagne and celebrate. When a mysterious text urges them to get out of the building while they can, things take a turn for the worse — Charles and Oliver stumble into yet another murder s...
Only Murders In the Building Season 2 Continues the Twisty Mystery Fun: Review
The Pitch: When we last saw Charles Haden-Savage (Steve Martin), Oliver Putnam (Martin Short), and Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez), things weren’t looking great for the trio. Season 1 of Hulu’s Only Murders In the Building was a 2021 hit following the journey of the aforementioned crew as the grew from strangers and neighbors in glamorous New York apartment The Arconia to something of a chaotic family. After setting out to solve the murder of fellow Arconia resident Tim Kono by way of true crime podcast — and somehow succeeding in the matter — Charles, Oliver, and Mabel think all that’s left to do is pop some champagne and celebrate. When a mysterious text urges them to get out of the building while they can, things take a turn for the worse — Charles and Oliver stumble into yet another murder s...
The Umbrella Academy Season 3 Treats Elliot Page’s Transition With Respect: Review
The Pitch: The Umbrella Academy is not a subtle show. Characters outwardly express both what’s happening on screen and their feelings about it. The cinematography calls constant attention to itself with aerial shots and CGI camera maneuvers to glide us around stately mansions and old-fashioned hotels. In one episode of the show’s third season, “Cat’s in the Cradle” plays as an ironic musical accompaniment for a spoof on a father-and-son bonding montage. There are somehow needle drops more obvious than that. That The Umbrella Academy is a show that, in a way, serves as its own audio description, might be more of a liability were it not for its characters, both the core of ne’er-do-well estranged adopted Hargreeves super-siblings as well as the many beings they get to know. Watching this sho...
Players Uses League of Legends to Satirize Sports Docs, and It’s Hilarious: Review
The Pitch: What Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story did for music biopics, Netflix’s American Vandal did for the true-crime docuseries. For two glorious seasons of adolescent dick and poop jokes painted with all the forensic seriousness of Making a Murderer, Tony Yacenda (who also directed episodes of Dave and real-life true crime doc Trial by Media) and Dan Perrault perfectly threaded the needle between the melodramatic trivia of teenhood and the over-the-top mechanics of true crime. After that show’s unceremonious cancellation, Yacenda and Perrault are back with another pointed critique of the documentary format and the juvenile antics of manchildren. This time, the question is: What would The Last Dance look like if it were actually about mouthbreathing esp...
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...
