15 items
The Breaking Bad prequel had long been two shows running on parallel tracks: amiable shyster Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) building a legal career while romancing unflappable lawyer Kim (Rhea Seehorn), and ex-cop Mike (Jonathan Banks) slowly immersing himself in the local drug game run by Gus Fring (Gian-carlo Esposito). In Season Five, the two storylines finally started […]
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel . . . amused? The Hank Azaria baseball comedy jumped ahead to 2030 for its final season, presenting a pre-apocalyptic future that was simultaneously horrifying and reassuring. On the one hand, it’s a period when the planet has been ravaged by climate change, and economic inequality has […]
Boy meets girl. Boy loves girl but messes everything up. Boy and girl keep reconnecting, as friends and/or lovers, as they grow into adulthood. No, the broad strokes of this miniseries version of Sally Rooney’s bestseller — where the boy is small-town Irish jock-turned-writer Connell (Paul Mescal) and the girl is his classmate, nerd-turned-queen-bee Marianne […]
Few shows in television history offer scenery quite as beautiful, let alone as lushly photographed, as this continuing adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. But those gorgeous seascapes and piazzas are harshly contrasted by the ugliness in the foreground, both between former childhood best friends Lenu (Margherita Mazzucco) and Lila (Gaia Girace) and between each […]
The first three years of Pamela Adlon’s autobiographical dramedy portrayed her alter ego Sam as a saintly single mother whose daughters had turned out to be insufferable despite her best efforts. Season Four finally saw Sam’s heroic efforts paying off with all three girls; as they matured, they found their concern turning toward their mom as she […]
Ramy Hassan the character has a vague idea about what he wants out of life — to be a better Muslim, and thus a better person — and very little idea of how to accomplish that goal. Ramy Youssef — who plays the fictional Ramy and helps write and direct his misadventures — has a […]
Easily the best of Apple’s early entries into the streaming wars, this anthology series tells real-life stories of American immigrants that in any given moment can be heartwarming or heartbreaking, and often both at the same time. There’s the spelling-bee champ forced to run his family’s Utah motel while his parents are sent to India […]
Like BoJack, The Good Place only aired a handful of episodes this year while concluding its run. They just happened to be among this great series’ most wonderful, kind, ridiculous, and hopeful installments, as Team Cockroach figured out how to fix the afterlife and make all of reality a whole lot more fair and happy. (If only our […]
A very high bar was set for the Zoë Kravitz vehicle, which is based on a beloved book (by Nick Hornby) that was already translated into a beloved film (with John Cusack). But as a record-store owner navigating various romantic failures, Kravitz was just so charismatic, and the chemistry between her and shop employees played […]
This mockumentary about a trio of vampires (Matt Berry, Natasia Demetriou, Kayvan Novak) living on Staten Island — along with a superhumanly dull “energy vampire” (Mark Proksch) and a human familiar, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) — remains the exact kind of stupidity we need in these scary times. Season Two hit absurd new highs (or lows, depending […]
FX’s expansion into the streaming world via the new FX on Hulu imprint got off to a hell of a start with this creepy — and, as its writer/director Alex Garland freely admits, weird — thriller about a tech mogul (Nick Offerman) killing anyone who stands between him and his latest creation. The characterization at times felt […]
The spectacular animated tragicomedy split its final season in two, meaning we only got a few episodes in 2020, and they were for the most part not on the funnier end of BoJack‘s impressive range. But it was the sad parts that tended to make BoJack special, and the story’s concluding chapters forced our horse hero to confront […]
Art imitates life tragically imitating art. The Wire co-creators David Simon and Ed Burns adapt Philip Roth’s 2004 alternate-history novel where anti-Semitic aviator Charles Lindbergh is elected president in 1940, which now unfortunately has greater resonance in the America of our current presidential administration. Starring Zoe Kazan and Morgan Spector as Jewish spouses slowly coming to grips […]
Having already succeeded in the transition from child actor to teen (go stream 20th Century Women on Netflix, please), Elle Fanning announced her adult presence with authority in this black-comic tale of a young Catherine the Great realizing that her husband, the sadistic loser of an emperor, Peter (Nicholas Hoult, wickedly funny), needs to be deposed in order […]
What started out seeming like an elaborate joke about the male anatomy of co-creator/star Dave Burd, a.k.a. rapper Lil Dicky, soon turned out to be something much richer and more compelling in its examination of celebrity and appropriation — while still having plenty of room for dick jokes, roadkill jokes, and, of course, onscreen diarrhea. […]