John Ross Bowie, Lauren Lapkus, Kevin Sussman and Brian Posehn in HBO Max’s “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe.”
(Colin Remas Brown / HBO Max)
The 17 best TV shows to watch this summer
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The hardest question for me to answer as a television critic is “What should I watch?” (It’s also the question I’m most asked.) It’s difficult in part because a series can slip right out of my mind as soon as I go on to review the next one, and I often have to search the paper to remember what I’ve written, and what I think.
My standard, honest response is another question: “What do you like?” There are drama people and comedy people, gritty mystery people and cozy mystery people. Someone who’ll be all over “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” might not be up for something like “Cape Fear.” And narrowing the field, I’ll look up some reviews and make suggestions.
What seems beyond question is that people are perennially in the market for the next thing to watch, TV being the glue that binds us together, the friend when we’re on our own. And so to answer a question you can really only answer for yourself, we present a selection of recent series I can 100% recommend as worth somebody’s time.
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‘Furious’
Drama Watch on Hulu
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Danny Kelly (Scoot McNairy) and Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) in “Furious.”
(Sarah Shatz/Disney)
“Furious” is technically a serial killer story, since there are multiple murders committed by a single character, but happily that is the least of it. The series is as much relationship drama as procedural, animated by a quartet of excellent performances, with some things to say about abuse, exploitation and love along the way.
Although “Furious,” created by Elizabeth Meriwether (“New Girl,” “Dying for Sex”), acknowledges an inspirational debt to the 1987 Theresa Russell-Debra Winger film “Black Widow,” all it really preserves are a couple of names, the idea of a female serial killer and an emotional relationship with the woman hunting her. The killer is Catherine (Lola Petticrew), a petite young woman who goes about in a variety of wigs, under a variety of names, careful to mask in public. Her murdering is not a compulsion but a mission, like Jeanne Moreau in “The Bride Wore Black.”
Her nemesis is Alice Black (Emmy Rossum), a former police detective now answering phones for the FBI. She became persona non grata in the NYPD after identifying her detective boyfriend (Jake Lacy as Marshall) as the person who put her in the hospital, because, you know, cops. One day a request comes from former colleague Danny Kelly (Scoot McNairy) to assist him in investigating the homicide we see Catherine commit at the top of the series.
It’s not perfect. Some of the plot points strain credulity. There are some old-school jurisdictional clashes between the police and the FBI (as in every fourth episode of “The Closer”), and a heaping helping of professional jealousy within departments. But the show stays fascinating less for the plot than for the performers. Rossum attacks her role as if playing a Greek tragedy. McNairy, one of TV’s most likable actors, brings warmth. Petticrew evokes broken innocence.
Read the full review.
Although “Furious,” created by Elizabeth Meriwether (“New Girl,” “Dying for Sex”), acknowledges an inspirational debt to the 1987 Theresa Russell-Debra Winger film “Black Widow,” all it really preserves are a couple of names, the idea of a female serial killer and an emotional relationship with the woman hunting her. The killer is Catherine (Lola Petticrew), a petite young woman who goes about in a variety of wigs, under a variety of names, careful to mask in public. Her murdering is not a compulsion but a mission, like Jeanne Moreau in “The Bride Wore Black.”
Her nemesis is Alice Black (Emmy Rossum), a former police detective now answering phones for the FBI. She became persona non grata in the NYPD after identifying her detective boyfriend (Jake Lacy as Marshall) as the person who put her in the hospital, because, you know, cops. One day a request comes from former colleague Danny Kelly (Scoot McNairy) to assist him in investigating the homicide we see Catherine commit at the top of the series.
It’s not perfect. Some of the plot points strain credulity. There are some old-school jurisdictional clashes between the police and the FBI (as in every fourth episode of “The Closer”), and a heaping helping of professional jealousy within departments. But the show stays fascinating less for the plot than for the performers. Rossum attacks her role as if playing a Greek tragedy. McNairy, one of TV’s most likable actors, brings warmth. Petticrew evokes broken innocence.
Read the full review.
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‘Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston’
Documentary Watch on Disney+
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(Paolo Verzone/National Geographic)
Tom Hiddleston first visited Pompeii in 1998, when he was 17, and found it unforgettable, because “in Pompeii you can time travel.” (He’s not wrong.) He visited it again, after a fashion, for a few minutes in the first season of “Loki,” and he’s back now, walking the ancient empty streets, not too dead for dreaming, with a chimerical documentary, “Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston.”
As the title suggests, “Out of Time” is less about the living city than the dying one, with a sliver of hope carved out of the ash, rubble and pyroclastic surge. The conceit is that recent scholarship has been able to identify citizens of Pompeii who turned up elsewhere after Vesuvius blew. In order to bring their story to life, says Hiddleston, “I need to combine the historical evidence with what I do as an actor, I need to imagine it.” Hiddleston, who studied classics in college, for which he credits his trip to Pompeii, and so speaks a little Latin, is puckishly identified in a title as “amateur classicist.”
The re-created history, which is where many historical documentaries fail, looks good, and the scenes the writers conjure up are well done, if verging sometimes on melodrama. “This is all a little goofy,” I thought more than once watching “Out of Time.” Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it greatly.
Read the full review.
As the title suggests, “Out of Time” is less about the living city than the dying one, with a sliver of hope carved out of the ash, rubble and pyroclastic surge. The conceit is that recent scholarship has been able to identify citizens of Pompeii who turned up elsewhere after Vesuvius blew. In order to bring their story to life, says Hiddleston, “I need to combine the historical evidence with what I do as an actor, I need to imagine it.” Hiddleston, who studied classics in college, for which he credits his trip to Pompeii, and so speaks a little Latin, is puckishly identified in a title as “amateur classicist.”
The re-created history, which is where many historical documentaries fail, looks good, and the scenes the writers conjure up are well done, if verging sometimes on melodrama. “This is all a little goofy,” I thought more than once watching “Out of Time.” Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it greatly.
Read the full review.
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‘Stuart Fails to Save the Universe’
Comedy Watch on HBO Max
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Kevin Sussman and Lauren Lapkus in “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe.”
(Colin Remas Brown/HBO Max)
Next to the return of the doves to the backyard, nothing has made me happier recently than tumbling through the 10 episodes of the first season of “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe,” the third spin-off from “The Big Bang Theory.”
“Stuart” takes its players — secondary characters in the original — and places them somewhere quite different: a single-camera, parallel-realities science-fiction adventure comedy. Temperamentally akin to Kevin Feige’s oddball Marvel confections for Disney+, or the metafictional DC-based “Doom Patrol” (also on HBO Max, for what it’s worth), it was created and written by Chuck Lorre with “Big Bang” co-creator Bill Prady, along with Zak Penn, whose screenwriting credits involve mostly superheroes and sci-fi, appropriately enough.
Our protagonists here are comic shop owner Stuart Bloom (Kevin Sussman), not the schlemiel he can seem; his able, practical girlfriend Denise (Lauren Lapkus); sweet geologist Bert Kibbler (Brian Posehn, exquisitely deadpan); and troublesome plasma physicist Barry Kripke (John Ross Bowie). They are not the first four actors, or characters, one might elect to carry a series, but they are the right ones, and they do.
Why it should be Stuart who’s charged with saving the universe is not explained, and meaningful only in that, comically speaking, Sussman, the actor, and Stuart, the schlub, are right for the job, and that casting brings Lapkus, who is delightful as Denise, into the mix; their relationship is the emotional core of the show. Anything Posehn says is funny by dint of his saying it. There is some dated speech-impediment humor attached to Kripke, and some hacky sex jokes, but they come already attached to the character, so what are you going to do? And Bowie couldn’t be any better being awful.
Read the full review.
“Stuart” takes its players — secondary characters in the original — and places them somewhere quite different: a single-camera, parallel-realities science-fiction adventure comedy. Temperamentally akin to Kevin Feige’s oddball Marvel confections for Disney+, or the metafictional DC-based “Doom Patrol” (also on HBO Max, for what it’s worth), it was created and written by Chuck Lorre with “Big Bang” co-creator Bill Prady, along with Zak Penn, whose screenwriting credits involve mostly superheroes and sci-fi, appropriately enough.
Our protagonists here are comic shop owner Stuart Bloom (Kevin Sussman), not the schlemiel he can seem; his able, practical girlfriend Denise (Lauren Lapkus); sweet geologist Bert Kibbler (Brian Posehn, exquisitely deadpan); and troublesome plasma physicist Barry Kripke (John Ross Bowie). They are not the first four actors, or characters, one might elect to carry a series, but they are the right ones, and they do.
Why it should be Stuart who’s charged with saving the universe is not explained, and meaningful only in that, comically speaking, Sussman, the actor, and Stuart, the schlub, are right for the job, and that casting brings Lapkus, who is delightful as Denise, into the mix; their relationship is the emotional core of the show. Anything Posehn says is funny by dint of his saying it. There is some dated speech-impediment humor attached to Kripke, and some hacky sex jokes, but they come already attached to the character, so what are you going to do? And Bowie couldn’t be any better being awful.
Read the full review.
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‘Ride or Die’
Action-Comedy Watch on Prime Video
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Hannah Waddingham, Octavia Spencer and Ed Skrein in “Ride or Die.”
(Prime)
In the eventful, rollicking “Ride or Die,” created by Tessa Coates, Judith (Hannah Waddingham) and Debbie (Octavia Spencer) have been friends for more than two decades, in which time Judith has kept secret from Debbie the fact that her day job is not as a “forensic accountant,” a meaningless term meant to stop people asking questions, but as an assassin, working for a well-established secret organization of highly trained killers.
It can be preposterous and complicated to a fault. The barely developed but welcome romantic subplots, of which there are three, are lighter than air; indeed you will recognize them before the characters do. Yet it’s a straightforward narrative on the whole — all text, no subtext. You know who to root for. Even the non-thriller themes — female friendship, aging, ageism, admitting the truth about oneself to oneself and one’s dearest, the invigorating effects of danger — are explicitly expressed.
Read the full review.
It can be preposterous and complicated to a fault. The barely developed but welcome romantic subplots, of which there are three, are lighter than air; indeed you will recognize them before the characters do. Yet it’s a straightforward narrative on the whole — all text, no subtext. You know who to root for. Even the non-thriller themes — female friendship, aging, ageism, admitting the truth about oneself to oneself and one’s dearest, the invigorating effects of danger — are explicitly expressed.
Read the full review.
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‘Lucky’
Action-Thriller Watch on Apple TV
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Anya Taylor-Joy and Drew Starkey in “Lucky.”
(Apple TV)
“Lucky,” created by Jonathan Tropper from Marissa Stapley’s substantially different novel of the same name, presents itself in a desaturated palette, through what can feel at times like a scrim of dust. There are no jokes. It can be quite violent, but it’s not off-putting — not for more than a couple minutes at a time, anyway — and even at seven episodes, the flow is so well arranged as to remain engaging.
When we meet them, Lucky (Anya Taylor-Joy) and husband Cary (Drew Starkey) seem like just a couple of crazy kids in love, going mad in Las Vegas, like you do, but with a suitcase stuffed almost comically with cash back in the hotel room. The why and wherefore of this is helpfully specified by a news report detailing that more than $10 million remains unrecovered after “the FBI broke up a West Coast gas scam thought to have defrauded the government out of more than $200 million. How this young, seemingly unassuming couple came into possession of funds the FBI has been trying to track down for over two years is still unknown.”
But when Lucky wakes from a drugged sleep, Cary is gone and the money too, and police are pulling up outside. Most of the first episode gives us Lucky on the run, getting out of the hotel and out of Vegas, and across the tops of a field of big rigs. Indeed, if there’s a theme to “Lucky,” other than that crime might not pay, or that chase scenes are exciting, it’s the problematic, potent relationship between parents and children — handled with surprising feeling given the circumstances. And we’ve all been there, with or without a bag of cash.
Read the full review.
When we meet them, Lucky (Anya Taylor-Joy) and husband Cary (Drew Starkey) seem like just a couple of crazy kids in love, going mad in Las Vegas, like you do, but with a suitcase stuffed almost comically with cash back in the hotel room. The why and wherefore of this is helpfully specified by a news report detailing that more than $10 million remains unrecovered after “the FBI broke up a West Coast gas scam thought to have defrauded the government out of more than $200 million. How this young, seemingly unassuming couple came into possession of funds the FBI has been trying to track down for over two years is still unknown.”
But when Lucky wakes from a drugged sleep, Cary is gone and the money too, and police are pulling up outside. Most of the first episode gives us Lucky on the run, getting out of the hotel and out of Vegas, and across the tops of a field of big rigs. Indeed, if there’s a theme to “Lucky,” other than that crime might not pay, or that chase scenes are exciting, it’s the problematic, potent relationship between parents and children — handled with surprising feeling given the circumstances. And we’ve all been there, with or without a bag of cash.
Read the full review.
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‘The Hawk’
Comedy Watch on Netflix
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Will Ferrell as Lonnie in “The Hawk.”
(Colleen E Hayes/Netflix)
“The Hawk,” a 10-episode series on Netflix, is a golf comedy, a Will Ferrell comedy and, most to the point, a Will Ferrell golf comedy, following in the line of such sports-themed Ferrell films as “Blades of Glory,” “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” and “Semi-Pro,” and, at a stretch, “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.”
Ferrell plays Lonnie “The Hawk” Hawkins, whose career cratered in 2010 after he choked on the 18th hole at Pebble Beach, missing a three-foot putt “on the verge of a career Grand Slam.” Now, as his son Lance (Jimmy Tatro) is making a name for himself on the PGA circuit, Lonnie is working on the minor league Korn Ferry Tour, putting on a show with his longtime caddy and friend, Old Henry, played by Keith David, whose departure from the series after only eight minutes is a disappointment to me, as a card-carrying David fan, whenever I get around to printing those cards.
But it clears the way for Fortune Feimster’s Sam, who just happens to be fixing her car in a Walmart parking lot where Lonnie has parked his tour bus, to become Lonnie’s caddy. She knows nothing about golf, and can’t catch a golf club on the fly — one of Old Henry’s tricks — but she has the proper sense of fun and some good ideas.
“The Hawk” is sentimental and juvenile — that isn’t a criticism — its pee and poo and erection jokes delivered with great vigor. There are, of course, the sort of improvised passages that have left their mark on a quarter-century of film comedy, so that now and again a scene spins into irrelevance, as if life were just a series of skits — and maybe it is — but this does tend to be funny and what we come for, after all.
Read the full review.
Ferrell plays Lonnie “The Hawk” Hawkins, whose career cratered in 2010 after he choked on the 18th hole at Pebble Beach, missing a three-foot putt “on the verge of a career Grand Slam.” Now, as his son Lance (Jimmy Tatro) is making a name for himself on the PGA circuit, Lonnie is working on the minor league Korn Ferry Tour, putting on a show with his longtime caddy and friend, Old Henry, played by Keith David, whose departure from the series after only eight minutes is a disappointment to me, as a card-carrying David fan, whenever I get around to printing those cards.
But it clears the way for Fortune Feimster’s Sam, who just happens to be fixing her car in a Walmart parking lot where Lonnie has parked his tour bus, to become Lonnie’s caddy. She knows nothing about golf, and can’t catch a golf club on the fly — one of Old Henry’s tricks — but she has the proper sense of fun and some good ideas.
“The Hawk” is sentimental and juvenile — that isn’t a criticism — its pee and poo and erection jokes delivered with great vigor. There are, of course, the sort of improvised passages that have left their mark on a quarter-century of film comedy, so that now and again a scene spins into irrelevance, as if life were just a series of skits — and maybe it is — but this does tend to be funny and what we come for, after all.
Read the full review.
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‘Little House on the Prairie’
Drama Watch on Netflix
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Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald), Charles (Luke Bracey), Mary (Skywalker Hughes) and Laura (Alice Halsey) in “Little House on the Prairie.”
(Eric Zachanowich/Netflix)
“Little House on the Prairie” is the third television adaptation to bear the name of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 1935 autobiographical novel of life on the Kansas plains in 1869 to 1870. The newest version, created by Rebecca Sonnenshine and streaming on Netflix, is fairly faithful to its spirit, and less so to its letter.
At its center is the Ingalls family: father Charles (Luke Bracey), or Pa; mother Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald), or Ma; serious older sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes), and adventurous Laura (Alice Halsey), whose story this is. They are heading out to Kansas to what they imagine is free land, though they will have a thing or two coming on that account. “This will be our new forever,” says Laura, who doesn’t yet know that her future will be in Minnesota.
It’s very sentimental — which the novel, with its matter-of-fact, if sensually evocative prose, and its child’s-eye view, is not. The dialogue here is ripe with sampler sentiments and weighted with meaning. Much of the added material would have easily fit the TV series — temperamentally, it’s very much a case of late-20th century broadcast television — which to some may be a recommendation.
Read the full review.
At its center is the Ingalls family: father Charles (Luke Bracey), or Pa; mother Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald), or Ma; serious older sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes), and adventurous Laura (Alice Halsey), whose story this is. They are heading out to Kansas to what they imagine is free land, though they will have a thing or two coming on that account. “This will be our new forever,” says Laura, who doesn’t yet know that her future will be in Minnesota.
It’s very sentimental — which the novel, with its matter-of-fact, if sensually evocative prose, and its child’s-eye view, is not. The dialogue here is ripe with sampler sentiments and weighted with meaning. Much of the added material would have easily fit the TV series — temperamentally, it’s very much a case of late-20th century broadcast television — which to some may be a recommendation.
Read the full review.
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‘Elle’
Comedy Watch on Prime Video
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(Jessica Brooks/Prime)
Advertised as “from the world of ‘Legally Blonde,’” the Prime Video series “Elle” revisits that film’s heroine, Elle Woods (Lexi Minetree), as a 16-year-old high school student, suddenly transported from Beverly Hills to Seattle after her plastic surgeon father (Tom Everett Scott) botches a nose job and has to lie low.
Set in 1995, six years before the events of the first “Legally Blonde” film, with Seattle still living through the long tail of first-wave grunge — Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell are mentioned almost in a single breath — it shares with the big-screen mothership only its indomitable protagonist, who loves pink and her Chihuahua, Bruiser. (The dog gets its own origin story: It was “rescued” from the Spellings, as in Aaron, who found that its “earth tones” didn’t match “their new color palette.”)
There’s a passing reference to the lawyer Elle might (and does) become, and surely some things I missed, but if you’ve never seen “Legally Blonde,” you will not be at any particular disadvantage. (Possibly you will be at a disadvantage if you have seen it.) Bruiser aside, nothing that happens here affects what happens there. Don’t think twice, or even once, about canon. This is something else entirely.
Read the full review.
Set in 1995, six years before the events of the first “Legally Blonde” film, with Seattle still living through the long tail of first-wave grunge — Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell are mentioned almost in a single breath — it shares with the big-screen mothership only its indomitable protagonist, who loves pink and her Chihuahua, Bruiser. (The dog gets its own origin story: It was “rescued” from the Spellings, as in Aaron, who found that its “earth tones” didn’t match “their new color palette.”)
There’s a passing reference to the lawyer Elle might (and does) become, and surely some things I missed, but if you’ve never seen “Legally Blonde,” you will not be at any particular disadvantage. (Possibly you will be at a disadvantage if you have seen it.) Bruiser aside, nothing that happens here affects what happens there. Don’t think twice, or even once, about canon. This is something else entirely.
Read the full review.
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‘Zorro’
Action-Comedy Watch on MHz Choice
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Jean Dujardin as the titular hero in “Zorro.”
(Christophe Brachet/MHz Choice)
If you were a TV show, nothing would be more certain to gain my attention than to be a French-made, French-language series about Zorro, the masked vigilante swordsman of old Los Angeles. Sword fighting plus cape plus Francophilia plus hometown pride equals yes, please.
The new “Zorro” is a thoroughly original and quite wonderful take on the material; it’s one of my favorite new shows this year, possibly the one that made me happiest. Starring Jean Dujardin, whom American audiences will know as the star of the 2011 silent film “The Artist,” which won him an Oscar for lead actor, it’s thoroughly a comedy without being a spoof — it isn’t “Zorro, the Gay Blade.” (Though, to be fair, most Zorro films, going back to Fairbanks, have comedy in them.)
It’s a romance, a swashbuckler, a melodrama, a relatively light-handed critique of capitalism, demagoguery and the malleability of the crowd. It’s a farce — a French farce, literally, and stylistically, a la Feydeau, with characters appearing and disappearing, changing costumes and identities.
MHz Choice, which imports series from around the world, may not be high on your list of must-have streamers — chances are it isn’t. But how else are you going to watch this good thing?
Read the full review.
The new “Zorro” is a thoroughly original and quite wonderful take on the material; it’s one of my favorite new shows this year, possibly the one that made me happiest. Starring Jean Dujardin, whom American audiences will know as the star of the 2011 silent film “The Artist,” which won him an Oscar for lead actor, it’s thoroughly a comedy without being a spoof — it isn’t “Zorro, the Gay Blade.” (Though, to be fair, most Zorro films, going back to Fairbanks, have comedy in them.)
It’s a romance, a swashbuckler, a melodrama, a relatively light-handed critique of capitalism, demagoguery and the malleability of the crowd. It’s a farce — a French farce, literally, and stylistically, a la Feydeau, with characters appearing and disappearing, changing costumes and identities.
MHz Choice, which imports series from around the world, may not be high on your list of must-have streamers — chances are it isn’t. But how else are you going to watch this good thing?
Read the full review.
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‘Sugar’
Drama Watch on Apple TV
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Colin Farrell in Season 2 of Apple TV’s “Sugar.”
(Apple TV)
For whatever reason, I never reviewed the first season of “Sugar,” which I’d stopped watching before its late-season big reveal — the detective (Colin Farrell as John Sugar) is an alien. Had that happened earlier in the story I might have hung on, but strictly as a production, I’d found its brand of neo-noir to be mannered, gimmicky, obvious, overdirected (by Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian director of the fine “City of Men”) and, as you may have surmised, off-putting.
This is by way of announcing that the second season arrives Friday on Apple TV and that I like it very much. The stylistic eccentricities have been dialed back, including the use of old Hollywood film clips to reflect the action and possibly the thoughts of its main character, a cinephile from space, who is both practicing and enacting the work of a private detective. He reads American Cinematographer; he takes the Paramount studio tour, then takes it again.
One might navigate the new season without having watched the first, though at least reading an online synopsis. Sam Catlin (“Preacher”) has taken over as showrunner from series creator Mark Protosevich; the tone is lighter, the plot less perverse. Under new director of photography Marshall Adams, the camerawork, formerly too quirky by half — a mishmash of lenses and film stocks and canted angles — has settled down, as has the editing, enhancing the story by letting it breathe and staying out of the way of Farrell’s singular performance — the series’ distinguishing feature and warm heart.
Read the full review.
This is by way of announcing that the second season arrives Friday on Apple TV and that I like it very much. The stylistic eccentricities have been dialed back, including the use of old Hollywood film clips to reflect the action and possibly the thoughts of its main character, a cinephile from space, who is both practicing and enacting the work of a private detective. He reads American Cinematographer; he takes the Paramount studio tour, then takes it again.
One might navigate the new season without having watched the first, though at least reading an online synopsis. Sam Catlin (“Preacher”) has taken over as showrunner from series creator Mark Protosevich; the tone is lighter, the plot less perverse. Under new director of photography Marshall Adams, the camerawork, formerly too quirky by half — a mishmash of lenses and film stocks and canted angles — has settled down, as has the editing, enhancing the story by letting it breathe and staying out of the way of Farrell’s singular performance — the series’ distinguishing feature and warm heart.
Read the full review.
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‘The Listeners’
Drama Watch on Starz
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Jo (Gayle Rankin), Claire (Rebecca Hall), Omar (Amr Waked) and Kyle (Ollie West) in “The Listeners.”
(Will Robson-Scott/BBC / Element Pictures)
“The Listeners” began unusually as a story written by Jordan Tannahill as the basis of Missy Mazzoli’s 2022 opera, also called “The Listeners” (libretto by Royce Vavrek), which he turned into a 2021 novel, which became a 2024 BBC television series, also written by Tannahill. Starz has cut its original four episodes into five, which means that they end in odd places, but given its controlled, glacial pace, shorter might be better.
Tannahill’s inspiration is an unexplained phenomenon reported in the real world — though exactly how real it is is open to interpretation — generally called “the hum,” where people experience a low but persistent background noise inaudible to others. One such sufferer is Claire (Rebecca Hall), a high school literature teacher with a husband, Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah) and a teenage daughter, Ashley (Mia Tharia), with whom she gets along well. We begin on an up note, Claire and Ashley singing along to Richard and Linda Thompson’s “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” as they drive to school (she also has Nick Drake on her phone). And then the 1970s British folk rock gives way to a less pleasant auditory landscape, as the hum appears, bringing on headaches and nosebleeds and affecting her concentration and mood, her work and family.
Directed by Janicza Bravo and photographed with great intention by Jody Lee Lipes, it has the studied look and tempo of a 20th-century art film. You can look for metaphors and social comment here — there are references to conspiracy theories and industrial noise pollution and such — but it seems to me to operate most effectively as a beautifully rendered mood piece and character study, and, certainly in the case of Hall, whose story this is, a platform for some exquisitely subtle acting.
Read the full review.
Tannahill’s inspiration is an unexplained phenomenon reported in the real world — though exactly how real it is is open to interpretation — generally called “the hum,” where people experience a low but persistent background noise inaudible to others. One such sufferer is Claire (Rebecca Hall), a high school literature teacher with a husband, Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah) and a teenage daughter, Ashley (Mia Tharia), with whom she gets along well. We begin on an up note, Claire and Ashley singing along to Richard and Linda Thompson’s “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” as they drive to school (she also has Nick Drake on her phone). And then the 1970s British folk rock gives way to a less pleasant auditory landscape, as the hum appears, bringing on headaches and nosebleeds and affecting her concentration and mood, her work and family.
Directed by Janicza Bravo and photographed with great intention by Jody Lee Lipes, it has the studied look and tempo of a 20th-century art film. You can look for metaphors and social comment here — there are references to conspiracy theories and industrial noise pollution and such — but it seems to me to operate most effectively as a beautifully rendered mood piece and character study, and, certainly in the case of Hall, whose story this is, a platform for some exquisitely subtle acting.
Read the full review.
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‘Alice and Steve’
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Jemaine Clement and Nicola Walker in “Alice and Steve.”
(Lara Cornell / Hulu)
“Alice and Steve,” a marvelous six-part British comedy on Hulu, gives us Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement as the titular longtime best friends whose lives are turned inside out when Steve begins dating Alice’s daughter, Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith). She’s 26, and he’s “a 50-year-old man, and that’s when I’m rounding down.”
Creator Sophie Goodhart (“Sex Education”) builds her story on themes of youth and age, love and friendship. Steve is a celebrity stylist — don’t call him a hairdresser — who created the “Nicole Richie bob.” Alice (Walker, known here for “Spooks”) is a clothing designer, married to Daniel (Joel Fry), a music teacher. Their son, Dom (Tyrese Eaton-Dyce), is taken with Rome (Eilidh Fisher), whom he’ll scare off with a premature declaration of love — not that that’s the end of that. Daniel has a flirty colleague, Marni (Lydia Wilson), who would like him to let his hair down.
The series has a naturalism I think of as particularly British that grounds whatever is outlandish in the plot. Because Goodhart takes her characters seriously — because she likes them, clearly — and because the actors sit so well in them, one is genuinely concerned for their fates. And because she doesn’t really play favorites — everyone makes mistakes, everyone deserves love — the series remains unpredictable.
Read the full review.
Creator Sophie Goodhart (“Sex Education”) builds her story on themes of youth and age, love and friendship. Steve is a celebrity stylist — don’t call him a hairdresser — who created the “Nicole Richie bob.” Alice (Walker, known here for “Spooks”) is a clothing designer, married to Daniel (Joel Fry), a music teacher. Their son, Dom (Tyrese Eaton-Dyce), is taken with Rome (Eilidh Fisher), whom he’ll scare off with a premature declaration of love — not that that’s the end of that. Daniel has a flirty colleague, Marni (Lydia Wilson), who would like him to let his hair down.
The series has a naturalism I think of as particularly British that grounds whatever is outlandish in the plot. Because Goodhart takes her characters seriously — because she likes them, clearly — and because the actors sit so well in them, one is genuinely concerned for their fates. And because she doesn’t really play favorites — everyone makes mistakes, everyone deserves love — the series remains unpredictable.
Read the full review.
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‘Cape Fear’
Thriller Watch on Apple TV
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Javier Bardem and Amy Adams in Apple TV’s “Cape Fear.”
(Apple)
“Cape Fear” on Apple TV is a 10-episode limited series remake of a 1991 Martin Scorsese remake of a 1962 film adapted from John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel “The Executioners,” and as in a game of telephone each subsequent version adds new material and moves a little further from the original.
In every version, the antagonist is a now-charming, now-menacing psychopath named Max Cady (Javier Bardem), memorably played by Robert Mitchum in 1962 and Robert De Niro in 1991. In the novel and movies, Cady was serving time for rape; here it’s for the murder of his wife and unborn child, when new evidence suddenly springs him from prison after 17 years. We are invited to suspect this evidence from the very beginning, though this suspicion will itself become suspect. “Or is it?” is a question you’ll be prompted to ask through the series.
Read the full review.
In every version, the antagonist is a now-charming, now-menacing psychopath named Max Cady (Javier Bardem), memorably played by Robert Mitchum in 1962 and Robert De Niro in 1991. In the novel and movies, Cady was serving time for rape; here it’s for the murder of his wife and unborn child, when new evidence suddenly springs him from prison after 17 years. We are invited to suspect this evidence from the very beginning, though this suspicion will itself become suspect. “Or is it?” is a question you’ll be prompted to ask through the series.
Read the full review.
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‘Not Suitable for Work’
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Avantika and Ella Hunt in Hulu’s “Not Suitable For Work.”
(Gwen Capistran / Disney)
Following not exactly in the recent footsteps of “Adults” and “I Love L.A.,” “Not Suitable for Work” on Hulu is an amiable, sweet-tempered romantic ensemble comedy with a heftier than usual emphasis on professional ambition. (See title, above.) Created by Mindy Kaling, it’s set in New York, the city that never sleeps, not in order to party, but to get something on somebody’s desk first thing in the morning.
As on “Friends,” the main characters occupy two New York apartments separated by a hallway. In one live Josh (Jack Martin), Davis (Will Angus), and Kel (Nicholas Duvernay); Kel has known Josh since they were 12; Davis and Josh were in college together. In the other, we find Abby (Avantika), who as the curtain rises is being joined by AJ (Ella Hunt), her college friend, replacing Abby’s boyfriend, who moved to Nashville to be a country singer.
“Not Suitable” isn’t exactly chaste — there is some smooching, and a very little bit of sex — but there is an old-fashioned modesty to it that seems more lifelike than shows in which characters are getting busy all the time and sex is the constantly discussed be all and end all.
Read the full review.
As on “Friends,” the main characters occupy two New York apartments separated by a hallway. In one live Josh (Jack Martin), Davis (Will Angus), and Kel (Nicholas Duvernay); Kel has known Josh since they were 12; Davis and Josh were in college together. In the other, we find Abby (Avantika), who as the curtain rises is being joined by AJ (Ella Hunt), her college friend, replacing Abby’s boyfriend, who moved to Nashville to be a country singer.
“Not Suitable” isn’t exactly chaste — there is some smooching, and a very little bit of sex — but there is an old-fashioned modesty to it that seems more lifelike than shows in which characters are getting busy all the time and sex is the constantly discussed be all and end all.
Read the full review.
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‘Spider-Noir’
Drama Watch on Prime Video
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Nicolas Cage in “Spider-Noir.”
(Aaron Epstein/Prime)
The endlessly exploitable Spider-Man is back in “Spider-Noir,” a retro tale set in a recognizable New York in an inconsistent 1933 (to judge by a preponderance of cultural referents).
Shot in “authentic” black and white, the eight-episode series, which streams on Prime Video, is something of a stunt, but one that offers a reasonable, (imperfectly) period-appropriate approach to the material. An available colorized version, which seems primarily a sop to younger viewers who refuse to watch anything in black and white, works less well, flattening and softening the image. You can probably tell which I’d choose, but you do you.
Nicolas Cage, in his first live-action television role, plays Ben Reilly, a down-at-the-heels private eye, spiking his morning coffee with whiskey helpfully provided by his knowing secretary, Janet (Karen Rodriguez), and barely scraping by on the occasional divorce case.
The pacing can drag at times. The music goes everywhere but the represented period and characters quote lines from movies yet to be released. The writing and the acting boldly flirt with cliche and caricature, which, as the show is about 100% pastiche, drawn from films more than three-quarters of a century old, could scarcely be avoided and isn’t really a problem. (In a way, it’s the point.) But the overall what and why of the story is clever and the conclusion satisfying.
Read the full review.
Shot in “authentic” black and white, the eight-episode series, which streams on Prime Video, is something of a stunt, but one that offers a reasonable, (imperfectly) period-appropriate approach to the material. An available colorized version, which seems primarily a sop to younger viewers who refuse to watch anything in black and white, works less well, flattening and softening the image. You can probably tell which I’d choose, but you do you.
Nicolas Cage, in his first live-action television role, plays Ben Reilly, a down-at-the-heels private eye, spiking his morning coffee with whiskey helpfully provided by his knowing secretary, Janet (Karen Rodriguez), and barely scraping by on the occasional divorce case.
The pacing can drag at times. The music goes everywhere but the represented period and characters quote lines from movies yet to be released. The writing and the acting boldly flirt with cliche and caricature, which, as the show is about 100% pastiche, drawn from films more than three-quarters of a century old, could scarcely be avoided and isn’t really a problem. (In a way, it’s the point.) But the overall what and why of the story is clever and the conclusion satisfying.
Read the full review.
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‘The Boroughs’
Science Fiction Watch on Netflix
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Denis O’Hare as Wally, Alfre Woodard as Judy, Alfred Molina as Sam and Clarke Peters as Art in Netflix’s “The Boroughs.”
(Netflix)
What do we have here? Some of my very favorite actors — Alfred Molina, Alfre Woodard, Clarke Peters and Geena Davis — starring in an eight-episode, B-grade sci-fi comedy-drama, “The Boroughs,” on Netflix.
Molina plays Sam Cooper, a retired engineer — that will be important — being brought grumbling to the Boroughs, a posh, city-sized retirement community plopped down in the middle of the Southwestern desert. Sam’s late wife, Lily (Jane Kaczmarek, in flashbacks and dreams), had planned the move, but she died suddenly, while they were dancing to Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” which will become a kind of trigger and motif going forth.
Mired in grief, Sam is initially reluctant to interact with his new neighbors, until former weatherman Jack (Bill Pullman) breaks down his defenses. Judy Daniels (Alfre Woodard) used to be a reporter, her husband Art (Clarke Peters) is a pot-smoking old hippie who pretends to go golfing but heads off to a ghost town where he grows mushrooms, “searching for proof that there’s more to life than just knockin’ about and hangin’ out.” Wally Baker (Denis O’Hare) used to be a doctor, but now needs one. (It’s cancer, and terminal, though it doesn’t show.)
They have complicated relationships, but there’s nothing better for ironing things out than creeping together through dark tunnels by flashlight, hoping that nothing jumps out at you, engaging in weightless banter as you go.
Read the full review.
Molina plays Sam Cooper, a retired engineer — that will be important — being brought grumbling to the Boroughs, a posh, city-sized retirement community plopped down in the middle of the Southwestern desert. Sam’s late wife, Lily (Jane Kaczmarek, in flashbacks and dreams), had planned the move, but she died suddenly, while they were dancing to Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” which will become a kind of trigger and motif going forth.
Mired in grief, Sam is initially reluctant to interact with his new neighbors, until former weatherman Jack (Bill Pullman) breaks down his defenses. Judy Daniels (Alfre Woodard) used to be a reporter, her husband Art (Clarke Peters) is a pot-smoking old hippie who pretends to go golfing but heads off to a ghost town where he grows mushrooms, “searching for proof that there’s more to life than just knockin’ about and hangin’ out.” Wally Baker (Denis O’Hare) used to be a doctor, but now needs one. (It’s cancer, and terminal, though it doesn’t show.)
They have complicated relationships, but there’s nothing better for ironing things out than creeping together through dark tunnels by flashlight, hoping that nothing jumps out at you, engaging in weightless banter as you go.
Read the full review.
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‘Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’
Thriller Watch on Apple TV
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Tatiana Maslany in Apple TV’s “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.”
(Zach Dilgard/Apple TV)
Tatiana Maslany is the best reason to watch “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed,” a thriller on Apple TV, and since there is a lot of her in it, across 10 episodes, you can take that as a recommendation, of a sort.
Maslany plays Paula, a single mother, divorced and lonely. For some time, she has been spending time (and money) online with Trevor (Brandon Flynn), a “cam boy,” mostly for conversation, with a side of video sex. It seems nice and friendly — a relationship. Then one day, as she watches, Trevor is attacked by a masked intruder who speaks a few words in a foreign tongue before the picture goes blank.
A new character is introduced every so often to wake up the plot and complicate things; revelation follows revelation until revelation fatigue sets in, and the end we arrive at — the solution to the mystery — feels a little silly, out of proportion to the violent trouble it’s caused. (This may be the point, of course.) Evil, it’s banal. Still, there’s much to enjoy.
Read the full review.
Maslany plays Paula, a single mother, divorced and lonely. For some time, she has been spending time (and money) online with Trevor (Brandon Flynn), a “cam boy,” mostly for conversation, with a side of video sex. It seems nice and friendly — a relationship. Then one day, as she watches, Trevor is attacked by a masked intruder who speaks a few words in a foreign tongue before the picture goes blank.
A new character is introduced every so often to wake up the plot and complicate things; revelation follows revelation until revelation fatigue sets in, and the end we arrive at — the solution to the mystery — feels a little silly, out of proportion to the violent trouble it’s caused. (This may be the point, of course.) Evil, it’s banal. Still, there’s much to enjoy.
Read the full review.
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