Manhunt
SimilarAgatha Christie's Poirot Anna Karenina, Dark Winds, Dexter, Fallen, Fate/Apocrypha, Fearless, Game of Thrones, Gossip Girl,
Hilda Furacão Jack the Ripper, Jewels, La Mante,
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Studio3 Arts Entertainment, Apple Studios,
Making Abraham Lincoln or Hamish Linklater the least interesting thing about your television series is no easy feat. That's especially the case when it features Linklater playing the 16th President of the United States. Yet, somehow, the Monica Beletsky-created MANHUNT, adapted from the James L. Swanson tome of the same name, manages to do just that. And that is 100 percent a compliment.
Often forgotten is that Lincoln was not John Wilkes Booth (Anthony Boyle) and his co-conspirators’ only target. The schemers also marked Vice President Andrew Johnson (Glenn Morshower, an acting veteran turning in his best work.) and Secretary of State William Seward (Larry Pine) as targets. (The series additionally implies that the show’s lead, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies), may have been on that list, but that doesn’t appear in historical texts.) By opening on the far larger plot that almost immediately unraveled due to bungling and cold feet, MANHUNT quickly asserts its intentions. While catching Booth is the series’ splashiest element, it is certainly not all it has on its mind.
Tobias Menzies has hat, will travel. (AppleTV+)
If anything, the eponymous search provides the show a means of taking stock of America immediately after the Civil War. Ping-ponging around in time, Manhunt provides a glimpse of how a collection of Americans experienced life after General Lee’s surrender. The derailing of a far more extensive restructuring of America feels every bit as mourned here as the fallen President. Continue Reading →
Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan
SimilarChuck, Condor, Des, Dexter, Game of Thrones, Gossip Girl, Lupin,
Pride and Prejudice Tales from the Neverending Story,
Generally speaking, we avoid personalizing our reviews at The Spool. This isn’t the early 2000s. No one needs to know about my journey to my couch to watch Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan Season 4. That said, please allow me a brief personal indulgence that I promise will prove illustrious. In an effort to get ahead of deadlines, I watched the season’s six episodes in a day with a plan to write the review the next day. However, by the time I sat down to write that review about 26 hours later, I realized I had to watch the whole thing again. In a day’s time, I had forgotten too much to write a review in good faith. Continue Reading →
Stranger Things
The one thing that no one can deny is Stranger Things Season 4 remains aggressively itself right up to the end. Its final two episodes, feature-length films onto themselves, serve everything that one could enjoy about the first seven episodes with a side of everything that frustrates and annoys. The good news is that the bad bits remain a side dish, not the main course. The better news is that ratio tips even further in favor of what’s enjoyable. Continue Reading →
A Black Lady Sketch Show
Studio3 Arts Entertainment,
Bringing back favorite characters and connecting some surprising threads throughout sketches in previous seasons, season 3 of the Emmy Award winning A Black Lady Sketch Show is back and funnier than ever, throwing comedic punches with an all-star cast of hilarious heavy-hitters. Continue Reading →
Ozark
SimilarBrimstone, Broadchurch, Jack the Ripper, Tientsin Mystic,
StudioMRC,
Previous seasons of Netflix’s Ozark followed Martin and Wendy Byrde’s (Jason Bateman and Laura Linney) quest to survive death and prove their family’s worth to the cartel and their violent rivals. Now, in the fourth and final season, the Byrdes must figure out if they can survive without their dark, criminal lives. They sacrificed a lot to get to the top—but what would they sacrifice to stay there? Thanks to this ask and its answers, Ozark Season 4 Part 1 is slow-burn suspense at its finest, with the Byrde’s maneuvering to stay on top, no matter the personal costs. Continue Reading →
Colin in Black and White
I wasn’t alive during the days of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Muhammad Ali, and Jim Brown’s stands against violent forms of discrimination. Therefore, Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to back down from his principles despite obvious NFL blacklisting makes him the closest my generation has to a genuinely revolutionary athlete. In refusing to stand for the national anthem in the wake of racial discrimination and murder by the U.S. Government, Kaepernick demonstrated he is who certain athletes (I’m looking at you, Kyrie Irving) think they are. Continue Reading →
Heist
The appetite for true crime stories can seem insatiable. Mountains of podcasts, TV series, and movies, the latter two sent directly to streaming services, have been released over the last decade, making it more difficult for these narratives to find a wider audience. Netflix’s newest documentary series, Heist, attempts to cash in on this trend to mixed results, telling three stories over the course of six episodes. Continue Reading →
I'll Be Gone in the Dark
SimilarLuther, Murder Most Horrid,
StudioHBO Documentary Films,
Nearly a year after the series aired on HBO, there is a new episode of I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, a docuseries based on Michelle McNamara’s book of same name. This time around, the epilogue serves as a coda, bringing the story of The Golden State Killer (and the root McNamara’s obsession) full circle. Continue Reading →
The Handmaid's Tale
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In the spirit of full disclosure, I need to say this: I’m not a big fan of The Handmaid’s Tale. There’s something about a show that is so unrelentingly grim—without even the occasional glimmers of light—that just makes me feel like I’ve been ground down into a salty meat paste. This is why I checked out of Game of Thrones before I even knew the words “Red Wedding,” because I couldn’t bear to watch Sansa Stark beaten, humiliated, and tortured anymore. So while I can say that Handmaid’s has strong writing and still boasts some of the most gorgeous photography of any show out there, I still don’t enjoy it. Can anyone say they actually enjoy it? And when did the incessant castigation of women become primetime entertainment? Continue Reading →
YASUKE -ヤスケ-
SimilarHina Logic: From Luck & Logic, Out of This World,
Japan. 1582. The samurai general Akechi Mitsuhide betrayed his liege lord Oda Nobunaga and sets his castle alight. Trapped by the blaze, Nobunaga elected to die by seppuku - ritual suicide. His friend and retainer Yasuke - a Black man and the first foreigner ever granted the rank of samurai - acted as his second. Not long after Nobunaga's death, Yasuke vanished from the historical record. Continue Reading →
MINDHUNTER
If anybody could find something new to add to pop culture’s fixation with serial killers and true crime, it would likely be David Fincher. Se7en announced him as a major director while Zodiac revealed him as a master. The Fincher style – dark lighting and sickly colors, obsessive attention to detail, unblinking looks at violence – has served as a template not just for other movies, but also for TV shows of both the prestigious and potboiler variety and for the ever-increasing number of investigative podcasts and Netflix documentaries. In 2017, Fincher returned to the serial killer subgenre by taking his project Mindhunter to the streaming service. Continue Reading →