9 Best TV Shows Similar to 23.5

Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), and the rest of the Slough House reprobates are back for Slow Horses Season 4, and things are, unsurprisingly, not good. While a bombing in a bustling London shopping center consumes most of Britain’s intelligence community, River’s grandfather, David (Jonathan Pryce), has wandered into a very different sort of fight. His memory and cognitive skills are unraveling, triggering, among other problems, a rapid increase in his paranoia. One night, someone close to him drops in for a visit, and moments later, David guns down the visitor. But is everything what it seems? Questions of what family members owe one another take center stage as David’s confused and deadly actions expose the previously largely unexplored complexity of the Cartwright family. As one member of Slough House runs to France to investigate a single errant clue, the rest of the team is left behind to protect David from Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley), the new head of MI5’s “dogs”. While seemingly far less corrupt than her predecessors, she’s just as disinterested in tolerating the Horses’ nonsense or willing to trust their pleas for more time. Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Christopher Chung, Tom Brooke, Kadiff Kirwan, and Rosalind Eleazar are all here. You got a problem with that? (AppleTV+) Coming at the Horses from the other side is a seemingly unstoppable black-ops mercenary (Tom Wozniczka) trying to clean up the loose ends of…something. David might have once been able to fill in the blanks, but with dementia steadily robbing him of his past and his present consumed with guilt and trauma, he can’t conjure any explanations. As he stalks the members of Slough House, Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) tries to push the new First Chair, the hesitant and PR-focused Claude Whelan (James Callis), to bury anything and everything having to do with the bombing and its apparent perpetrator. Continue Reading →

Before things go too far, it’s important to offer this disclaimer. Bad Monkey’s monkey isn’t especially naughty. Or even all that present. So people with particular opinions on animal performers, now you know. Proceed accordingly. For everyone else, Bad Monkey isn’t bad. In fact, it’s largely quite good. The series grabs your attention with an opener that accurately captures the tone of the ten episodes to come. An arrogant, nouveau riche-coded husband on honeymoon reels in a big one. Only problem is it turns out not to be a fish. Instead, a severed arm, seemingly flipping off the world, hangs off the hook. His new bride screams inconsolably as a deckhand snaps a pic of the man with his catch. On the deck above, the rent-a-captain dryly mumbles to himself about the business of making dreams come true. It is loud, over the top, funny, and a bit horrifying when you stop to think about it. Continue Reading →

To say creator Kathleen Jordan’s adaptation of The Decameron is loose is to enjoy the gift of significant understatement. The source material, an Italian collection of 100 tales “told” to one another by ten characters, was a kind of Canterbury Tales for the plague set. Or, more accurately, Tales was a Decameron for the Brits. The Italian work, after all, has about 50 years on Chaucer’s book. While the TV series does gather ten characters together, initially to celebrate the arranged wedding of Pampinea (Zosia Mamet) and Leonardo (Davy Eduard King), then to try to ride out the Bubonic, it largely ditches the tale-telling. In its place is a satirical take on today’s class inequalities smuggled onto screen under the veil of a period black comedy. While likely conceived of during or in the wake of COVID’s darkest early days, the tones and themes update nicely to now. It does not reflect our modern situation as literally as it did in, say, April 2020. Nonetheless, it smartly captures how certain global tragedies cannot be dodged and how the rich and powerful will still try at the cost of the larger society. If only it landed its jokes as well. Zosia Mamet and Saoirse-Monica Jackson learn the importance of decanting from Jessica Plummer. (Giulia Parmigiani/Netflix) It isn’t for lack of talent. Tanya Reynolds—so good in Sex Education—proves she deserves a bigger stage, stepping into one of the lead roles as the handmaiden Licisca. She finds herself tethered to the vain and selfish Filomena (Jessica Plummer) as they journey to Leonardo’s estate. How the kind and socially conscious member of the servant class evolves in isolation as she tastes luxury and power for the first time is genuinely interesting and well-acted by Reynolds. A scene where she goes from faking kindness to the hypochondriac aristocrat Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin) to genuinely delight with him feels wonderfully organic and honest. Continue Reading →

About fifteen years ago, an era of “complicated” protagonists ruled the television landscape. These anti-heroes—Walter White, Don Draper—were the sort of people one wouldn’t associate in their day-to-day life. Safely sealed in a flat screen, though, and viewers couldn’t get enough of them. It was a glorious time to be unlikable on TV. Still, as Erik Kain pointed out, it was an honor almost entirely reserved for men. Sunny is a late-arriving corrective, centering a fully complex and often unlikable Rashida Jones. As Suzi, Jones ditches nearly everything that makes her an on-screen appealing presence in the likes of The Office and Parks and Recreation. She also flattens the traits that make her stand out as a character worthy of empathy in projects like Silo and On the Rocks. In place of those, she offers a dead-eyed stare that only sparks to life when castigating her mother-in-law Noriko (Judy Ongg), random bureaucrats, and, of course, the titular android Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura). Rashida Jones does not, and this can't be stressed enough, have time for this nonsense. (AppleTV+) It isn’t like she doesn’t have cause for anger and the thousand-mile gaze. As the opening minutes reveal, Suzi has justy lost her husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and son in a plane crash. However, as the series unfolds, it becomes clear Suzi can’t blame her unpleasantness entirely on grief. As revealed in flashbacks, she’s been hard-drinking and foul-mouthed for some time. Additionally, although partially owed to her dyslexia, she wields her failure to learn nearly any Japanese like a cudgel. It is yet another tool for holding the world at bay. That world includes, often, her spouse. Of course, his own drinking and pile of secrets hardly made him an ideal partner either. Continue Reading →

In Season 1, The Big Door Prize felt like a cracked mirror version of a small-town Stephen King story. When the Morpho Machine—a device that spits out a card revealing the user’s “potential”—arrives in Deerfield, it does indeed disrupt life. However, most Deerfield residents are nice. Or, at least, they're not mean in the “could be tempted by Randall Flagg or Leland Gaunt” way. As a result, the disruptions were more of a “the principal buys a motorcycle” and “that dad grieving the death of his son declares himself sheriff without ever abusing power.” No escalating series of pranks culminating in out-and-out bloodshed or betraying one’s former friends to the dark embodiment of evil found here. For those expecting The Big Door Prize Season 2 to start stacking the bodies like cordwood, I have bad news. It keeps the King’s small-town vibes without wandering into King’s “the secrets we keep will literally tear us apart” territory. Opening moments after Season 1’s end, the Morpho machine has stopped spitting out cards, instead offering the town folk a move to the next level. While the result is, essentially, yet another projective test, the results bring a distinctly different flavor to the mix. While the series retains a certain goofiness, it also gains a sadder complexity. The longer we look at the characters, the more forced their good-time silliness becomes. Instead of the exception, Season 1's Father Reuben (Damon Gupton) centric fourth episode feels more like Season 2’s template. Mary Holland and Josh Segarra nail the couples' costumes category. (AppleTV+) To find that tone, the series does reshuffle its character decks. Many of the students we met last year are nowhere to be seen, for instance. New characters are introduced, including a music teacher played by Justine Lupe. Others, like Cass’s (Gabrielle Dennis) best friend Nat (Mary Holland), get a much bigger spotlight. The overall result gives the series a stronger ensemble feel, even if it is not necessarily without downsides. Continue Reading →

There’s something undeniably inspired about casting Kristin Wiig as Maxine Simmons in Palm Royale. A social climber attempting to ingratiate herself into late 60s Palm Beach high society, Simmons shares with Wiig a certain constant desire to change herself. The actor's years at Saturday Night Live and subsequent film roles have established her as a chameleonic performer. She has enough versatility to play everyone from the painfully grounded to live-action cartoon characters. In this case, Wiig pours that talent into a woman trying desperately to be a different version of herself. As a kind of middle-aged conservative version of Tom Ripley, Wiig does indeed excel. The actor invests a mix of brute force cunning and barely hidden desperation in Simmons. That makes the would-be social maven compelling and repulsive in equal measure. Her machinations are too intriguing to ignore, but her very presence can be almost unendurable, especially for viewers with an overactive sense of vicarious embarrassment. Kristen Wiig and Allison Janney try to hash it out. (AppleTV+) The show also adds an interesting layer to her performance of wealth and class. Simmons’ claims often sound outlandish, the scrambling lies of someone trying to stay one step ahead of being exposed. However, Palm Royale slowly confirms a great many of them. Unlike Ripley or Saltburn’s Oliver Quick, she’s not a total fabrication. She has the credentials for the inner circle, but can’t stomach the time it takes.  Continue Reading →

Do we need another live-action Goosebumps adaptation? After a ’90s Fox Kids series and a pair of 2010s films, one would assume that the ground of turning Slappy the dummy and other frightening beings into flesh-and-blood creations has been well-trodden.  Continue Reading →

As the TV series Everything Now begins, Mia (Sophie Wilde) is eager for freedom. After spending months in a hospital undergoing treatment for her anorexia, her supervisor, Dr. Nell (Stephen Fry), has decided she’s well enough to return to school with her best friends Becca (Lauryn Ajufo), Cam (Harry Cadby), and Will (Noah Thomas). Cooped up inside for what seemed like an eternity, Mia is bursting with enthusiasm about finally undergoing many teenage rites of passage like first dates and big parties. Continue Reading →