39 Best TV Shows Similar to The Summer I Turned Pretty
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Laid
Sometimes, having any connection to your ex(es) can feel like a curse. In Laid—a Nahnatchka Khan and Sally Bradford McKenna adaptation of the Kirsty Fisher/Marieke Hardy Australian series of the same name—that feeling becomes literalized. That’s because the former sexual partners of Ruby (Stephanie Hsu) are dying, in the order they slept with her, with increasing regularity. Some of their deaths are sad but expected (cancer), while others are shocking and bloody (an accidental gunshot). Regardless of the cause, though, they all seem marked for death. To solve the puzzle of why, Ruby enlists her best friend/roommate, the true crime-loving AJ (Zosia Mamet). Or rather, AJ nominates herself and insists on solving the case. The duo receives assistance from Richie (Michael Angarano), the one of Ruby’s exes who immediately buys the death curse and lasts long enough to join up. The group hides their actions from AJ’s on-again/off-again fiancé Zack (Andre Hyland), a streamer who expresses love almost entirely through gifts of stuffed animals. Zosia Mamet knows that every sleuth (or murderer) needs an evidence wall. (James Dittiger/PEACOCK) The already lousy situation is made worse by Ruby developing a crush on her current client Isaac (Tommy Martinez), a handsome, sensitive client planning his parents’ huge anniversary party blowout. Besides having a beautiful bikini-wearing marine biologist girlfriend, Ruby knows she is dangerous, even if she has no idea exactly how or why. Continue Reading →
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Silo
About 18 months ago, I praised a new AppleTV+ series for its “frequently elegiac and hypnotic” tone. With its return, I renew that compliment. Despite growing in scope and ambition, Silo Season 2 remains committed to its quiet, insular brand of sci-fi. That’s very much a positive. The decision to split the action this season between Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) in exile in the apparently ruined, abandoned Silo 17 and the rest of the cast back at home base is more of a mixed bag. The cross-cutting action isn’t new; Season 1 also bounced between characters, levels, and subplots. However, separating the show’s two most compelling characters—Juliette and head of IT/Mayor Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins)—does deny the audience some great verbal sparring. That doesn’t mean Silo Season 2 lacks for great interactions for either, though. Juliette quickly discovers that 17 is not as abandoned as it seemed. A man, Solo (Steven Zahn), lives in that Silo’s IT vault and refuses to leave. Zahn’s vacillation between laid-back vibes and sharp temper matches Ferguson’s mix of resentment and buried empathy well. You know the performers are in the pocket when they can sell a version of the “How did you get the name Solo?” from that Star Wars spinoff with sincerity and sadness. Continue Reading →
Interior Chinatown
Interior Chinatown looks great, features plenty of talent, and is rich with metatext as it explores the cliches of police procedurals and depictions of Asian Americans in media. And yet, it never quite comes together as a satisfyingly cohesive whole in the five episodes provided to critics. The overall plot, taken from showrunner Charles Yu’s novel of the same name, initially presents as reasonably straightforward. Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang) grew up in his brother’s (Chris Pang) shadow and was largely happy to do so. However, his brother’s disappearance rocked the family and left Willis rudderless. Now, Willis works at his uncle’s restaurant with his friend Fatty (Ronny Chieng), and his ambitions only reach as high as being a witness to a crime. Chloe Bennet always seems to catch the breeze just right. (Mike Taing/Hulu) When he seemingly achieves just that—seeing the abduction of a woman on the sidewalk outside the restaurant—it drops him into an increasingly surreal world populated by TV-perfect cops Turner (Sullivan Jones) and Green (Lisa Gilroy). He quickly leapfrogs from witness to a variety of cliched parts for Asian actors that double as episode titles, including “Tech Guy” and “Chinatown Expert,” teaming with Detective Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet). Like Willis, she’s an outsider hoping for hero status. Unlike him, she’s in the game and far better at faking it til you make it. Continue Reading →
Cross
When it comes to storytelling, especially when adapting a character that has starred in more than 30 novels and three films, it doesn’t matter if the plot relies on tropes. It matters how one utilizes those tropes. When it comes to the Ben Watkins-created Cross, there are few actors better suited to breathing new life into the Psychology PhD having Detective Alex Cross than Aldis Hodge. Hodge, an actor who engenders goodwill no matter where he pops up, is an excellent fit for the character. He gets the mix of intellect, self-righteous fury, and tendency towards self-destructive isolation just right. Unfortunately, he’s doing it in service of a series that isn’t close to the same level. The good news is he isn’t alone in playing above Cross’s level of quality. Isaiah Mustafa brings a gruff clarity to Alex’s lifelong best friend and current partner on the force, John Sampson. His Sampson seems to get that he’d be the hero in any other story, but as long as there’s Cross, he’ll always be second on life’s call sheet. The performance isn’t heavy with jealousy, though, but rather a frustration that his friend can’t stop making choices that hurt him and his family in the name of protecting them. Alona Tal, as the duo’s FBI contact Kayla Craig, is another standout. Her mix of “one of the boys” attitude and nonstop flirtation makes her a vibrant presence on-screen. That brings important moments of lightness to a show that too often confuses dourness as proof of serious storytelling. Who wouldn't trust Ryan Eggold? Nothing suspicious about his look. (Keri Anderson/Prime Video) As alluded to above, Cross isn’t an especially unique offering. Making the smart choice to tell an original story rather than adapt a specific novel does not lead to the show avoiding most of the genre’s trappings. There is a dangerous serial killer who’s in a cat-and-mouse game with Cross and his team. Like most pop culture serial killers—but very few real-life ones—he has a bizarre gimmick. In this case, he likes to pick victims that resemble executed convicted murderers and make them look almost exactly like killers through force-feeding, haircuts, cosmetic surgery, and more. When he achieves his vision, he murders them in the same manner their look-a-likes were executed. The police, inspiringly, call him Fanboy. Continue Reading →
Say Nothing
There is objective good in this world, and it is possible to know it. That does not, however, mean that everything done in pursuit of that good is itself objectively reasonable. That’s the underlying message of so much of Say Nothing, a nine-episode look at the Troubles in Ireland predominantly through the eyes of former IRA soldier/terrorist Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew predominantly, Maxine Peake in middle age). For instance, it is objectively true that Ireland deserves to be united and free of British rule. Does it follow, then, that bombings in British downtown centers are objectively good? Regrettable but necessary? Acts of terrorism? Similarly, the series considers (although with admittedly less zeal) the idea that it is objectively true that British citizens deserve lives free of random acts of violence. Does that make all actions to crush the organization behind that violence acceptable? Does that extend to mistreatment of the people who live next to members of that organization, people who never made a bomb or even threw a rock but also don’t report their neighbors, friends, and family for the same? Continue Reading →
Teacup
Straight away, to be clear, Teacup is a corker of small-scale science fiction paranoia. It clearly has thoughts about life in our country and the world on its mind. It utilizes the genre's potential for metaphor well throughout. Still, one feels compelled to note that series creator Ian McCulloch has barely adapted Stinger by Robert McCammon. Instead of a Texas town circling the drain, the setting is a few farmsteads in rural Georgia. There are fewer characters—none of the characters in the book are present—and subplots like the rival gangs and desperate economic conditions don't exist. As a result, the season jettisons a lot of themes, such as explorations of racial prejudice, crimes real and imagined, and "dying" rural communities. While the show still uses its tale to reflect some larger modern-day concerns, those not interrogated still constitute a loss. Without them, Teacup tells a far smaller story. All of that acknowledged, it is essential to review the series as it exists, not as it could've been. So while a closer adaptation done well would've likely yielded a richer story, this is the last this review will make mention of it. Moreover, I have no intention of holding that possibility against the show as it exists. Continue Reading →
Disclaimer
If you’ve seen or read enough stories about vengeance, chances are good you’ve encountered the saying, “He who seeks revenge digs two graves,” or some variation. Likely misattributed to Confucius, its meaning nonetheless carries weight. The new drama Disclaimer wrestles with the adage far more seriously than most other takes on the act of seeking catharsis through reprisal. Teacher Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline) has just finished self-destructively barreling into his own firing, quite the fall for a former Teacher of the Year. He’s alone, a widower, his wife Nancy (Lesley Manville) dead after a protracted time with cancer. However, in many ways, he’s been alone since their son Jonathan (Louis Partridge) died about two decades earlier. That’s when his wife began to pull away from him and didn’t stop until her death. With his newfound time, he begins to clean out the closets and wardrobes left unused since her passing. Among the debris, he discovers a series of objects that lead to a manuscript. In its pages, Nancy lays out their son’s final days in Italy. More importantly, she places the blame for his death firmly at the feet of Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett). Catherine is now a highly successful documentary filmmaker married to financier Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) with an adult son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Continue Reading →
Nobody Wants This
The pleasures of the romantic comedy are well-documented. When they work, they make for the best kind of fantasy. The ones where our all too numerous flaws may stall but never derail us. Of course, their failures are similarly well documented, making the ups and downs of lust and love feel like products. Moving the genre from its typical medium—film—to television with the new series Nobody Wants This carries the threat to magnify those shortcomings until they blot out anything else. And then there’s that title. Oof. If ever there was a juicy fastball down the middle for critics looking for an easy headline dunk, it’s that one. It’s more than a relief then to find that blowing out rom-com tropes from an under two-hour film to a 10-episode season helps, not harms, the storytelling. Nobody Wants This isn’t doing anything revolutionary, but it plays the hits well. It makes a thing you’ve seen a hundred permutations of feel fresh and lively. Sorry, lovers of ironically mean-spirited headlines. The story is a tale of mismatched lovers. Joanne (Kristen Bell) cohosts a podcast with her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) dedicated to their love life’s successes and failures—mostly failures. Her producer Ashley (Sherry Cola) has her over for a small gathering, warning Joanne there’s a rabbi in the house. Joanne jokes with another guest, Noah (Adam Brody), about it, their chemistry immediate. When Noah blesses dinner, Joanne realizes her error. Continue Reading →
Slow Horses
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 →
The Decameron
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 →
Those About to Die
There’s probably something meaningful to say about the current state of politics and the seeming revival of the swords and sandals genre; unfortunately, Peacock’s new series Those About to Die engenders very little desire to engage with its material on any deeper level. Created by Robert Rodat and directed by Roland Emmerich and Marco Kruezpaintner, Those About to Die is a historical drama centered around the fading rule of Emperor Vespasian (Anthony Hopkins), his sons Titus (Tom Hughes) and Domitian (Jojo Macari, eating every piece of available scenery), and the bloody and politically treacherous world of chariot racing. Set in 79 AD (reading up on that year will provide some spoilers if history is a spoiler), Those About to Die wants to have it all. It’s a drama! It’s an epic! It’s historical fiction! It’s sexy! It’s violent! Well, sure, it’s all of these things, but sadly none are enough to raise it above its vaguely ‘90s television miniseries feel. The series sags under the weight of its scale. Feeling at times like nothing so much as “James Michener’s ROME," Those About to Die features no fewer than 15 primary characters, many of whom fade into the background and reappear with such little fanfare that the audience struggles to keep track. Though the storylines blend fairly swiftly after an overpacked premiere, the characters make so many rash and death-defying decisions per episode that nothing seems to carry any sort of weight. Anything dramatic that can happen does but with varying (and unearned) degrees of consequence. There are attacks on characters but then they’re fine; characters lose money and then get more. When it feels like everyone has plot armor until a “surprise,” nothing is a surprise anymore. Continue Reading →
Sunny
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 →
The Tattooist of Auschwitz
The Tattooist of Auschwitz opens on Lale Sokolov (Harvey Keitel in the 2000s “present-day” sequences) living in Australia. He's decided the time has come to commit his life story to paper. A nurse with writing aspirations Heather Morris (Melanie Lynskey), (the real-life writer behind the inspired by actual events but labeled historical fiction source material) is referred by someone in the community to help. With little prologue, he dives in, describing how he "volunteered" for a program about defending Jewish communities. Unfortunately, it was a trap. The train ride takes him to Auschwitz instead. While imprisoned there, he (Jonah Hauer-King in flashbacks) became one of the tattooists. The position leads him to meet the love of his life, fellow prisoner Gita Furman (Anna Próchniak). Additionally, the position gave him a certain level of consideration not accorded to others, including access to medications. On the other hand, he faces resentment among the prisoners and decades of survivor’s guilt. The book—and its two subsequent spinoffs/sequels—has a certain amount of controversy surrounding it. While I’m not an expert on the Holocaust, I feel it is at least important to acknowledge that fact. Wanda Witek-Malicka from the Auschwitz Memorial Research Center publicly worried that the book engaged in excessive “exaggerations, misinterpretations and understatements” that could render its text “dangerous and disrespectful to history.” Continue Reading →
Franklin
Michael Douglas's career so deeply connects him to as specific kind of late 20th/early 21st Century man. As a result, throwing him back to the 18th Century and into the body of Benjamin Franklin feels deeply counterintuitive. It is not surprising that Franklin—an adaptation of the book A Great Improvisation by Stacy Schiff—is one of the few period projects Douglas has done, joining the likes of The Ghost and the Darkness and those flashback scenes in the Ant-Man films. What is surprising, and to the series’ credit, is how quickly that strangeness recedes. It isn’t that Douglas manages to fade into the role of Franklin until he disappears entirely, but he does manage to recede enough that he doesn’t disrupt the show’s reality. In some ways, Douglas proves a surprisingly apt selection. No stranger to playing womanizers on screen, Douglas easily finds the correct valence to portray Franklin’s specific flavor of late 18th-century skirt chaser. The metacommentary works in his favor as well, an aging icon who retains much of his skill but perhaps can no longer command the same buzz or box office returns embodying an aging icon whose mind remains sharp but whose body—and possibly will—has been beaten up by life and time. While almost a decade older than the Franklin he’s portraying, Douglas also excels at the moments where the audience witnesses the statesman energized like old times. Thibault de Montalembert has neither the time nor the interest in your lame attempts at Call My Agent/Dix pour cent joke attempts. (AppleTV+) Still, the script too frequently hamstrings the actor. Not bad by any means, the writing still suffers for trying to match Franklin’s reputation. It’s the old conundrum of trying to build a series, film, or play around a singular piece of art. How does a creator convince the audience that someone is singing the most fantastic song ever without truly writing the most fantastic song ever? Similarly, how do writers provide dialogue to what is, by historical reputation, one of the greatest wits in American History without simply quoting his greatest hits? Continue Reading →
RIPLEY
Tom Ripley doesn't exist. Not just in the sense that he's a fictional creation of thriller novelist extraordinaire Patricia Highsmith, no; as a man, Ripley is a chimera, a shadow, a formless void that hungrily sucks in whatever nourishment it can from whatever or whoever is around him. Damn the consequences. He's one of literature's (and, in the case of several cinematic adaptations, moviedom's) greatest conmen, a remora with nothing behind the eyes except the next game, the next mark, the next place to flee when suspicions run too high. Now, writer/director/showrunner Steven Zaillian has adapted the first of Highsmith's novels into an eight-episode miniseries for Netflix (it was originally slated for Showtime before they sold it), and by virtue of those pedigrees, it's maybe the best original series the streamer has put out all year. When we first meet Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott), he's a low-level grifter eking out a living with some street-level mail fraud in New York City. But one day, a private dick (Bokeem Woodbine) taps him on the shoulder and hauls him in front of a wealthy shipping magnate (filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan) for a special mission: travel to Italy on his dime to find his layabout painter-wannabe son Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) and bring him back home to fulfill his business responsibilities. Ripley doesn't know the man, but he agrees -- the chance to start all over somewhere else (and be bankrolled for it) is too great. So he swans off to Atrani, a small beachside villa where he ingratiates himself to the pampered Dickie and his writer girlfriend, Marge (Dakota Fanning), two people as insulated by their wealth as they are by their respective artistic mediocrities. RIPLEY. (L to R) Dakota Fanning as Marge Sherwood and Johnny Flynn as Dickie Greenleaf in RIPLEY. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024 Unlike previous adaptations of the material, Zaillian barely (if ever) clues us into any kind of deeper humanity lurking under the surface for Tom Ripley. Matt Damon's version from The Talented Mr. Ripley was motivated by emotional impulse; here, Scott plays him like a reptile. There's something downright alien about his cold tilt of the head, those shark-like eyes (aided by Robert Elswit's chiaroscuro photography, which we'll get to later), the way his delivery teeters between blase deference and a flat, manipulative affect. He seems less like a desperate hanger-on than a predator, one all too happy to take rich people for everything they've got and discard them when he's sucked all the meat off their bones. He doesn't covet the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and even the script's frequent allusions to Ripley's subtextual lust for Dickie don't seem to fully account for his motivations. Continue Reading →
Palm Royale
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 →
Apples Never Fall
The expression, “The book was better,” has become a truism in adaptation, an assumption where the few exceptions only prove the rule. But what’s a creator to do when the source material is deeply flawed? If you’re Apples Never Fall creator Melanie Marnich, you make several cosmetic changes to Liane Moriarty’s novel. The drama moves from Australia to West Palm Beach. The four Delaney children—Troy (Jake Lacy), Brooke (Essie Randles), Amy (Alison Brie), and Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner)—are no longer uniformly tall and olive-skinned. Quite the opposite, really, on the skin tone front. Relationships are shuffled a bit. Unfortunately, these changes fail to elevate the series. The broad strokes of the plot itself are intriguing. The Delaney parents Joy (Annette Bening) and Stan (Sam Neill) have finally retired from a lifetime of running a tennis center, including their own stints as players and coaches. Rather than a delightful occasion, it churns up all manner of unprocessed relationship issues. Stan is cantankerous and competitive, oscillating between diminishing everyone around him with words and beating them all over the court. Joy, on the other hand, expected to spend her golden years catching up with her children, who lack the time or interest in doing the same. Continue Reading →
Lessons in Chemistry
Despite the lead character’s penchant for brutal honesty and empirical truths, Lessons in Chemistry is not a series viewers should turn to for a gritty look at early 60s gender relations, race relations, or workers’ rights. That’s not to say the word of the Lee Eisenberg-created series—adapted from a Bonnie Garmus novel of the same name—exists in a conflict-free world. It’s there’s a bittersweet gentleness that underpins and surrounds the proceedings, conflicts and all. Continue Reading →
Justified: City Primeval
How does anyone justify a revival? The original Justified gave viewers a conclusion in the first 30 minutes and an epilogue with the last 16. It gave Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) a fitting third act, living in Miami as a part-time dad to his daughter and finally enjoying freedom from the town he worked so hard to escape. So how does a creative team go from “we dug coal together?” to that nearly happy ending to a brand-new Givens tale? The simple answer is to head north. Continue Reading →
The Crowded Room
Danny Sullivan (Tom Holland) sits in interrogation. He's been picked up for a seemingly random shooting on the busy streets of New York City. He insists that his friend Ariana (Sasha Lane) fired the gun, but the police can’t find her. Nor can they locate Danny’s Israeli landlord Yitzhak (Lior Raz). Worse, when they start digging, they find a pattern of people disappearing around the young man. NYPD Detective Matty Dunne (Thomas Sadoski) feels confident the department has accidentally brought in a serial killer. To prove his point—and find the victims—he brings in his ex, Professor and Psychologist Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried), to conduct a series of interrogations. Continue Reading →
City on Fire
As an act of nostalgia, City on Fire has plenty to offer anyone who lived or spent lots of time in New York City in the summer of 2003. The new series, created by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, evokes the era matter-of-factly. Besides nailing the look of early 21st Century Manhattan, it captures the sense of a city in transition. The groundwork for the gentrification that swept across Manhattan and Brooklyn had just been activated. Mayor Bloomberg was taking what Giuliani had begun and pushing it farther and faster than “America’s Mayor” ever managed. And while the series eventually stomps the theme into the ground, the tendency to wonder if every adverse event was evidence of terrorism was very alive. Continue Reading →