59 Best TV Shows Similar to Black Mirror (Page 3)

It’s difficult to recall how sneakily Stranger Things came upon us on July 15, 2016. Like so many Netflix releases, the stream launched the series with surprisingly little effort to grab people’s attention. However, throughout that summer weekend, the buzz quickly built to a roar. By the end of July, the show had become Netflix’s hottest property. Six years later, it is the streamer’s flagship title. Continue Reading →

Throughout Suspicion, Rob Williams’s English language adaptation of False Flag, teases of revelations and insights dangle in front of the audience. These remain teases. Even when the show’s final twist hits, it reveals new information without deepening our understanding of the characters. Continue Reading →

Hulu’s new series How I Met Your Father attempts to recreate the magic of the - wait for it! - legendary status of the original series How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM for short). This update proves a nostalgic ride for fans of the original series and an enjoyable journey for newcomers, even if it lacks some of the fresh qualities of its predecessor.   Continue Reading →

It’s baffling to me that Apple TV+ is still making kids-centered programming. In the streamer’s two years of existence, none of their family-friendly shows, whether they be Helpsters or Doug Unplugged, have left any kind of footprint. You’d think they’d realize Disney+ and Netflix have got this market cornered and would instead pursue programming the bigger streamers aren’t making by the truckload. Instead, Apple TV+ keeps on raging, raging against the dying interest in their kid’s programming, with shows like the new animated take on Harriet the Spy.  Continue Reading →

There has been something of a teen thriller renaissance of late. Shows like Cruel Summer, The Wilds, Panic, and Outer Banks have mined the teen streaming audience to deliver stories that all had at least something about them worth watching. Joining the fold this week is Peacock’s One of Us Is Lying, an adaptation of the Karen McManus book of the same name.  Continue Reading →

The Patton Oswalt-narrated Netflix docuseries tells a compelling story about the endangered birds' life during their molting and mating season. “Six hot months! One wild colony! No rules!” With this reality show-esque tagline, Netflix’s Penguin Town appears to be a quirky, comical twist on nature docuseries. They even pulled in comedian Patton Oswalt to narrate. Penguin Town follows the adventures of a wild cast of African penguins. As the series progresses however, dramatic events unfold, pulling the audience in for an emotional trip alongside the endangered birds. The series follows the journey of African penguins as they hit land on the shores of Simon’s Town, South Africa. Here the birds live it up amongst the “giants” (aka humans) of the town, molting their feathers, hooking up with their mates, and hopefully raising some hatchlings before they depart. This may sound like spring break for penguins, but their time at the beach is anything but a vacation. These penguins fight off predators on land and in the sea, attempt to survive catastrophic weather events, all in the hope their species will survive and thrive. Continue Reading →

After a four-year absence, Master of None returns to Netflix with a new tone and new focus, but it still grapples with the same emotional beats of the first two seasons. This time around, creator Aziz Ansari focuses his efforts behind the camera, only appearing in two brief cameos in season three’s five-episode arc. Instead, all of the action is focused on Denise (Lena Waithe) and her partner Alicia (Naomi Ackie), who are rusticating in a cottagecore fantasy that not even TikTok could call sustainable. Rather than the buzz of traffic and the cramped quarters of the city, we see Denise and Alicia’s relationship develop against the bucolic splendor of open fields and towering trees. Continue Reading →

At The Spool, generally, we try to keep the work front and center. We try to center the work, not ourselves. I say all of that here as a preface because I am both a therapist and a therapy client. I’m reviewing In Treatment as a fictional dramatic work, but I’m also honest enough to acknowledge that framing and guiding some of my opinions will be my own experiences and, while I hesitate to use the term, expertise. Continue Reading →

On the heels of The Luminaries, Starz brings us another dramatic import, this time the Irish 3-episode miniseries Death and Nightingales, based on Edmund McCabe’s book of the same title and adapted/directed by Allan Cubitt. Set and filmed in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, Death and Nightingales is one of those rare sunny day thrillers, a gorgeously filmed but raw story of a young woman trying to save herself amidst family secrets, Irish Nationalism, and an increasingly untenable homelife. Continue Reading →

A running joke in early episodes of The Simpsons was McBain, an action hero parody. In one scene, a group of rich people celebrate their new product SWANK (a product 10 times more addictive than marijuana), and end with a toast: “To human misery!” After watching Alex Gibney’s two-part documentary, The Crime of the Century, it’s hard to not think this scene was based on Purdue Pharmaceutical’s owners, the Sackler family, toasting the creation of OxyContin. Continue Reading →

Michael Schur’s no stranger to centering television sitcoms around complex topics. There’s the inner workings of local government in Parks and Recreation, the chaos and philosophy of the afterlife in The Good Place, and now America’s problematic past in the Peacock original Rutherford Falls. Co-created by Schur, Ed Helms, and Sierra Teller Ornelas, Rutherford Falls is the funny wake-up call we need. Continue Reading →

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 →

As TV’s best series about mental illness and addiction comes to an end, our hero BoJack doesn’t get closure, exactly (because there’s really no such thing), but is further down the road to self-awareness and real insight than he ever was. He may end up making yet another bad decision based both on self-loathing and selfishness, but there has to be some reason he keeps getting another chance, another hit at the reset button. If you’ve ever struggled with depression and/or addiction, then you know how both wonderful and absolutely terrifying that feels. Though the final season stumbles a bit with extended bits on cancel culture and open relationships, it ends on a subtle, melancholy note: “Life’s a bitch, and then you go on living.” [Gena Radcliffe] Continue Reading →

Netflix breathes new life into the tired stand-up comedian sitcom genre. The stand-up comedy dramedy is dead. It was tired after Seinfeld, and the only person that got it right since turned out to be a monster. Every other offer in the genre has either struggled with a relationship with the world outside of comedy, or an obsession with the inside world of comedy, which is not that interesting. I am sorry to say, but I do not care about anyone’s struggles to impress a booker.  The thing that Feel Good, Netflix’s new British comedy centered on the life of queer comedian Mae Martin, gets right is that stand up is still work. It doesn’t matter if your work is talking in front of other people, or working in an office. Most of the time it’s not that interesting. Our current society is so obsessed with work that the obsession tends to bleed into our media. Feel Good isn’t a show about a stand-up comedian. It's about a person who happens to be a stand-up comedian.  Mae as a character has more important things to think about than comedy. The show navigates through its first six episodes mostly focused on Mae’s relationships with George (Charlotte Ritchie), a teacher who’s never had any queer experiences, her mother, Linda (Lisa Kudrow), and her sobriety. Martin proves themself a capable actor, painting a well-made version of a person who doesn’t just love cocaine but loves getting high on any sort of obsessive behavior. Feel Good isn’t about drugs or about being queer. It's about the day to day struggle to fight our worst aspects.  Continue Reading →

Amazon's adaptation of the Roberto Saviano novel is far too passive and jumbled to capture your interest. “Look at cocaine and all you see is powder. Look through cocaine and you see the world,” says the tagline to Roberto Saviano’s book, ZeroZeroZero. Now an eight-part mini-series on Amazon Prime, the show promises the same. It purports to be the whole picture of the cocaine trade from the Italian buyers to the Mexican sellers to the American brokers. We follow the effects of a single shipment of cocaine on the lives of people spread across multiple continents. Unfortunately, showrunners Stefano Sollima, Leonardo Fasoli, and Mauricio Katz’s attempt is unwieldy and unfocused. Reviews of the source material reported similar issues, with Saviano’s narrative often lacking, well... narrative structure. You’d hope that the show would seek to correct this by streamlining Saviano’s many interviews into a cohesive picture, but it ends up replicating them instead. It does simplify the cast of characters, however. We focus mainly on three sets of people: the tumultuous relationship between an Italian mobster grandson (Giuseppe De Domenico) and his grandfather (Adriano Chiaramida) who plan to buy the cocaine shipment; the American brother (Dane DeHaan) and sister (Andrea Riseborough) brokering the deal; and the Mexican soldier turned narco (Harold Torres) doing the selling.  Continue Reading →

Despite solid reviews, DC's latest putting Harley Quinn front & center struggles to find an audience. This past weekend, something rare happened. A live-action title based on a Marvel Comics or DC Comics property underperformed at the box office. Usually, such movies are bulletproof at the box office but Birds of Prey proved that not everything with the DC label on it is destined for box office glory. Opening to just $33.2 million, Birds of Prey came in severely under expectations this frame and scored the lowest debut for a live-action DC title since Jonah Hex. Among prior February openers, Birds of Prey opened just below the $33.3 million debut of microbudget horror title Get Out and also below the $34.1 million opening of last years would-be WB tentpole The LEGO Movie 2. Birds of Prey is gonna need some incredible box office stamina to recover in the coming weeks, and it feels practically assured at this point that the film will become the only the eighth 21st-century live-action DC Comics project to miss $100 million domestically, following in the footsteps of Catwoman and the two RED movies. Normally you can pinpoint an exact reason these kinds of blockbuster titles went awry, but in the case of Birds of Prey, it’s hard to see what lead to this opening. The marketing was distinct and emphasized the kind of elements (action & comedy namely) audiences look for in these movies, reviews were strong, February has always been a successful launchpad for comic book fare and Harley Quinn is an incredibly popular character. Perhaps it simply boils down to the fact that sometimes, a surefire success just doesn’t turn out to be as surefire as it seemed. At least Birds of Prey only cost $84 million to make, so the financial losses will be minimal. After all, it’s a tentpole title released by an arm of AT&T, a company so financially secure that it can more than withstand a million mild underperformers like Birds of Prey. Plus, Birds of Prey did score two genuinely impressive box office feats in its opening. First off, as near as I can tell, Birds of Prey is the first time in history a live-action film directed by a woman of color topped the domestic box office. It also joins a rare group of films (which includes The Birdcage) with queer lead characters that managed to open number one at the domestic box office. Continue Reading →