Quietly Watching

  There is a version of this story that gets made as a procedural. The 1992 murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common — a young mother stabbed to death in daylight while walking with her two-year-old son — has most of the ingredients that true crime productions reach for: a shocking crime, a botched investigation, a wrongful conviction, and a case that took more than a decade to resolve. Netflix could have made that show. Instead, from what the trailer suggests, they made something harder. A True Crime Story Told From the Inside The Witness, a three-part drama series premiering June 4 alongside a companion documentary The Murder of Rachel Nickell, is told from the perspective of the family. André Hanscombe (Jordan Bolger) is the man who lost his partner and was left to raise their son alone — a son who was standing right there when it happened. Alex Hanscombe was two years old on the morning his mother was killed. He saw it. The show is about what that does to a child, and to th...

  House of the Dragon has spent two seasons doing something that takes considerable discipline: making you wait. The civil war at the heart of the story — the Targaryen succession crisis that will eventually tear the dynasty apart — has been building through political maneuvering, private grief, and the slow accumulation of grievances since the first episode. Season 2 ended with the pieces in place and the board about to tip. Season 3, premiering on HBO on June 21, is where everything falls. The Battle of the Gullet — Four Years in the Making The opening episode is The Battle of the Gullet — a naval and aerial confrontation that showrunner Ryan Condal has described as four years in the making, and arguably the most ambitious thing the show has attempted. The battle involves dragons, ships, and multiple simultaneous theaters of conflict. The Triarchy fleet — secretly allied with Team Green — launches a coordinated pincer attack on Team Black's blockade from north and south. Rhaenyra...

  The Michael Jackson biopic that dominated box offices earlier this year made a choice that everyone noticed: it told the story of the music, the performances, the rise, and mostly stepped around the trial. That choice was a commercial calculation as much as a creative one, and it worked. But it left something unresolved, which is the same something that has been unresolved for twenty years. Netflix's Michael Jackson: The Verdict, a three-part docuseries premiering June 3, goes where the biopic wouldn't. It walks directly into the 2005 criminal trial — the child molestation charges, the courtroom proceedings, the acquittal on all counts — and attempts something that, remarkably, hasn't been done properly before: a reconstruction of the trial from the people who were actually inside the room. <The Trial the Cameras Were Never Allowed Inside> Here is the fact that makes this docuseries worth paying attention to regardless of where you stand on Jackson's legacy: no ...

  The premise of Remarkably Bright Creatures sounds like a pitch that got through on charm: an elderly widow bonds with a giant Pacific octopus and a wayward young man. On paper, the octopus is the hook. On screen, you forget about the octopus for long stretches, and that turns out to be both the film's problem and its secret. Netflix's adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt's 2022 novel — directed by Olivia Newman, streaming since May 8 — is, at its core, a film about two people with mirror-image losses finding each other in a small aquarium town. Tova Sullivan has outlived her husband and her son. Cameron Cassmore, a broke musician living out of a camper, is looking for the father he never knew. What they share, without knowing it at first, is a shaped absence at the center of their lives. The octopus watches. The film arranges its coincidences. And Sally Field does something that keeps you from caring too much about either. <What Shelby Van Pelt's Novel Becomes on Screen...

  he most disciplined thing The Four Seasons Season 2 does is refuse to let Nick haunt it. Steve Carell's character was, in the first season, the kind of person a group of friends organizes itself around without quite realizing it — the one whose choices set the terms, whose appetites defined the social weather. His death in the season finale, accidental and almost offhandedly sudden, left a structural vacancy that the show could have filled in any number of ways. It could have given him flashback episodes, voice-over letters, grief-triggered visions. It chose, instead, to make his absence the season's primary fact and let the other characters expand into the room he vacated. That is a harder choice than it sounds, and Season 2 — eight episodes, streaming now, already sitting at number one in the US — earns it more often than not. <The Best Decision The Four Seasons Season 2 Makes> The show's quarterly structure — one vacation per season of the year, two episodes per ...