Quietly Watching

  Netflix built eight forty-five-minute episodes around fights that already went viral. Ashtin Earle throwing her sister out of a New York apartment. Alex Cooper daring Alix to say something back. Both of those played out in vertical video months ago, free, to millions of people. Two of the three published reviews call the series boring, and I think they are aiming at the wrong target. Boredom is a verdict on a person. What is actually wrong here is arithmetic. The Girl Who Would Not Cover Her Acne Earle started posting Get Ready With Me videos in February 2020 from a dorm at the University of Miami. The draw was never the makeup. She filmed her acne scars before she covered them, at a moment when everyone else was smoothing their skin after the fact. By the summer of 2022 brands were paying her. Behind her now are 8.5 million followers on TikTok, 6 million on Instagram, a podcast, and a finals run on Dancing With the Stars. What she sold was the absence of a filter, and that is an...

  The chalkboard gag reads: I did not predict any of this crap! That is the show swatting away thirty years of people posting old screenshots and insisting it saw the future. Then it goes ahead and does an episode about screens ruining people, which is exactly the territory that meme lives in. Yellow Mirror sat at number two on Disney+ in the United States this week, eight days after it arrived on August 26. It is the Simpsons take on Black Mirror, two separate stories, both about a device. The first one is the reason people are searching. It takes the episode where this whole family started and says it never happened. The half hour in question is The Way We Was, from 1991. Homer and Barney get detention for smoking in the school bathroom. Marge is there too, sent down for burning a bra at a rally. Homer looks at her and that is that. It was the show's first flashback, it is where the whole family comes from, and it was directed by David Silverman. Yellow Mirror opens by putting Ho...

  In 2009 a law professor named Dan Markel published a book about families and criminal justice. Its argument was blunt. When the law gives someone special treatment because of who they are related to, the costs add up fast, and courts should grant far fewer of those exemptions. Five years later Markel was shot in his own garage in Tallahassee, and the people who paid for it were his ex-wife's mother and brother. Welcome to the Family: The Murder of Dan Markel, four parts, streaming on Hulu since September 1, is the fullest account of that case anyone has put on screen. It is also a four-hour test of the argument he spent his career making. The series never mentions that he made it, and I think that gap is the one real hole in an otherwise thorough four hours. The Family the Series Puts on a Shelf It comes from ABC News Studios, directed by Sebastian Smith, and it has people nobody else got. Rob Adelson, the eldest of the Adelson children, sits for his first interview. So does June...

  All ten episodes of Heartland season 19 arrived on Netflix in the United States on September 1, and the show is already back inside the Netflix top ten there. So the wait is over. The odd part is what American viewers are actually watching: a season that finished airing in Canada last year. They have been a year behind this show for most of its run, and the reason has nothing to do with Netflix being slow. Season 19 ran on CBC through the autumn of 2025, so its ten episodes have been sitting in Canadian hands for the better part of a year. The season gives Amy Fleming a romance with Nathan Pryce, whose family are neighbours, beef competitors, and a direct threat to the ranch. Her daughter Lyndy walks in on the two of them at the worst possible moment. Amy's reputation as a horse trainer also comes under attack, which for her is the more serious injury of the two. Georgie comes home. I would not hand this season to a newcomer, because the Pryce feud only stings if you already care...

  Near the end of 9 to 5, the chairman of the board walks through an office that is running better than he has ever seen it. Productivity is up twenty percent. There is a daycare down the hall. People are on flexible hours, and two women are splitting one job so that both can keep working. He loves every bit of it. Then he lowers his voice and asks for one change to be undone. The equal pay has to go. That scene is forty-six years old, and a lot of people are meeting it again this week. Dolly Parton died on August 25 at eighty. ABC aired a 20/20 special about her that night, Disney+ and Hulu picked it up the next day, and the comedy that made her a movie star climbed back into the Disney+ top ten in the United States. It is worth going back to. Just not for the reason most people remember it. The story is easy to explain. Three women work for the same awful boss, get high together one night, and take turns describing how they would kill him. Judy (Jane Fonda) pictures a big-game hu...

  Yes, Stolen Girl is based on a true story, though you would never guess the real one from the trailer. The film hands Kate Beckinsale a gun, a stack of wigs, and a way into a CIA espionage web to pull her abducted daughter out of Beirut. The woman it is actually based on, Maureen Dabbagh, got her daughter back a very different way: a phone call at four in the morning, seventeen years after the girl was taken. That distance between the rescue movie and the real case is the most interesting thing about Stolen Girl, so it is worth walking through both. The Rescue Movie It Wants to Be On screen, Maureen is an ordinary American mother until her ex-husband spirits their young daughter, Amina, out of the country. She teams with Robeson, a mysterious ex-marine played by Scott Eastwood, who teaches her to shoot, to disguise herself, and to move through the underworld of international child recovery. The trail runs through Mexico, Albania, and Beirut, and it widens into a conspiracy with t...

  The woman credited as the author of The Secret Woman does not exist. "Anna Ekberg" is a pen name two Danish men, Anders Ronnow Klarlund and Jacob Weinreich, adopted to write the novel, and Klarlund later helped produce this Netflix adaptation of the book he wrote as her. Keep that in your pocket, because the film keeps asking the same question about its heroine. A calm café owner on a Norwegian island, Louise Andersen, is really Helene Soderberg, a Danish shipping heiress who disappeared three years ago. She is not in hiding. Nothing about that life survives in her memory. So when a stranger walks into her café and calls her Helene, the small life she has quietly assembled starts to come apart from the first word. The Night That Erased Her Helene did not run because she was reckless. She ran because she had found something. On the night she vanished, she was fleeing the family shipping empire with a woman named Louise Andersen, and the two of them got as far as a bridge on ...