Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
I Will Find You, Harlan Coben’s latest Netflix thriller, raced to the top of the charts after its June 18 release, and it ends the way his best stories do, with a long-buried lie blowing a family apart. The eight-episode mystery turns on three questions: is David’s son really alive, who took him, and who … Read more
Most TV revivals are a bad idea wearing a beloved name. They show up two decades late, trade on your affection, and leave the original looking a little worse for the visit. Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair is the rare exception. The four-episode revival landed on Hulu in April and immediately became the … Read more
The Handmaid’s Tale ended in 2025 after eight years, and rather than let Gilead fade, Hulu has handed the story to the next generation. The Testaments, based on Margaret Atwood’s 2019 sequel novel, finished its first season on May 27 and was renewed for a second before the finale even aired. It has already pulled … Read more
House of the Dragon returns for Season 3 on June 21, and it has been a while since Season 2 left the board mid-game. If you do not want to rewatch eight episodes before the war finally turns bloody, here is everything you need to remember. Full spoilers for Season 2 follow. Where We Left … Read more
Netflix just dropped all 22 episodes of The Polygamist, its biggest South African telenovela to date, and it has spent the days since burning up social media. The title puts a man at the center, a self-made CEO juggling a wife and several other women. But the smartest thing about the show is that it … Read more
Sugar returns to Apple TV+ on June 19, two years after it pulled off one of the stranger sleights of hand in recent television, and the thing worth saying up front is that its detective story was never really about the case. It was about the man working it. Colin Farrell’s John Sugar spends his … Read more
All ten episodes of Sweet Magnolias Season 5 dropped on Netflix on June 11, and the show shot straight back into the Top 10, because this is the kind of series people do not just watch but check in on, like old friends. The finale gives the three Magnolias very different endings: one wedding, … Read more
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. … Read more