Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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, … Read more
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 … Read more
By its last stretch, The Whisper Man has two questions left to answer, and it closes them almost back to back. The person taking children this time is not Frank Carter, the original Whisper Man, who is still behind bars. It is Frank’s grown son, Francis Jr., who has spent the whole film in … Read more
Somewhere around the midnight-margaritas scene, Practical Magic stops pretending to be about its plot. Two sisters and their aunts turn a kitchen into a small hurricane of blender noise and Stevie Nicks, and for a few minutes the 1998 movie forgets it has a curse to break and a body in the garden. That … Read more
Mica Miller, the 30-year-old wife of a South Carolina pastor, was found dead at a North Carolina state park on April 27, 2024. Authorities ruled it a suicide, and the documentary does not dispute that. So if you came looking for a hidden killer, Death of the Pastor’s Wife is not that kind of … Read more
In Blood Sacrifice, the Swedish thriller that reached number one on Netflix, someone is killing police officers. The deaths always come at 1:15 in the morning, always after a call to 112, the emergency line. For most of the five episodes it plays like a hunt for a faceless serial killer. It is not. … Read more
In 2019, Shane Gillis was hired by Saturday Night Live and fired four days later, before he taped a single episode, over old podcast clips that resurfaced the same week he got the job. That is usually where a comedy career stalls out, or at least detours into a long apology tour. Gillis skipped … Read more