Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Television keeps a short list of shows that ended exactly where they should have and then had the grace to stay gone. Ted Lasso sat near the top of it. Season three sent Ted home to Kansas, married off Coach Beard, handed Roy the team, and rolled credits on a story its makers had … Read more
Pickleball is the sport serious tennis players love to roll their eyes at: too easy, too social, played on a shrunken court with a wiffle ball and a paddle. The Dink, now the number one movie on Apple TV+, is the film version of that eye-roll and its answer at the same time. It is … Read more
For twenty years, fans have wanted Matt Damon and Doug Liman working together again. The Bourne Identity launched both of their careers in 2002, and The Instigators, now the number one movie on Apple TV+, is their reunion: a Boston heist comedy that Damon’s own production company handed to Liman as a script. What … Read more
Before Echo Valley, Brad Ingelsby wrote Mare of Easttown, the HBO series about a worn-down detective in working-class Pennsylvania carrying more grief than any case could hold. Echo Valley is that same world shrunk to two people and one farm. Julianne Moore plays Kate, a horse trainer in southern Pennsylvania still grieving the wife … Read more
Here is the answer most people are searching for: no, F1 is not based on a true story. Sonny Hayes, the burned-out driver Brad Pitt plays, was never real, and neither was APXGP, the last-place team he comes back to rescue. There was no eleventh car on the 2024 grid, and no thirty-years-later comeback … 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
There is a particular kind of dread that Cape Fear has always been about — not the fear of violence exactly, but the fear of someone who understands the system well enough to use it against you. The 1962 film had it. Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake had it. Apple TV+’s new ten-episode limited series … Read more