Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Hillman College is fictional. In Netflix’s A Different World sequel, however, parts of the campus belong to Morehouse College, Spelman College, and Clark Atlanta University. These are real historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, in Atlanta. There is no single Hillman campus to enroll in. The series assembles its college from places that already … Read more
No, not in the usual sense. The longer answer is more useful. Netflix’s Best of the Best is not presented as the biography of one dance team. Maya and Anjali are characters, and UCLA Agni is not the name of UCLA’s real Bollywood-fusion team. The national contest they chase, however, was not invented for the … Read more
Chuck Lorre flew to Knoxville, sat on a back porch, held a stranger’s grandbaby, and asked her if she wanted to make a television show. The stranger was Leanne Morgan, a stand-up comic in her fifties who had been told for twenty-five years that she was not edgy enough and too plain. Netflix heard … Read more
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 … 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
Keanu Reeves spends most of Good Fortune wearing the blank, patient look of a man who has read the instructions and understood none of them. He plays Gabriel, a low-ranking guardian angel who sets out to fix one struggling life and manages to break several. It is the loosest, funniest thing he has done in … 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
I didn’t expect to have much to say about a Kevin Hart bachelor-party comedy, and the early reviews suggested I wouldn’t. 72 Hours landed on Netflix on July 24 with a 16% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, a number that usually files a movie under “content” and moves on. Then it went to number … Read more
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