Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Malcolm Spellman never wrote an episode of Snowfall. FX handed him the spinoff anyway, and what he came back with is not a tour of familiar streets. The Drop: A Snowfall Saga opens in 1990, four years after the parent show signed off, and it keeps South Los Angeles while swapping out the product. … 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
Yes, it is a true story, and that is the first thing most people want confirmed. The woman at the center of Hulu’s My Grandfather Charles Manson is Sophia Maddox, a real filmmaker and actress, and she really is the granddaughter of the man who orchestrated the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. The documentary, number one on … Read more
Sam Raimi’s Send Help looks like a two-person survival story: a plane goes down, an employee and her boss wash up on a deserted island, and they have to get along or die. About halfway through, it quietly stops being that movie. The island is not the trap. The office is, and Linda has … Read more
Somewhere in The Devil Wears Prada 2, Miranda Priestly picks up her own September issue, the object the entire fashion calendar once bent itself around, and remarks that it has gotten thin enough to floss with. The line is played for a laugh. It is the truest sentence in the film. Twenty years ago … Read more
If you have just watched Ready or Not 2: Here I Come on Hulu and want the ending laid out plainly: Grace survives again, and again she manages it without ever being the strongest person in the room. She wins by finding a loophole in the rules the rich people hunting her wrote for … Read more
For five seasons, The Bear kept asking the same question: does making something great have to cost you everything you have? Its series finale finally answers, and the answer is not the Michelin star the whole show had been chasing. All eight episodes of the fifth and final season landed at once on June 25, … 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
The Bear returns for its fifth and final season on June 25, and the most revealing thing about it isn’t the premiere date or the episode count. It’s the premise. Carmy Berzatto, the character around whom four seasons of tension have been organized, has quit. He’s walked out of the restaurant he drove himself … Read more