Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
If you just finished My Life with the Walter Boys Season 3 and reached for your phone to find out whether Jackie and Cole are finally, officially together, here’s the short answer: they’re not. Not yet, and maybe not for a while. Cole ends things before the finale is over. Jackie, the Manhattan orphan who … 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
Netflix dropped the first trailer for The Last House this week, and the premise alone is the kind that lodges in your head and stays there: a family of four wakes up sealed inside their own home, unable to get out, while the entire world outside falls under the same mysterious lockdown. A day … Read more
Colors of Evil: Black, the Polish thriller that climbed into Netflix’s Top 10 within days of its June 10 release, is built like a missing-child mystery and ends as something much darker: a portrait of an entire town that chose to look away. If you have finished it and want the knots untangled, here is … 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
The Marked Woman, Netflix’s Spanish original thriller that shot into the Top 10 within days of its June 5 release, runs on a single question: who is the woman found beaten half to death in a shipping container in Barcelona, with no memory of her own name? If you have reached the end and … Read more