Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
So does anybody actually get an answer at the end of The Perfect Lie? No. The seventh episode stops in the middle of the thing you most want explained, and if you went in expecting a tidy Dutch murder mystery, that is going to sting. Netflix has not announced a second season. The show … 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
Why would a filmmaker make the five-hour version first and the ninety-seven-minute version second? Brian Knappenberger did. In 2021 he released Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror, five episodes running an hour or more apiece. On September 2 he returned to the same subject with Turning Point: Generation 9/11, one film, ninety-seven … Read more
Netflix built eight forty-five-minute episodes around fights that already went viral. Ashtin Earle throwing her sister out of a New York apartment. Alex Cooper daring Alix to say something back. Both of those played out in vertical video months ago, free, to millions of people. Two of the three published reviews call the series … 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
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
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
Talamasca: The Secret Order spent late August near the top of Netflix’s TV chart, which is a strange fate for a show its own network had already given up on. AMC aired the six-episode gothic thriller last fall, canceled it in March, and moved on. The odd part is what the Netflix numbers prove. The … Read more
For one night in January 2006, Vince Young was the best football player alive. Texas trailed USC by five in the Rose Bowl with the national title on the line, and with nineteen seconds left Young ran it in himself, eight yards, nobody able to lay a hand on him. He finished that night with … Read more