Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
The mother at the center of Nothing to Lose asks for something hospitals run every day: one blood test. The boy who could give it is not her own sick son but a stranger, a possible donor being raised by another family a car ride away. That family says no, the law backs their … Read more
On March 3 of this year, Netflix renewed Little House on the Prairie for a second season. The first season would not premiere for another four months, and nobody outside the building had seen a frame of it. Streamers almost never do that. The confidence tells you what Netflix believed it was buying: an … Read more
On the night of January 13, 2012, a cruise ship carrying more than 4,000 people steered toward a small Tuscan island so the village on shore could watch it glide past, lit up like a floating city. Sailors call the maneuver an inchino, a bow. Minutes later the Costa Concordia struck a cluster of … Read more
I have a soft spot for the kind of show that trusts small moments to carry the weight. Heartstopper built four years of television out of them: a hand held on a school bus, the particular terror of sending a first text, animated leaves drifting into the corner of the frame every time two … Read more
If you came here straight from the last ten minutes of Old Henry, here is the short version. Yes, the quiet Oklahoma farmer is Billy the Kid. He did not die in 1881. The death was staged, with the help of the lawman who was supposed to have put him in the ground, and … Read more
The setup of Little Brother is older than most of the people streaming it: a man builds a perfect life, and someone from his past arrives to wreck it. What makes this particular version worth ninety minutes is the fine print, the reason these two men know each other at all. Decades ago, John Cena’s … Read more
There is a shot in the Enola Holmes 3 trailer of Millie Bobby Brown in a wedding dress, running. Not toward the altar. Away from it, toward a case. Three films in, that is still the only direction Enola knows how to run. A Wedding in Malta, Then a Kidnapping The setup reads almost like … Read more
A standard handgun needs about five pounds of pressure on the trigger to fire. Glock once turned that number into a selling point: five pounds was light enough that the pull would not throw off your aim. 5lbs of Pressure takes that grim little fact and builds a whole movie around it, and the question … Read more
For fifteen years, the person who understood Chris Evert most completely was the woman on the other side of the net trying to beat her. Netflix’s new documentary is about a tennis rivalry, but it is really about that stranger fact: how the opponent can end up being the witness. Chris & Martina: The Final … Read more
The Last Ship imagined a pandemic six years before we lived one. A virus wipes out eighty percent of the world. A single Navy destroyer, out at sea when it hit, comes home to a silent country carrying the one scientist who might build a cure. The show ran on TNT from 2014 to 2018, … Read more