Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
The Runner cheats, and I think the cheat is the best argument the movie has. Here is the short answer. Maia Marten never kills the witness she is sent to kill. The gun she fires on the 53rd floor of the Excelsus Hotel holds blanks, the blood is a rig the police set up in … 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
The chalkboard gag reads: I did not predict any of this crap! That is the show swatting away thirty years of people posting old screenshots and insisting it saw the future. Then it goes ahead and does an episode about screens ruining people, which is exactly the territory that meme lives in. Yellow Mirror … 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
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
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
Yes, Stolen Girl is based on a true story, though you would never guess the real one from the trailer. The film hands Kate Beckinsale a gun, a stack of wigs, and a way into a CIA espionage web to pull her abducted daughter out of Beirut. The woman it is actually based on, … 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