TV Reviews
The Beatles: Get Back Is a Comprehensive Time Capsule of the Fab Four’s Last Hurrah: Review
The Pitch: In January of 1969, the Beatles, wearing by internal tensions and alienated through years of not touring together, attempted to do the impossible: get back together to craft not only a new album but to record it live in concert, without any overdubs or studio tricks. Not only that, they wanted to film a TV special to coincide with the album’s release, which necessitated the hiring of director Michael Lindsay-Hogg and the building of Twickenham Film Studios into an erstwhile rehearsal space. On top of all that, they had just four weeks to pull this all off. The results were bittersweet: The album was released to muted fanfare (though it’s since been reappraised), and the ambitious TV special was whittled down to a now-iconic live concert atop the roof of Apple headquarters. ...
Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop Hits More Than a Few False Notes: Review
3,2,1, Let’s Jam: In a far-flung future where the solar system has been colonized and Earth has become uninhabitable, civilization has spread out into a new Wild West filled with grifters, terrorists, con men, and criminal syndicates. Among the rabble, there are a few intrepid souls who set out to collect the most dangerous bounties in the system… or at least scrounge up enough cash to keep their ship running. You might call them bounty hunters; they prefer cowboys. Two such cowboys are the crew of the run-down starship BeBop: Spike Spiegel (John Cho), a former Syndicate enforcer starting his life over, and Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir), a divorced ex-cop trying to make ends meet and be a good dad to his daughter. But the more they try to run from their shadowy pasts, the more those past...
Dexter: New Blood Can’t Quite Bring Its Madcap Antihero Back to Life: Review
The Pitch: Over a decade after the original series’… let’s say controversial finale, Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) has been living off the grid. Last we saw him, he was a lumberjack in the Pacific Northwest; now he’s packed up and moved to the sleepy, snowy upstate New York village of Iron Lake. He’s set himself up as Jim Lindsey, the unassuming town sweetheart, who mans the local hunting shop and brings cinnamon rolls to his customers. He’s even dating the town sheriff, Angela Bishop (Julia Jones), and has successfully tamped down the so-called Dark Passenger that drives him to kill. (Instead of his adoptive father Harry, it’s taken the shape of now-deceased sister Debra (Jennifer Carpenter), the devil in his ear who acts as his grim anti-conscience.) But naturally, Dexter: Ne...
Curb Your Enthusiasm Returns for a Wine-Spilling, Gut-Busting Season 11 Premiere: Review
The Pitch: Twenty-one years in, and LA’s (least) favorite curmudgeon Larry David is still up to his usual self-serving tricks, even as HBO’s long-running sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm moves from its MAGA-hat commentary in Season 10 to COVID-era shenanigans in Season 11. The season premiere — dubbed “The Five-Foot Fence,” Jehovah bless — brings the show back without skipping a beat, rolling into these so-called “unprecedented times” with all the unpredictable hilarity we’ve come to expect from L.D. and the crew. Leave it to Larry to start off the season with an image right out of Sunset Boulevard: a dead body in Larry’s pool and the police determine that it’s clearly a burglar who fell in and drowned. No harm, no foul, thinks Larry; by the time he’s successfully pitched a show ...
Jason Sudeikis Returns to SNL: The Six Best Sketches
Jason Sudeikis returned to Saturday Night Live this week, his first time hosting after spending ten years (or an “actor’s dozen,” as he called it in the monologue) as a writer, then a cast member. Sudeikis arguably has one of the most successful post-SNL careers of the past decade, appearing in multiple hit movies and winning a bunch of awards for his current sitcom Ted Lasso. Having a beloved alumnus return to host can be a deceptively dicey prospect, for a number of reasons. Not needing to work around a particular host’s skill set can create high expectations of an all-killer episode—which can then be dashed against the rocks of callbacks, revivals of old characters, and cameos from the host’s time on the show. The Sudeikis episode had a little bit of all of that, but not enough to tank ...
Review: Kim Kardashian-West’s SNL Episode Wasn’t the Worst Thing We’ve Ever Seen
The second episode of Saturday Night Live’s 47th season featured arguably their most famous host of the initial four episodes: Kim Kardashian-West, who really feels like she should have been a novelty host circa 2009, rather than a first-timer in 2021. Hopefully she’s just this season’s token billionaire—and hopefully that slot is retired from the host lineup hereafter. Wearing a lot of gloves for October, Kardashian-West didn’t project the same disdain for the world as fellow socialite Paris Hilton did in her infamous hosting gig, or the same discomfiting cutesiness as Elon Musk. At the same time, her version of being a good sport mostly involved getting off some shots at her family (and ex-husband Kanye West), and jokingly promoting her SKIMS shapewear line (the commercial for shapewear ...
HBO’s Succession Turns Its Family Feud Into All-Out War in Season 3: Review
The Pitch: When last we left the backstabbing, mega-wealthy Roy family, prodigal son Kendall (Jeremy Strong) finally plunged the dagger in the back of his imperious father, Logan (Brian Cox), by holding a presser in which — rather than acting as the “blood sacrifice” Logan wants to throw to the wolves — he publicly laid bare incriminating accusations of malfeasance within Waystar Royco’s Cruises division. It’s a ballsy act, one born of two seasons’ worth of tension between them, the latest move in their perpetual chess game. But the question remains: What now? Well, fresh off his impulsive gamble, Kendall rallies the troops: Initially, he’s just got Greg the Egg (Nicholas Braun) on his side, having snuck him the Cruises documents he needs to support the accusations. But what of Shiv (...
SNL Season 47 Premiere Recap: The Highlights and Lowlights
This past summer felt like a tumultuous one for Saturday Night Live, despite (or possibly because of) its usual between-season silence about major changes to the show—broken, as per tradition, shortly before the start of a new season. Season 46 ended with what felt like possible sendoffs for several long-tenured members of a record-sized cast—and then word flew around over the summer that SNL impresario Lorne Michaels was trying to convince some veteran players to stick around for not just the next season, but several more after that, dangling a more flexible work schedule in front of familiar faces like Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, and Cecily Strong. The Michaels Plan seems to have been put into motion with Season 47: McKinnon, Bryant, and Strong are all back, at least according to the ope...
Netflix Offers a Kid-Sized Companion to Kevin Smith with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: Review
The Pitch: In the realm of Eternos, in which high technology and magic exist hand-in-hand, prince Adam (Yuri Lowenthal) lives as a villager on the outskirts of his society, with no memory of who he is and the destiny he is to fulfill. But when he runs across a thief named Teela (Kimberly Brooks), who’s just betrayed the villains who hired her to steal a mysterious, powerful sword, he soon learns the sword grants him the Power of Grayskull, a heaping helping of muscles, and the incredible powers of He-Man. Together, Adam, Teela, and their friends must assemble to protect the sword from those who want to use Grayskull’s powers for evil — including Adam’s long-lost uncle Keldor (Ben Diskin), whose true identity is easy to spot once you slap an “S” on the front of his name. You Know, For ...
American Horror Story: Now With Macauley Culkin, Vampires and Even More Camp!
The Pitch: Paging Dr. King: It’s time for another round of “Let’s Basically Do The Shining!” For the latest installment of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s long-running horror anthology series, we settle in with the Gardners — father Harry (Finn Wittrock), wife Doris (Rabe), and daughter Alma (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) — driving to the sleepy seaside town of Providence, Massachusetts. Harry’s a writer looking to get out of the city and cure his writer’s block; Doris, who’s expecting their second child, plans to renovate their drab vacation house in exchange for free rent. But naturally, a few things are amiss about their new home: the neighboring houses turn on red lights as the sun goes down, creepy albinos with fangs loiter around the local graveyard, and “Tuberculosis Karen” (Sarah ...
Brooklyn Nine-Nine Tiptoes Around Police Corruption in Its Final Season: Review
The Pitch: The Nine-Nine is back, baby, but the precinct just isn’t the same: The one-two punch of the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-George Floyd reckonings with the utility of American policing have left the gang more dispirited than ever. Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz) quits the force in disgust at her complicity and becomes a private detective; Hitchcock (Dirk Blocker) retires and mostly just hangs out with Scully (Joel McKinnon Miller) over FaceTime; the strain of being a Black precinct commander has even taken its toll on Capt. Holt’s (Andre Braugher) personal life. But can the gang pull together and do their jobs — and maybe even enact some positive change within the force? Reading the Room: Even for hardcore Brooklyn Nine-Nine fans (of which I consider myself one), th...
FX’s Reservation Dogs Is a Sweetly Incisive Series About Native American Life: Review
The Pitch: When we first meet the quote-unquote “Reservation Dogs,” a tight-knit gang of four Indigenous teens growing up in northeast Oklahoma, they’re making off with a stolen spicy chip delivery truck. It’s a risky, exciting gamble — they relish the danger of it more than the profit potential, right down to not wearing seatbelts — that should take them closer to their goal: saving up enough money to move away to California. The rez, they posit, killed their close friend Daniel a year ago, and they want to take his spirit with them when they finally escape. But amid the petty crimes and odd jobs they’ll take to scare up the scratch to leave, they’ll navigate the myriad pains everyone feels growing up, with the specific concerns and anxieties of Native American life — generational tr...
