Television
Story Stream
Submitting to Cubicle Culture April 15, 2025
Everyone seems crazy about Severance. One of the first shows in a while to be a true “water cooler” show, it has a 96 percent rating from Rotten Tomatoes critics and 76 percent from audiences. It’s spawned an entire cottage industry of YouTube sleuth...
Brian Tyree Henry Has Been Doing the Work April 15, 2025
Brian Tyree Henry is accustomed to portraying characters who are shouldering some massive burden. He broke out in Atlanta, in which he played Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles, a drug-dealer-turned-rapper forced to reckon with the dangers of his old life and ...
Can Reality TV Redeem Jake and Logan Paul? April 15, 2025
On the first episode of “Paul American,” a new reality-TV show currently streaming on Max, the YouTuber, influencer, and wrestler Logan Paul mounts a PowerPoint pitch for his fiancée, the Danish supermodel Nina Agdal, in order to convince her that be...
‘Black Mirror’ Is a Series at War With Itself April 14, 2025
In January of 1963, The Twilight Zone made its triumphant return to television. One year earlier, CBS executive James T. Aubrey had abruptly canceled the genre-defining anthology, but after the program he chose to replace it with (a sitcom called Fai...
Can Jonathan Majors Come Back? April 11, 2025
Jonathan Majors was an actor on the rise—indie credits, prestige television, a Spike Lee joint, a superhero film. But all of that looked like it was over when Majors was found guilty of assault and harassment in 2023....
Hollywood’s Jester April 10, 2025
Seth Rogen is itemizing all the ways in which, when he’s producing a film or TV show, he’s inclined to agonize about his contribution. “Are my notes helping?” he says. “Am I making things worse? Am I actually inspiring the writers to create better th...
On ‘Severance’ Season Two April 07, 2025
Can human beings ever truly empathize with one another? Or even with ourselves?This is the critical question running throughout Severance, the blockbuster Apple TV+ puzzle-box show that recently wrapped its second season....
In Praise Of ‘The Pitt,’ The Most Normal Show On Television April 04, 2025
On Sept. 19, 1994, a week before Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell declared that there was no legislative path forward in the current Congress for the Clinton administration's healthcare reform agenda, NBC aired "24 Hours," the pilot episode of ...
How 'Survivor' Unlocks 'The White Lotus' April 03, 2025
Mike White has spent the bulk of his career in Hollywood under the radar, helming underseen critical darlings like HBO’s Enlightened and the indie film Chuck & Buck. But even before creating his own hit in The White Lotus, White made a big splash on ...
Leslie Bibb Is Having the Time of Her Life April 03, 2025
Leslie Bibb stops herself midway through a long and beautiful rumination about season 3 of The White Lotus to exclaim, “I’m like a babbling brook!” As part of the trio of lifelong friends (alongside Carrie Coon and Michelle Monaghan) reuniting in Tha...
Titus Welliver & the Legacy of ‘Bosch’ April 02, 2025
Titus Welliver believes in fate. Several years ago, when it was decided that internationally known author and novelist Michael Connelly’s LAPD Detective Harry Bosch would be brought to life in a streaming series for Amazon, Welliver felt deep down th...
Alec Baldwin’s Brooding Era March 25, 2025
Any show that uses the title card “Baldwin Residence: East Hampton” is rather begging to be hate-watched. And on that basis, The Baldwins on TLC, which peers into the life of Alec, his second wife, Hilaria Baldwin, and their seven children, is undeni...
The Kids Aren’t Alright March 25, 2025
“Nightmarish” and “immersive” can feel like overused words when describing the experience of watching a TV drama. But they are adjectives that do not fully encapsulate what it feels like to follow the Miller family in Netflix’s four-parter Adolescenc...
Spectacles of Banality March 24, 2025
When my television is turned on, which is often, I’m usually watching one of two things. As a standard-issue straight guy who played competitive sports as soon as I understood what they were, I consume a lot of professional sports broadcasts. The oth...
The White Lotus Is a Houellebecq Horror March 21, 2025
When the Covid lockdown started, five years ago, many in the laptop classes leaned into the glorious social dislocation. They embraced Zoom. They took in home deliveries and forgot to care about the carbon footprint. And they pretended to stay connec...
Mister Lonely, the New TV Hero March 19, 2025
In the very first shot of the pilot episode of “Paradise”—a recent dystopian political thriller from Hulu—a man played by Sterling K. Brown lies alone, unrestfully, in bed. His eyes are bolted open. A watercolor wash of blue light floods his face. He...
On Danzy Senza's 'Colored Television' March 17, 2025
Danzy Senna’s Colored Television spent last summer winning praise from the usual legacy publications as The Novel We Need Right Now: A serious book by a seasoned author willing to sink her teeth into debates around race and class, “representation” an...
Lady Gaga Throws Everything in the Pot March 13, 2025
Lady Gaga blew through Saturday Night Live over the weekend, weaponizing boisterous vocal runs and skinny fringe dresses that suggested the 38-year-old singer-songwriter, producer, and actor had put in the proverbial 10,000 hours studying zesty mid-2...
The Necessity of Nussbaum March 11, 2025
I first encountered Martha C Nussbaum in 1987. She was a guest on Bryan Magee’s BBC television series The Great Philosophers. In each programme, Magee would interview a leading contemporary philosopher about the ideas of a great philosopher of the pa...
The Last Sportswriters of New York March 11, 2025
On a warm, misty January morning, Phil Mushnick is sitting in his Boca Raton townhouse where he now winters. He points out the herons in the lagoon near his back porch as well as an adjacent golf course, a thousand miles from his central Jersey home ...
How “Severance” Makes a Fetish of the Office March 07, 2025
When “Severance” premièred, in 2022, it felt like an absurdist parable about the alienation of labor—a moody, eerie critique of technocapitalism that seemed in keeping with our age of “upskilling” and A.I. The four main characters worked at Lumon, a ...
The Stabilization of Religious Decline Is a Big Deal March 07, 2025
It’s hard to overstate how transformative the past decade has been in American life. One need only to do a quick survey of the political and social landscape at the dawn of 2015.A decade ago, Bruce Jenner was still Bruce. The Supreme Court still allo...
The Artificial Culture March 06, 2025
I'll start with a simple premise. If we now have direct evidence that the federal government was funneling millions of dollars into supposedly free market press organs (such as Politico, which has received federal subscription payments from agencies ...
Why Does Every Play Seem Political Now? March 05, 2025
IT’S ALWAYS BEEN a good argument starter to contend that all theater is political, even if the claim sometimes depends on stretching the definition of “political” to its vaguest outer limits. For one thing, unlike movies or television or books, theat...
'With Love, Meghan' Is a nightmare March 05, 2025
“Has anyone in the world ever been so tickled by the sight of lettuces?” Meghan titters to chef Alice Waters, on the final episode of her new “lifestyle television series,” With Love, Meghan. Meghan’s latest venture is an exercise in how many inspira...
