There are so many wonderful cast members in the fourth season of “Only Murders in the Building” that it becomes like a great comedy party with different talented artists throughout the soiree riffing on what they do best. A show that pushed the star throttle forward in a third outing that added the most acclaimed actresses of all time in Meryl Streep and one of the most likable comedy actors ever in Paul Rudd has not let up on bringing familiar faces into the fold.

Continue reading ‘Only Murders In The Building’ Season 4 Review: Star-Studded Senior Season Gets By On Goodwill at The Playlist.

Apple TV+’s “Slow Horses” was a surprising smash at this year’s Emmy nominations, landing nods for Outstanding Drama Series, Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series (Gary Oldman), Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (Jack Lowden), and a remarkable six other categories, including writing, directing, and editing. A program that had largely slid under the radar with its first two installments was now publicly recognized as one of the best on all television.

Continue reading ‘Slow Horses’ Review: Fourth Season Of Apple TV+ Thriller Deepens Legacy Of Hit Show at The Playlist.

Do young people remember “Sausage Party”? The movie about the hot dog that really wanted to find his place in a bun? While it may not feel that old to viewers of a certain age, the comedy about sentient food discovering the truth about what happens when they leave the grocery store is already eight years old, a lifetime in pop culture. And there are elements of it that feel even older, a product of a pre-COVID time when comedies aimed more directly at adults were more common.

Continue reading ‘Sausage Party: Foodtopia’ Review: Bursts of Comedy Flavor Keep Prime Video Animated Series From Going Bad at The Playlist.

The good thing about Apple TV+’s seemingly endless budget is that it allows for projects that other networks and streaming services might put in a box to explore their potential in creative ways. It truly feels like Apple is the best place for creators, and not just because of the money. Despite a few recent missteps, it’s valuable to have a company this massive that’s willing to open the wallets for shows as fundamentally different as “Ted Lasso,” “Dark Matter,” and “Swagger.”

Into this line-up enters creator Katie Robbins’ “Sunny,” one of the most surprisingly accomplished and hard-to-pin-down shows of 2024.

Continue reading ‘Sunny’ Review: Ambitious, Creative Sci-fi Dramedy Defies Expectations at The Playlist.

It’s rare for a show that appears to be running out of ideas to return two years later with the creative force that courses through the fourth season of Prime Video’s “The Boys.” After a couple of seasons of arguable wheel-spinning, seasons that seemed desperate to top the shock value of the first but didn’t do much with the complex themes or dense potential world-building in its abundance of ideas, “The Boys” oozes creative confidence with this outing and sets the table in a manner that bodes well for the future of this massive streaming hit.

Continue reading ‘The Boys’ Season 4 Review: Prime Video’s Hit Superhero Show Returns With A Great, Confident Season at The Playlist.

It makes sense that David E. Kelley would find his way back to the work of Scott Turow, one of the most popular authors of his era. They’re kindred spirits in a sense, both former attorneys who used their legal expertise to craft bestselling books or highly-rated TV mysteries. Turow came out of the gates on fire with a book that he would never really top in terms of popularity, 1987’s “Presumed Innocent,” made into a hit film with Harrison Ford in 1990 and now remade 34 years later as an Apple TV+ mini-series with Jake Gyllenhaal in the role of an ace prosecutor turned #1 suspect.

Continue reading ‘Presumed Innocent’ Review: Clunky Dialogue, Stretched Mystery Make for A Creatively Guilty Remake at The Playlist.

There’s something so frustrating about watching a show that should work but can’t quite figure out how to put its puzzle pieces together. Sometimes, the pieces just don’t fit. That’s the experience for the bulk of the six episodes of Netflix’s “Eric,” a drama that tries to do so many different things that it ends up doing too little of any of them. Its most fatal flaw might be that its conceit never feels thematically engaging, distracting from what works best about the show, a series of excellent performances that work on a scene-by-scene basis but never come together to form an effective show overall.

Continue reading ‘Eric’ Review: Benedict Cumberbatch’s ‘Sesame Street’-Meets-Kidnapping Series Can’t Find The Right Tones To Support Strong Performances at The Playlist.

How can you be a leader to your people if you’re on the run from them? It’s a fascinating question, one that could serve as the basis for a great book or film, but one that’s hard to embed in a six-part mini-series, a format that proves the wrong one for the story of how a fake movie played a role in the life of Black Panthers leader Huey P. Newton.

Continue reading ‘The Big Cigar’ Review: Great André Holland Performance Gets Lost in Cluttered Apple Mini-Series at The Playlist.

It’s just so sad. A somber tone hangs over Hulu’s very good “Under the Bridge” like a weighted blanket, dragging everyone down into the Canadian ground. It’s a show about characters who carry trauma and are forced into a situation in which they have to watch people work through their own life-changing situations, too. It’s about those rash decisions that young people sometimes make that they can never get back. There have been attempts at true crime stories about the systemic problems in youth culture that often discards children that society deems unwanted, and there have been dozens of stories of bullying, but this one feels more empathetic than almost all the others.

Continue reading ‘Under The Bridge’ Review: Riley Keough, Lily Gladstone Ground Heartbreaking True Crime Mini-Series at The Playlist.

There is so much going on in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2015 novel “The Sympathizer” that it would take a team of true craftsmen even to attempt to unpack it in episodic form. HBO is lucky they hired one of the best in Park Chan-Wook, a supremely and undeniably talented director. The South Korean auteur filmmaker behind “Decision to Leave,” “Oldboy,” and many more brings his remarkable tonal confidence to the first three episodes of “The Sympathizer,” which almost plays like a three-hour new film by the award-winning director.

Continue reading ‘The Sympathizer’ Review: Park Chan-Wook, Robert Downey Jr. Are in Inspired Pairing for HBO’s Ambitious Adaptation at The Playlist.

How is it possible that Apple TV’s high-budget “Palm Royale” doesn’t work? With this insanely talented cast and trendy concept, it should be a slam dunk, right? The main reason it’s not is a depressingly common one in today’s TV and streaming landscape: It’s the wrong length. Like so many recent projects, it wears out its welcome with narrative diversions that don’t work and subplots that sag in the middle of the season to the point where it becomes impossible to care.

Continue reading ‘Palm Royale’ Review: Phenomenal Cast Can’t Save Tedious Shallowness of Apple TV+ Series at The Playlist.

The natural question about Apple TV+’s “Manhunt,” based on the book “Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer” by James L. Swanson, is going to be “Why now?” It does not seem coincidental that a story that’s essentially about one of the times our democracy was at its most fragile just happens to be coming out during one of the most contentious and divisive election years in U.S.

Continue reading ‘Manhunt’ Review: History Comes To Life In Tense, Character-Driven Series About the Lincoln Assassination at The Playlist.

The leader of a fictional European country falls apart in HBO’s latest political satire, “The Regime,” premiering on March 3. The network has a long history of deconstructing power on shows like “Veep” and “Succession,” two programs that will undoubtedly spring to mind during this 6-episode descent into power-hungry madness. Oscar winner Kate Winslet, who won Emmys for her previous two HBO mini-series (“Mildred Pierce” & “Mare of Easttown”), is having a blast as Chancellor Elena Vernham, a world leader who is so insecure and unstable that she’s dragging her country down with her.

Continue reading ‘The Regime’ Review: Kate Winslet Chews Every Scene In HBO’s Smart Deconstruction Of Political Upheaval at The Playlist.

James Clavell’s “Shōgun” is a notoriously long book. The first edition in 1975 ran well over a thousand pages and yet was somehow still a truly massive, culture-shifting literary hit, selling millions of copies. Not only did it start a successful series of books for the author known as The Asian Saga, but it really helped define the prestige network TV mini-series. In 1980, a nine-hour mini-series captivated viewers on NBC over five nights, becoming the highest-rated program in the history of the network and second only to ABC’s “Roots” on any network.

Continue reading ‘Shōgun’ Review: FX’s Lavish Action Samurai Period Piece Reshapes Beloved Original at The Playlist.

At first, the concept behind the second installment of Ryan Murphy and FX’s “Feud” feels a bit too simple to maintain eight episodes of drama. How could one mine enough intrigue from the story of a writer bickering with his socialite friends? It turns out there’s both more and less to this story than meets the eye. Less in that it’s a more grounded and relatable tale than it first appears, a character study about insecurity and friendship.

Continue reading ‘Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans’ Review: Ryan Murphy’s FX Anthology Series Returns With Nuanced, Smart Edition at The Playlist.

In 2001, the TV mini-series was forever altered by HBO’s “Band of Brothers,” a towering achievement in the form and quite simply one of the best WWII films or shows of all time. Based on the book by Stephen E. Ambrose, and created by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, “Band of Brothers” told the story of “Easy” Company from boot camp through the Western Front.

Continue reading ‘Masters Of The Air’ Review: WWII Mini-Series Captures Insane Danger, But Struggles To Maintain Altitude at The Playlist.

To some, it may seem blasphemous to go anywhere near new content that centers Sam Spade. Who would dare pick up the pen of Dashiell Hammett or step into the shoes of Humphrey Bogart? Luckily, the pedigree behind AMC’s excellent “Monsieur Spade” is one of the highest in years. Co-created by Scott Frank and Tom Fontana, and executive produced by Barry Levinson, this brightly-lit noir is one of the best recent TV originals, a smart, sexy, deeply philosophical piece of storytelling that values things like dialogue, character, and theme over the high concepts that have defined so much TV in the 2020s.

Continue reading ‘Monsieur Spade’ Review: Clive Owen Headlines Smart, Accomplished Update Of Classic Character at The Playlist.

Television feels like it’s at a turning point at the end of 2023. The form has said goodbye to some of its heaviest critical darlings, including losing HBO Emmy juggernauts “Succession” and “Barry,” along with the too-soon demise of FX’s “Reservation Dogs.” It really felt like there was a question of where TV goes next … and then it went nowhere.

Continue reading The 20 Best TV Shows Of 2023 at The Playlist.

“There’s always another game being played, isn’t there?” The game on top of the game is the overall theme of the three stellar seasons of “Slow Horses,” one of the best Apple TV+ original dramas. The first two six-episode installments premiered in 2022, offering fans of spy dramas largely standalone jolts of espionage-driven entertainment, and there is zero dip in quality in the upcoming third chapter of this excellent series. In fact, the third season may be the most propulsive, an outing that jumps right into the action, takes place nearly in real-time, and never lets up for six hours.

Continue reading ‘Slow Horses’ TV Review: Apple TV+’s Spy Thriller With Gary Oldman Maintains Its Gold Standard at The Playlist.

After an ambitious fourth season in 2020 that arguably drifted into something different from what Noah Hawley had produced before in his Coen Brothers-inspired “Fargo,” the fifth chapter of this twisted anthology series returns to the roots of the film that gives it a title. It’s as if Hawley and his team put some of the basic elements of the 1996 Oscar winner on a whiteboard—kidnapped housewife, pair of bumbling criminals (one foreign), car salesman husband, kindly Minnesotan police officer, etc.—and then figured out how to warp them through their funhouse mirror approach to Coen-esque black comedy.

Continue reading ‘Fargo’ Review: Noah Hawley’s Critical Darling Returns To Its Roots With Timely, Funny Fifth Season at The Playlist.

The title of FX’s ambitious but frustrating new mystery series, “A Murder at the End of the World” has a very intended dual meaning. On the one hand, it takes place in an extremely remote location—an ice-covered hotel that is quite literally at the physical end of the world. However, it feels like creators Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij are also using their title in a chronological sense, weaving climate change concerns and A.I./tech conversation into their story in a way that implies that we may be at the end of the world as we know it all over the planet.

Continue reading ‘A Murder At The End Of The World’ Review: Intriguing FX Limited Series Feels More Like A Lecture Than A Mystery at The Playlist.

Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “All the Light We Cannot See” is a lyrically structured book, a story that moves back and forth through time and POV, using short chapters that read more like poetry than prose. In other words, it’s a really tough book to adapt for the big or small screen. Even with that degree of difficulty in mind, the 4-part Netflix mini-series version of this moving tale that unfolds starting November 2nd is atrocious, a poorly constructed, ham-fisted, manipulative adaptation that drains the source material of all of its inherent power in favor of obvious dialogue, blunt characterizations, and genuinely horrible filmmaking.

Continue reading ‘All The Light We Cannot See’ Review: Shawn Levy Drains The Power Of A Great Book In Netflix’s Manipulative WWII Series at The Playlist.

Charming performances and strong production values struggle to push through overwritten dialogue and ham-fisted plotting in Apple TV+’s mini-series “Lessons in Chemistry,” based on the hit 2022 novel by Bonnie Garmus. At its core, this is a story about how it is not predictable formulas that make up the building blocks of life but the chaotic random elements that define our journey. Trying to cram an overstuffed debut novel (and adding a bit more stuffing even) into eight episodes leads to a mini-series that often tells much more than it shows, allowing characters to become thematic and cultural mouthpieces more often than it should.

Continue reading ‘Lessons In Chemistry’ Review: Brie Larson Anchors Ambitious But Overcrowded Adaptation Of Hit Book at The Playlist.

Max’s pirate comedy “Our Flag Means Death” felt like a pretty standard spoof of pirate pop culture when it started its first season, but it developed over that 10-episode run into something much richer, smarter, and even moving by its end. As it navigates the tricky waters of streaming comedy in the 2020s, David Jenkins’ show has found a very loyal fan base; one attracted to both its smart sense of humor and its notable representation of LGBTQ+ characters.

Continue reading ‘Our Flag Means Death’ Review: Max Comedy Continues Confident Sail With Increasingly Lovable Characters at The Playlist.

Numerous clips have been shared online regarding how self-importantly Aaron Sorkin and company took themselves while they were making “The Newsroom,” a show that practically announced itself as the last stand for human rights and journalistic decency in the world. Holding that impossible standard high in its third season is Apple TV+’s expensive hit “The Morning Show,” a program that makes it feel like if morning news in America falls, then the apocalypse is just around the corner.

Continue reading ‘The Morning Show’ Review: Hit Apple TV+ Show Leans Into Soap Opera Melodrama in Entertaining Third Season at The Playlist.