TV Reviews1/14/21Jan 143TV Reviews1/14/21D+TV ReviewsThe Stand’s New Vegas is where nuance goes to dieKayla Kumari Upadhyaya229Up until this point, Randall Flagg has mostly lurked on the periphery of The Stand’s story. We see his bootheel hold…
TV Reviews1/7/21Jan 7SaveTV Reviews1/7/21C+TV ReviewsThe Stand buries its best character momentsKayla Kumari Upadhyaya102The Stand’s flashback-dependent structure continues to be one of its downfalls. As for “The House Of The Dead,” the…
TV Reviews12/31/20Dec 31SaveTV Reviews12/31/20C+TV ReviewsPoorly executed flashbacks plague The StandKayla Kumari Upadhyaya190Three episodes in, it’s becoming too hard to ignore the failures in The Stand’s structure. It does make sense that…
TV Reviews12/24/20Dec 241TV Reviews12/24/20B+TV ReviewsThe Stand finds more solid ground in “Pocket Savior”Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya43In its second episode, The Stand once again bounces between past and present, introducing even more characters to…
TV Reviews12/17/20Dec 171TV Reviews12/17/20B-TV ReviewsThe Stand wavers at the beginning of the end of the worldKayla Kumari Upadhyaya131Every time a book as popular as The Stand is adapted for screen, two questions emerge: Will it satisfy the built-in…
Best Of12/14/20Dec 143Best Of12/14/20Best OfThe 25 best TV shows of 2020Danette Chavez, Erik Adams, Patrick Gomez, and 12 more226In a year that saw many of us relegated to our homes for much of its duration, TV was an ever more powerful medium…
TV Reviews12/4/20Dec 41TV Reviews12/4/20ATV ReviewsEuphoria shines brightest in its stripped-down special episodeKayla Kumari Upadhyaya25While I struggled with Euphoria’s first season and ultimately found its execution to be uneven—all style, little…
TV Reviews11/2/20Nov 2SaveTV Reviews11/2/20B+TV ReviewsWe Are Who We Are dances through a finale that works best in a vacuumKayla Kumari Upadhyaya18We Are Who We Are follows a brilliantly acted but ultimately dysfunctional penultimate episode with its finale, the…
TV Reviews10/26/20Oct 261TV Reviews10/26/20A-TV ReviewsA standout episode of We Are Who We Are highlights the power of its castKayla Kumari Upadhyaya54We Are Who We Are is the rare conundrum of a show where the cast is operating on an almost entirely different level…
TV Reviews10/19/20Oct 191TV Reviews10/19/20BTV ReviewsWe Are Who We Are captures the disorienting power of a crushKayla Kumari Upadhyaya7A consistent strength of We Are Who We Are has been its ability to give very high stakes to very low-stakes…
TV Reviews10/17/20Oct 17SaveTV Reviews10/17/20C+TV ReviewsIf ghost stories and love stories are the same, The Haunting Of Bly Manor should be better at bothKayla Kumari Upadhyaya127“You said it was a ghost story. It isn’t. It’s a love story.”
TV Reviews10/16/20Oct 16SaveTV Reviews10/16/20D+TV ReviewsThe Haunting Of Bly Manor loses steam with its origin-story episodeKayla Kumari Upadhyaya109One of the many tricky bits of constructing effective horror is determining how much to explain. Things go bump in…
TV Reviews10/15/20Oct 15SaveTV Reviews10/15/20B+TV ReviewsPeter Quint is The Haunting Of Bly Manor’s scariest monsterKayla Kumari Upadhyaya114We have very little control over our memories. Remembering an event, a person, a place doesn’t always feel like a…
TV Reviews10/14/20Oct 14SaveTV Reviews10/14/20B+TV ReviewsMemories are a trap in another disorienting Haunting Of Bly ManorKayla Kumari Upadhyaya77Henry Wingrave has mostly been a background character up until this point. He hires Dani in the first episode, and…
TV Reviews10/13/20Oct 13SaveTV Reviews10/13/20ATV ReviewsThe Haunting Of Bly Manor devastates and disturbs in its dizzying time-jump episodeKayla Kumari Upadhyaya66“The Altar Of The Dead” is a remarkable chapter of The Haunting Of Bly Manor. At the heart of it rests a perfectly…
TV Reviews10/12/20Oct 12SaveTV Reviews10/12/20B-TV ReviewsEveryone harbors secrets in an uneven We Are Who We AreKayla Kumari Upadhyaya12“Surprise, I exist outside of your mind,” Caitlin says to Fraser after he says the moustache she’s painting onto…
TV Reviews10/12/20Oct 12SaveTV Reviews10/12/20C+TV ReviewsThe Haunting Of Bly Manor misses the mark with Dani’s backstoryKayla Kumari Upadhyaya94I wish this were a more obvious statement, but good queer representation does not mean queer characters have to be…
TV Reviews10/11/20Oct 11SaveTV Reviews10/11/20B+TV ReviewsReal-life horrors haunt Bly Manor in an episode full of flashbacksKayla Kumari Upadhyaya49“The Two Faces, Part One” opens with a great sonic transition from classic frenetic horror strings into “Tainted…
TV Reviews10/10/20Oct 10SaveTV Reviews10/10/20A-TV ReviewsNothing is as it seems in The Haunting Of Bly ManorKayla Kumari Upadhyaya104The most explicit connection between The Haunting Of Bly Manor and its predecessor The Haunting Of Hill House is…
TV Reviews10/9/20Oct 91TV Reviews10/9/20A-TV ReviewsThe Haunting Of Bly Manor introduces TV’s latest haunted houseKayla Kumari Upadhyaya90The year is 1987, and a young American woman named Dani (Victoria Pedretti) takes a job at as an au pair in the…