Damon and Ricky take centerstage in Pose this week, yielding some excellent dance sequences. Whereas most of the episodes this season have been sprawling and, occasionally, unfocused, “What Would Candy Do?” has a clear throughline, zooming in on a very specific story that sees Damon and Ricky competing for a spot in…
Early on in “Never Knew Love Like This Before,” Pose suffers a death in the family. Lulu reports that Candy is missing after working down at a motel with a dangerous reputation, and it becomes instantly clear that bad news is looming. Blanca gets the call. Candy was murdered.
While Pose is doing so many things well in its second season, it also occasionally suffers from its tonal dissonance. Take, for example, one of the central storylines in “Butterfly/Cocoon”: Elektra accidentally kills one of her clients at the Hellfire Club by leaving him tied up, unsupervised, and on drugs. It isn’t,…
Early on in “Worth It,” Angel sits Blanca down and tells her she needs a makeover. She’s being practical and a little harsh but ultimately comes from a place of love. Angel points out that Blanca probably won’t be able to rent a space to start her own nail salon unless she can pass as cis. She pokes fun at Blanca’s…
HBO’s Euphoria promises right away to delve into the dark side of Gen Z. It stars Zendaya—who has to carry much too much of the show—as Rue, a troubled teen who starts the series with an overdose and still spends most of her time after chasing the happiness she only feels when she’s high. She has a new best friend…
Pose begins its second season in 1990 in a graveyard of nameless, endless tombs. It’s a striking visual representation of the way the world tried to strip HIV-positive people of their humanity, punishing and isolating them even in death. It’s a grand statement, but it’s also an intensely personal one, because we are…
The final stretch of Charmed’s first season has reiterated exactly what the show does well. It has been a bumpy first season, the show often dropping some of its best stories in favor of a more traditional Monster Of The Week supernatural drama structure. And some of those short-term narratives have worked, but a lot…
In its third season, The Good Fight pushed the boundaries of its own universe. Characters broke the fourth wall; random musical interludes interrupted scenes; the story’s Big Bad was literally...Donald Trump. In its finale, the world is ending—from climate change-induced balls of lightning, maybe, or maybe from some…
Netflix is doing the work to inject life back into the rom-com genre, and its latest effort in that field is Someone Great, an NYC-set heartbreak story written and directed by Sweet/Vicious creator Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and starring Gina Rodriguez, Brittany Snow, and DeWanda Wise as three longtime best friends.…
“This is still going to be the most beautiful, deep, real, cool, and hot, meaningful, important relationship of my life,” Ilana tells Abbi on the Brooklyn Bridge in Broad City’s absolutely gutting yet still hilarious series finale. Broad City turned in an ambitious final season, pushing its central friendship into new…
More and more on this season of The Good Fight, characters are turning to decidedly morally bad tactics in order to win their battles. Playing dirty is the name of the game in “The One Where Diane Joins The Resistance,” and everyone is making bold moves that immediately have consequences in order to win their…
Documentary Now! turned in a third season full of strikingly character-driven documentaries, and in its finale, it delivers three compelling character arcs within its hilarious sendup of the incredibly mundane and yet very human 2006 bowling documentary A League Of Ordinary Gentlemen. “Any Given Saturday Afternoon”…
Broad City always brims with callbacks, a testament to its makers’ improvisation backgrounds, the specificity of its world, and the inside-jokey nature of its central friendship. But in this final season, those callbacks have an extra layer of nostalgia to them, each beat of this final chapter soaked in familiar,…
Halfway through “The One Inspired by Roy Cohn,” Cush Jumbo as Luca Quinn delivers a lengthy, gripping, emotionally potent monologue to her small infant son, splayed next to her, unable of course to understand a word she’s saying. She talks through her options, through unnerved confusion about how drawn to motherhood…
Episodes of Documentary Now! naturally stand on their own as self-contained installments, connected to the original work they send up but not necessarily to each other. And yet, there are some clear throughlines in this third season, whether intentional or not. Many of these episodes have a subtle underlying theme…
The Good Fight’s season three premiere has a lot going for it, playing to all of the show’s strength with spectacular finesse. It’s a tour de force of acting, writing, and directing. But one element shines brightest of all: Audra McDonald.
Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer don’t get to flex their dramatic acting skills very often on Broad City. The madcap style of this comedy means that they’re most often giving over-the-top comedic performances. That’s not to say that there isn’t nuance in their performances from week to week. Both women have proven time…
“Searching for Mr. Larson: A Love Letter From the Far Side” is less about satirizing the documentary upon which it is based—Dear Mr. Watterson, about the creator of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes—and more about interrogating the very idea of a male, super-fan documentarian. It’s a painstaking account of one man’s…
Charmed has a lot of meta fun with its hokey setup this week, poking some fun at itself while satirizing its genre roots. Macy accidentally summons the main characters from a television series she grew up watching in which two brothers were sent from heaven to fight demons. Like a 90s version of Supernatural, with…
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