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Review: ‘The Last of Us’ Is a Zombie Thriller About Single Parenting
You would be forgiven for suffering, at this point, from pandemic fatigue. I’m referring here not to Covid-19 but to the many plagues that have kicked off TV apocalypses in recent years. From “Station Eleven” to “12 Monkeys,” “The Walking Dead” to “The Stand,” “Y: The Last Man” to “The Last Man on Earth,” this […]
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Review: In ‘The Rehearsal,’ All the World Is Staged
Life, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said, can be understood only backward, but it must be lived forward. Nathan Fielder thinks he’s found a workaround for that. In the uncomfortably funny, sneakily poignant and conceptually bananas “The Rehearsal,” Fielder goes to audacious lengths to prove that life can be lived backward. Or at least, it […]
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‘Irma Vep’ Returns, More Meta Than Ever
Most shows fall within recognizable categories: original stories, spinoffs, docudramas or, increasingly, reboots and revivals. Then there is “Irma Vep.” Olivier Assayas’s new HBO series, starring Alicia Vikander, is more like a braid in which the past and the present are inextricably intertwined. Its origins go back more than a century, though it will be […]
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On ‘Barry,’ Sarah Goldberg Has Learned to Love TV
LONDON — Over two and a half seasons on “Barry,” Sally Reed, the aspiring star played by Sarah Goldberg, has become one of the most complex characters on television, inviting both sympathy for her Hollywood struggles and contempt at her overweening self-absorption. In Sunday’s episode, this empathy whiplash was in full effect. Overwhelmed with emotion […]
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‘We Own This City’ Review: Baltimore Police Problems, Rewired
“We Own This City” tends to choose telling over showing, however, especially on the investigation side of the story. As Nicole Steele, a civil-rights-division attorney, Wunmi Mosaku does all she can to create a character who feels her mission deeply and who chafes at her department’s resistance to real change. We glimpse Steele’s motives when […]
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Why TV-Inspired Vacations Are on the Rise
“It was the first time we’d done anything like this,” said Lara Richardson, chief marketing officer for Crown Media Family Networks, in an email. “One thing we hear over and over from viewers is that, as much they love our products, they want to step inside a ‘Countdown to Christmas’ movie.” Vacation homes are also […]
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‘The Gilded Age’ Explores a Rarely Seen Chapter of Black History
In this week’s episode of “The Gilded Age,” the HBO period drama set in late 19th-century New York, the young aspirant Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson) makes an unannounced visit to the Brooklyn home of her new friend, Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), hoping to surprise her with a gift of sorts: a bag of old used […]
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‘The Gilded Age’ Review: Dime-Store ‘Downton’
Julian Fellowes chased his new series, “The Gilded Age,” for a decade. Call it his white whale. Beginning Monday on HBO, you can watch it drag him and a large, talented cast beneath the waves. What would become “The Gilded Age” began in 2012 as Fellowes’s idea for a prequel to his “Downton Abbey,” the […]
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‘The Gilded Age’ Finally Arrives on HBO
(Baranski said of her character, “She’s a marvelous snob, but who wouldn’t want to play a snob written by Julian Fellowes?”) Sets were built on soundstages on Long Island, including for the myriad rooms of the Russell mansion, decorated with period-appropriate fabrics and patterns made by some of the same European companies that fabricated the […]
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