There’s a moment in the premiere episode of Channel Zero: The Dream Door, the newest installment of Syfy’s horror anthology series, that’s as good a jump scare as any this year. Newlywed and new homeowner Jillian has ventured through a mysterious door that has suddenly appeared in the basement of her new suburban…

The second season of Making A Murderer attempts to grapple with the deep scars wrought by the success of its first—for about six minutes, encompassing the montage of news headlines and local TV clips that open the season premiere. It comes across as well-intended but half-hearted, though it still frames one of the…

Can two people stay together happily forever? The new six-episode Netflix series Wanderlust attempts to answer this age-old question by intimately dissecting the marriage of an English couple, a therapist and an academic. The therapist is played by Toni Collette, who once again proves that she is one of the finest…

The third season of Marvel’s Daredevil finds the series and its hero getting back to basics. New showrunner Erik Oleson (of Arrow and The Man In The High Castle) sends Matt Murdock, a.k.a The Devil Of Hell’s Kitchen (Charlie Cox), back to the streets—and rooftops—of the city he’s sworn to protect, trading the…

Debuting later this month on Netflix, Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina already has a built-in audience. Fans of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s work in the world of Archie Comics, both on the page and screen, will definitely want to see what kind of magic the Riverdale creator casts away from the land of network standards and…

Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner made a career out of creating an entertaining series filled with frequently unlikable people in HBO’s Girls. The pair’s second time around on the cable network shows that lightning indeed does not strike twice. Camping is in the running for the worst U.S. version of a successful British…

Haunted-house stories are, by their very nature, self-contained. So it’s especially impressive that The Haunting Of Hill House, the newest in a series of collaborations between Netflix and director Mike Flanagan, manages to be both sprawling and terrifying at the same time. Flanagan and the show’s writers take pains…

The last (and first) time Matthew Weiner created a TV show, it was one of the great American works about a great American pastime: pretending. The characters in the Mad Men showrunner’s latest are bonded by that act as well: Each episode of the Amazon anthology series The Romanoffs features at least one character…

It takes a few minutes of post-viewing reflection for the most radical thing about Star Wars Resistance to set in: no Jedi. There’s not one laser sword on display in the new Disney Channel series, no evidence of magical powers. Nobody tells anybody to use the Force, or even mentions that quasi-mystical energy field.…

When Marvel and Disney released the six Marvel Rising: Initiation animated shorts this summer, the assumption (reinforced by Marvel) was that they would serve as a calling card for the then-upcoming Secret Warriors TV movie, showing off the fun and breezy potential of these heroes. The shorts were brief but spirited,…

There’s nothing innovative or remarkable about The Good Cop, which, for a Netflix series, almost becomes remarkable in and of itself. The series’ mundanity—especially enhanced by sharing a release date with the delightfully strange Maniac—feels out of place on the prolific streaming service, instead playing more like…

You’re going to be tempted to “figure out” Maniac. Deny the temptation.

The #MeToo movement is still going strong, historic numbers of women are up for election this fall (and voting and protesting across the country), and between Crazy Rich Asians and Netflix’s To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, the stereotypically “female” genre of the rom-com is back with a vengeance. American pop…

Space, as the saying goes, is the final frontier. We’ve crossed the oceans and explored their depths. We’ve discovered new lands and set up camp in the hottest, coldest, and highest places on Earth. Antarctica, the Sahara, Everest. The skies. The moon. Humans are a species which, as Stephen Dunn once wrote, often…

In the battle for New York, Danny Rand, a.k.a Iron Fist (Finn Jones), emerged as the most improved of Marvel’s The Defenders (which, given where the curly-haired warrior started, is saying both a little and a lot). The barefoot billionaire and living weapon—and all the other sobriquets that make up his Daen…

Over the course of four movies, the alternate reality of the Purge has slowly taken shape: a dystopian America in which, for one night of the year, all crime is legal. It’s an appropriately blunt political allegory for our own time—which often reads like satire itself— making the Purge arguably the most relevant…

A lot of the buzz surrounding Netflix’s latest TV original, The Innocents, seems focused on comparing the show to Stranger Things. From a corporate perspective the comparison is smart. It’s a straightforward way to reel in an audience that might otherwise shy away from genre shows with sci-fi influences. Outside that…

While the Bond franchise hunts for a new director (and maybe even Daniel Craig’s successor), Amazon is hoping to move from niche programming to blockbuster productions with the help of a different household name. Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, from Lost alums Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland, presents the fifth screen…

For all her gifts as a master of the modern detective novel, Agatha Christie was never terribly comfortable with the insides of the human head. In Christie Land—that glorious old world realm of murder, righteous neighborhood busybodies, and fastidious little Belgians—the motives for killing are rarely complicated. If…

We are not in the business of judging a book solely by its cover, nor a film or TV series by the trailer (and when we do weigh in on the marketing, it is after the fact). No, we make the journey—sometimes a sprint, sometimes a slog—from cover to cover, opening credits to stinger, cold open to epilogue to offer some…