Like its lead character, Marvel’s Luke Cage is aware of the upward climb it’s facing in season two. Luke (Mike Colter) cleared his name in Defenders, but when the new episodes begin, he’s wrestling with his newfound fame and obligations, the return of his estranged father (the late, great Reg E. Cathey), and, oh yeah,…

Yellowstone, the inaugural television effort from Sicario and Hell Or High Water screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, feints at being several types of programs throughout its feature-length premiere: a pulpy modern Western, a sudsy family drama, a consequential clash of cultures on the final American frontier. But none of…

“What you are about to see has never been attempted before on television.” With this baldfaced lie, ex-NFL quarterback Jesse Palmer kicks off a reality TV show where a bunch of women reveal their personalities (and bodies) to a guy hidden behind a wall whom they know nothing about, and hope he’ll propose to them.…

In accordance with its own “change is good” philosophy, Netflix’s Queer Eye reboot got a makeover in its first season, tweaking its title along with expanding its focus and pool of subjects. The new “Fab Five”—Jonathan Van Ness, Bobby Berk, Tan France, Karamo Brown, and Antoni Porowski—now use their considerable…

When The Staircase first debuted on French TV in 2005, it was barely recognizable as a true-crime documentary. At that time, “true crime” meant Dateline. It meant Nancy Grace, whose smug moralism stands in for the judgments of society in Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s then eight-part documentary series. More than a decade…

“The universe keeps pushing us together,” says one of the two teens destined to become the title characters on Cloak & Dagger, Marvel’s latest televised superhero adaptation, and the other one replies, “The universe keeps pulling us apart.” It’s a fittingly meta commentary on the writing team for this show, who has…

Millions of women struggle with their diet and weight, and most likely consider it a personal battle between themselves and the scale. But what if, Dietland supposes, it’s actually a massive male-dominated conspiracy by the fashion industry to keep women in a perpetual state of insecurity and to promote rape culture?…

There’s a lot going on in Pose, the new FX drama that explores the origins of New York’s ball culture, but little of it feels superfluous. The opening sequence alone is packed with introductions, finery fit for queens, a heist, choreography—and every entertaining bit of it is significant. Not a single stitch is…

We’ve come a long way from The Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous. Luxury, the likes of which we once fawned over, now rings a sour note in a society where wealth has become increasingly more concentrated. The conglomerates are converging, and the dream of achieving one’s own swimming pool of gold drifts further and…

“It just never stops,” says one person. “It’s such crazypants bullshit,” another opines. A third sums up something anyone in this country could’ve said in the past year, when it comes to following the current vein of politics in America: “You get tired of saying ‘holy shit,’ because you’d be saying it every three…

Peter Weir’s 1975 film Picnic At Hanging Rock is a bewitching thing, “a film of haunting mystery and buried sexual hysteria,” as Roger Ebert put it. Buried is a key word there—much of what makes the film so haunting lingers beneath the surface, like a bare ankle glimpsed in a flash beneath a long, full skirt. You know…

Five years since Arrested Development made its improbable comeback—thanks to Netflix’s then-nascent foray into original content—the verdict on its fourth season, its mere existence miraculous, is a shrug. When Netflix announced Arrested Development as part of its first slate of original content back in 2011—which…

The success of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale adaptation and ABC’s Roseanne revival would suggest that timeliness is next to godliness. The former has raked in the accolades with its deft, often merciless exploration of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian themes, while the latter scored the highest-rated sitcom premiere in years,…

What made the first season of 13 Reasons Why so addictive wasn’t its drawn-out mystery about the reasons Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford) took her own life. It was the show’s ability to capture the nuances of modern high school life—the frankness with which teens discuss sex, the nebulous…

Some of Netflix’s true-crime series start with a fascinating case, then expand their focus to engage with larger social issues: Making A Murderer and corruption, for example, or The Keepers and institutional memory. However, in its newest binge-worthy miniseries, Evil Genius: The True Story Of America’s Most…

In the second episode of Showtime’s adaptation of Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, patriarch and noted monster David Melrose (Hugo Weaving) keeps watch over his carefully isolated kingdom. It’s 1967, and the elder Melrose looks out over the expanse of his property in France, taking in the sunshine and the…

Hari Kondabolu’s Netflix special Warn Your Relatives brims with the kind of incisive political comedy one can expect from Kondabolu, the star, creator, and executive director of the pop culture documentary The Problem With Apu. There are digs at Trump, and self-aware attempts to stop talking about Trump that end in,…

When AMC announced its new pop culture docuseries, Visionaries, at the Television Critics Association 2017 summer press tour, the network made it clear that these explorations of genres and media would be informative, but informal—expansive, but specific to whatever prominent filmmaker or producer was at the helm of a…

If last year’s Archer: Dreamland was the animated show’s equivalent of a semester abroad—a fun but frivolous affair, enjoyable yet lacking the usual stakes to invest in—then Danger Island, the new season, is a follow-up spring break in Miami. There’s still pleasures to be had, but it’s all a bit hollow.

The first season of The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s adaptation of the eponymous Margaret Atwood novel, made for some of the best TV in 2017. Every bit as harrowing as its source material—in which the few fertile women left in the world are reduced to incubators by an oppressive, theocratic regime—Bruce Miller’s series was…