Pleasure, in the novels of Jackie Collins, tends to be abundant but hard-earned—imagine Pandora, having opened the box containing every sin plaguing humanity, retiring to a beach house in Malibu with two Weimaraners and a finely muscled masseur. The titles of her later books nod to desire and its cost: Lethal Seduction, Deadly Embrace, Dangerous Kiss. And in life, the British-born author emanated a similar combination of tough glamour.
This is supposed to be the season of unleashed, exuberant exhibitionism. Many of us have swaddled our pale bodies in Lycra and terry cloth for more than a year; the theory of Hot Vax Summer is that we’re long overdue to expose them to the cruel light of other people’s eyes. In the music video for “Solar Power,” Lorde basks on the beach in a lemon-yellow crop top, the symmetry of her rib cage its own work of art.
In the first episode of Loki, the trickster god of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—last seen escaping in a time-travel snafu during Avengers: Endgame—is captured and taken to a mysterious hinterland that exists outside of time and space and resembles nothing so much as a mushroom-colored 1970s airport. The walls are paneled in wood. The ceiling, covered in hundreds of circular light fixtures, stretches vastly into the distance, its composition pure Kubrick.
Way back in January, I was idly thumbing through Instagram when I received a message that shook me like a nascent martini. “Did you hear that Taking Cara Babies donated to Trump?” a friend wrote. This sentence likely makes no sense to you, unless you’ve had a baby sometime in the past few years. Taking Cara Babies is the brand name for Cara Dumaplin, a neonatal nurse turned baby-sleep expert who became, in 2020, my everything.
This article contains spoilers through the entirety of Mare of Easttown.Mare of Easttown is a strange name for a prestige television show: clunky, nondescriptive, homonymic. (“So she’s the mayor?” people might ask if you recommend the series, and in a way, she is.
This article contains spoilers through the entirety of Mare of Easttown.Mare of Easttown is a strange name for a prestige television show: clunky, nondescriptive, homonymic. (“So she’s the mayor?” people might ask if you recommend the series, and in a way, she is.
A few unspoken subjects hang over the third season of Netflix’s Master of None, as inescapable as air. One is the sidelining of Aziz Ansari’s character, Dev, for reasons that I can only assume relate to Ansari’s desire to be less conspicuous in recent years. Another is the fact that the series, set in New York City and the vague hinterland of “upstate,” was filmed in the U.K., a feint that provoked a sense of inauthenticity I couldn’t shake.
As gratifying as it can be to see an actor disappear into a role, there’s something soul-restoring about an underappreciated star finally twinkling their way front and center in the Hollywood firmament. At 69, Jean Smart has almost five decades of ancillary and co-lead roles to her name—the rapacious Lana in Frasier, the ditsy helpmeet Charlene in Designing Women—but the new HBO Max series Hacks marks the rare time the actor has anchored a show.
This article contains spoilers through the entirety of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Avengers: Endgame.Superlative television should always know what it wants to be, and on that front, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has felt more like Marvel’s exercise in trying things out than a series with a fully realized sense of self.
This article contains spoilers through the entirety of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Avengers: Endgame.Superlative television should always know what it wants to be, and on that front, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has felt more like Marvel’s exercise in trying things out than a series with a fully realized sense of self.
There’s a scene in the second episode of Mare of Easttown, HBO’s new crime series, that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I watched it. Mare, the show’s titular police detective (played by Kate Winslet), visits a rural spot where a girl’s body has been found and prepares to inform the girl’s father.
On television these days, the near future tends to look like an Apple Store. Everything is gleaming white, a triumph of polymers and marble and Windex. Everything is shiny and unsullied by human fingerprints. On Made for Love, HBO Max’s zany new series about a woman who manages to escape what’s essentially a virtual-reality prison, the contrast between her pristine digital surroundings and her disheveled, pine-paneled childhood home makes for the show’s most effective comedy.
Writing about Titus Andronicus in 1948, the scholar John Dover Wilson bemoaned how Shakespeare’s bloodiest play “seems to jolt and bump along like some broken-down cart, laden with bleeding corpses from an Elizabethan scaffold, and driven by an executioner from Bedlam.” You couldn’t say the same for Gangs of London.
The childhood memories we retain most searingly tend to involve shame. When I was 6, after being chided twice for talking too loudly during lunch, I was made to stand in the cafeteria by myself until the other kids finished their food. I can’t even type that sentence without flushing at how conspicuously bad I felt, and how alone.
Early in the first episode of Q: Into the Storm, the filmmaker Cullen Hoback makes a confession. “QAnon creeps into your thoughts,” he says, describing how years of investigating the false conspiracy theory that a cabal of powerful elites is engaging in ritualistic child abuse has warped his thinking. “It changes the lens with which you see the world.” Hoback can’t see the number 17 without thinking of its corresponding letter in the alphabet, Q.
Image above: The photographer Rose Marie Cromwell documented her experience giving birth and her growing child during the pandemic, in a series called Eclipse.In early March last year, I was heading home from a work happy hour on the subway when I realized that a woman was staring at my belly. She looked at my waist, where my coat was belted, and then at the floor, and then at my waist again, and then she very tentatively offered me her seat. I was four months pregnant.
Watching Allen v. Farrow, HBO’s new four-part miniseries about the 29-year-old allegations of child molestation against the director Woody Allen, I kept having a feeling that I couldn’t entirely identify. Since revelations about Harvey Weinstein emerged in late 2017—broken, in part, by Allen’s son, Ronan Farrow—harrowing stories about abusive men in the workplace have been reported one after another.
In a video that recently went viral after it was dug out of the aughts time capsule, the former late-night host Craig Ferguson brings up Britney Spears.
AMC’s newest British import, the four-part drama The Salisbury Poisonings, is a dystopia with a bucolic English setting, and the disconnect between the two is where the show’s slow creep of horror begins. On an ordinary street, a man and a woman quietly convulse on a park bench. Later, workers in ghostly white hazmat suits swab hastily abandoned cups of tea for signs of contamination. Swans, one police officer reports, are “behaving strangely.
Before Arsène Lupin was the inspiration for an out-of-nowhere Netflix smash hit, projected to be watched by 70 million subscribers, the character was a French literary legend, a gentleman thief with the moral code of Robin Hood, the wits of Sherlock Holmes, and the anti-aristocratic instincts of Robespierre.
Paul Spella / HBO / Netflix / Getty / The AtlanticLate last year, at the end of my parental leave, I finally caught up with The Comey Rule, Showtime’s stolid adaptation of former FBI Director James Comey’s memoir about—among other things—being fired by Donald Trump.
Not 20 minutes into The Vow, HBO’s enthralling-then-ultimately-gasbaggy docuseries, things started to feel concerningly familiar to me. Sarah Edmondson—an engaging Canadian actor with big valedictorian energy who had joined the Albany-based organization NXIVM (pronounced nex-ee-um)—was describing how she was first drawn into a group that she would later expose as a sex cult. Edmondson’s career had stalled, and she was looking for a sign from the universe.
This is, hopefully, the last thing I’ll write before going on parental leave. At this point late in twin pregnancy, I’m less a functioning professional person than a bad Ron Burgundy impression, chugging smoothies and bellowing “I am COMPLETELY MISERABLE” at anyone caring and unwise enough to check in.
Food, at its essence, is sustenance; that much is simple. Where things get complicated is in all the manifold ways it sustains us. Consider the burrito. In the first episode of Padma Lakshmi’s new Hulu show, Taste the Nation, the food writer and longtime Top Chef host travels to El Paso, Texas, where she attempts to isolate all the different ingredients in one of America’s favorite dishes.
Of all the charges you could level at Cops, it’s hard to accuse it of stinting on action. Until its cancellation this week, the 31-year-old reality series endured for so long because, despite the unvarnished nature of its presentation and concept (just regular cops filmed doing real police work!), it stuck rigidly to a fast-paced format. Each episode runs about 22 minutes long and has three acts, within which a suspect is located, investigated, and—mostly—arrested.
Of all the charges you could level at Cops, it’s hard to accuse it of stinting on action. Until its cancellation this week, the 31-year-old reality series endured for so long because, despite the unvarnished nature of its presentation and concept (just regular cops filmed doing real police work!), it stuck rigidly to a fast-paced format. Each episode runs about 22 minutes long and has three acts, within which a suspect is located, investigated, and—mostly—arrested.