HBO

You can tell a lot about a show from its title sequence. It: Welcome to Derry boasts a fun one in Episode 2, “The Thing in the Dark”, which fittingly released on Halloween on Max and will occupy its usual timeslot on HBO.

There’s a thing about jump scares where they almost never work because savvy viewers have come to expect them.

There are openings, and then there are openings. It: Welcome to Derry has an italicised version.

All the comedy in The Chair Company lives in the space between how other people see Ron Trosper and what he’s actually like.

Task ended with Robbie’s death, in many ways. I don’t mean literally, obviously, because Episode 7 devotes another epilogue-style hour to tying up loose ends...

The clue is in the name, sometimes. Even if you didn’t know that HBO’s The Chair Company comes from I Think You Should Leave’s Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin, the simple fact that it’s called The Chair Company should be a bit of a giveaway that it’s slightly off-kilter as far as comedies go.

People die. This is true in real life and even truer in television shows, since drama needs conflict, and conflict is invariably kicked off and concluded with violence.

If there’s a better show in 2025 than Task, I’d be interested to see it. You can always rely on HBO to just ride into town and drop extremely high-quality prestige TV on a semi-regular basis, to an extent that it almost feels unfair to other networks and platforms.

Watching Task really is an exercise in being put through the wringer. Here are a bunch of people who are mostly well-intentioned but all deeply traumatised, trapped in a situation beyond their control that just keeps escalating.

At this point, I’ve given up on my quaint hope that anyone in Task doesn’t have a deeply traumatic personal backstory. It’s a waste of time.

If the first episode of Brad Ingelsby’s Task was about a crime, Episode 2 is about all the other complications and consequences spilling out from it.

With some TV shows, you can just tell they’re good. I don’t mean “decent”, either – I mean properly, prestige.

The Last of Us already peaked in Season 2. It was in the penultimate episode where some minor storytelling changes improbably improved the original version.

I’m one of those insufferable fans of The Last of Us Part II who thinks it’s a work of towering genius, and I’ve done nothing throughout these recaps but moan about all the ways in which Season 2 of the HBO adaptation has made changes to it.

It was always going to be difficult to adapt The Last of Us Part II, which is a game that relies on the fundamental expectations of video games as a medium to tell a pretty complex story about grief, revenge, and various other attendant matters, none of them particularly positive.

The Last of Us, as a game and a TV show, is bleak to an extent that borders on parodical, like a social experiment designed to psychologically break huge swathes of people with their so-called entertainment.

There's usually a calm before a storm, but The Last of Us Season 2 provided enough storm in its previous outing that everyone spends Episode 3 reeling from it.

Only rarely will you see pre-release hype for a single hour of television as vigorous as what HBO was pushing for "Through the Valley".