Apple TV+

If you can’t eat the rich, you might as well steal from them. This is the point that Your Friends & Neighbors is making, more or less.

With every episode of The Studio, it finds a new way to impress. In the two-part premiere it was a very funny ensemble piece and then a tight, isolated riff on the microcosmic art of the oner.

The White Lotus has only just wrapped up its third season, and yet it’s back in all but name on Apple TV+ in the form of Your Friends & Neighbors, Episode 1 & 2 of which debuted together to give a good sense of all the key ingredients.

Surface has had a very strange trajectory in Season 2, hasn’t it? It started out feeling very inert, then it gradually whipped up some steam...

There's simply no reason for The Studio to be this good. If it were just a satire on the movie industry, it'd be funny and fine, and nobody would be upset about that.

Finally! Just like that, a meandering Season 2 of Surface starts to feel a lot more like a proper thriller with Episode 7, and it’s about time.

I was a little mixed on the two-part premiere of The Studio. You can’t blame me, though. Those were two very different episodes, with the first feeling scatty and overstuffed and the second feeling a bit too insular.

Surface Season 2 has been very strange, but with the way Episode 6 plays out, you can sort of see what it was all building towards.

As strongly implied in the last episode, MQ is undergoing corporate changes that are creating significant stress for David. This situation shows no signs of...

At one point in Episode 1 of Apple TV+’s Seth Rogen-helmed Hollywood satire The Studio, the former head of Continental Studios, Patty (Catherine O’Hara), gives the protégé who inherited her job a pep talk about how Hollywood will trample his dreams, stress him out, and possibly even ruin his life.

The word of the day is languishing. That’s the one that keeps springing to mind during Surface Season 2, anyway. In Episode 5, “Daybreak”, we continue to take the most circuitous route possible to conclusions that we just know aren’t going to be worth the aggro when we get there.

Season 2 of Severance has had its ups and downs; there’s no doubt about that. We’ve had bottle episodes that offered little and compensatory follow-ups...

In Mythic Quest Season 4, Episode 9, David is engulfed in a profound crisis, struggling to keep the company afloat.

You’ve got to appreciate Surface taking some chances in Season 2, even if the results might end up being a little mixed.

For the first time in Season 2, Severance delivered what many would consider to be a bad episode.

I was blindsided that we were offered a filler episode after the emotional ending in the last episode. But Mythic Quest Season 4, Episode 8 is decent, even if it does not move the story forward.

Surface Season 2 hasn’t been very good, at least not if you ask me, but Episode 3, “Kintsugi”, provides an interesting turning point.

Severance is a great show, of that there can be no doubt, and Season 2 is on track to exceed the freshman outing in almost every way. But Episode 8, “Sweet Vitriol”, doesn’t help its case.