HBO

The best joke in I Love LA is that the funniest character isn’t any of the Gen Z influencer caricatures that Rachel Sennott has clearly created the show to mock.

I think it’s safe to say that It: Welcome to Derry has been much better than anyone expected it to be.

It is highly probable that I am so far removed from the target demographic of an HBO comedy about single twenty-something Californian girls – and guys! – trying to make it in L.A., that any opinion I may or may not have on the subject is utterly worthless.

After what was pretty unmistakably a Halloween special in disguise, imagine my delight when the cold open of The Chair Company Episode 4 suggested we were doing a Christmas special this week instead.

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.