Comedy

There’s a popular Kierkegaard quote about how life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards, and this popped into my mind during Episodes 3 & 4 of Heavenly Ever After.

The concept of heaven is in itself a cliché. Think angels playing harps on clouds, tearful reunions with your loved ones who haven’t aged a day, family pets frolicking through fields – you get the idea.

I didn’t like Episode 6 of The Studio as much as I’ve liked some of the others.

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.

Taking a page out of Black Mirror's playbook, Poppa's House tries to tackle a relevant subject in Episode 16. And like recent Black Mirror, it's misguided rubbish.

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.

How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) already had a pretty decent ending in Season 3, which puts the Season 4 finale in a difficult position,...

Let me start by saying that How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) didn’t need to return for Season 4. The ending of Season 3 was pretty conclusive...

The White Lotus doesn’t do happy endings, which is by design. Each season begins with the promise of death and ends by delivering it.

Everyone knew that The Potato Lab would have a happy ending. Really, it deserved one, and Episode 12 provides it with relish. It wasn’t always...

It was obvious that Episode 11 of The Potato Lab was going to play out like this. The signs were there. You can’t have a romantic enemies-to-lovers K-Drama without the dreaded breakup period, where crossed wires lead to an absence that makes the heart grow ever fonder.

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.

Call me naïve, but I thought Poppa’s House was onto something. After finally introducing a halfway-compelling new element, it regresses into its default state in Episode 15.

We’re almost at the end of our third stay at The White Lotus, and we’ve reached the point in Season 3 where everything is knitting together and we’re right on the cusp of all-out disaster.

As suspected, Episode 10 of The Potato Lab is indeed the obligatory one where problems between the leads threaten to upend their entire relationship.

How a show navigates its pesky middle episodes usually says a lot about it. You expect a captivating opening, and you expect an ending to provide all the payoff you’re looking for. But it’s rare that your average show has a really stand-out Episode 9.

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.

After a week or two off, the return of Poppa's House doesn't exactly feel like a tantalizing proposition.

I have a personal theory that no boat trip in the history of mankind has ever been an especially good idea, and this is truer in the world of The White Lotus than anywhere else.

Fundamentally, The Potato Lab continues to work in Episodes 7 & 8 about as well as it has worked up to this point, and in largely the same way.