Drama

Only one episode ago, I was saying that One Piece Season 2 utilising flashbacks was something of a novelty, so Episode 7 makes me look pretty stupid, since it’s virtually all flashbacks. But who’s complaining? “Reindeer Shames” is probably the best episode of the season, a truly lovely hour of storytelling and impressive special effects that is both wrenchingly sad and powerfully hopeful.

It occurred to me during Episode 6 of One Piece Season 2 that this is the rare show that doesn’t overindulge in flashbacks. Not that flashbacks are inherently a bad thing, obviously, especially not when something like Paradise exists. But this show’s unwillingness to rely on them is especially apparent here, since “Nami Deerest” uses them quite a lot, and it ends up feeling like a bit of a welcome novelty.

Now, this is more like. After basically sacrificing the previous episode to set up this one, One Piece Season 2 delivers pretty well on the...

The weakest hour of One Piece Season 2 thus far, Episode 4 isn’t bad, by any means, but it’s the first chapter to feel like...

The great novelty of One Piece is that it’s a show of profound, fantastical imagination, all stretchy arms and double cigars and guns in powdered...

One Piece was one of Netflix’s better original offerings, despite nobody really expecting it to effectively adapt Oda Eiichiro’s extremely popular – and thoroughly bonkers...

There’s nothing inherently amusing about being swallowed by a gigantic sea creature, but it’s probably a testament to the quality of One Piece that it...

Here’s an interesting thought. The first season of Netflix’s live-action One Piece adaptation only adapted the first major story arc and completely left out a...

So, what exactly is going on here? I’m used to Watson being rubbish, and I assumed that Season 2’s mid-season premiere being above-average was a...

There’s no point in a Yellowstone spin-off that doesn’t feel pretty intimately connected to Yellowstone, and if the premiere of Marshals had a downside, it...

Paradise is a really, really good television show. I've been thinking about this a lot throughout Season 2, since every episode just keeps nailing it. At first, I was worried that I'm just a sucker for the Dan Fogelman brand of schmaltz, which remains a possibility, since the previous chapter laid it on really thick.

Rooster was always going to be good. A dramedy from the creators of Ted Lasso, Shrinking, and Scrubs, starring Steve Carell as a bumbling author intervening in the spiralling love life of his daughter and her cheating husband against the backdrop of a liberal arts college campus? Sometimes these things just write themselves.

DTF St. Louis is that rarest of things, a mystery that is genuinely mysterious. I have no idea who killed Floyd, or why, or what his prior career as a nude male model or his curved penis might have to do with any of it. And that's just the way I like it.

Change is good, or at least it can be, but it’s typically best if the change occurs for a reason. This is the key thing...

I always feel bad comparing Sheriff Country to Boston Blue directly, since it doesn’t seem like a fair comparison, but they’re both procedurals airing on the same channel on the same day, and one is significantly better than the other in a way that is strikingly obvious whenever they try to adopt a similar cadence.

It didn’t take a genius to work out that Boston Blue wrapping up its most compelling overarching subplot was going to leave it a little adrift. Episode 11, “Family Secrets,” falls into a procedural holding pattern reminiscent of some of the early-season outings that felt too aimless to take much notice of.

Finally, a serial killer I can get behind! After all, who among us hasn’t considered pushing an influencer into traffic? The Hunting Party Season 2 hasn’t made much of an effort to be “current”, but you simply can’t have a procedural these days without an influencer case, and Episode 6, “Lou Kaplan”, is that.

I might be wrong, but I’m not sure what Season 2 of The Last Thing He Told Me needed was a much narrower focus. Episode 3, “Reunion”, does away with the vast majority of scenes involving characters other than Hannah and Bailey, and indeed, as per the title, brings Owen himself back into their physical orbit.

Monsters are supposed to be scary, which is something that, in large part, hasn’t really been considered by the MonsterVerse. Giant and awesome? Sure. But...

When it was revealed that Season 2 of The Pitt was going to be set on the Fourth of July, everyone envisioned a lot of firework-related nastiness. In Episode 9, over halfway through the season, we finally get some of that. But it’s the least of anyone’s problems in PTMC.