#series-lead

#series-lead

The script is so blunderingly crude, so sluggish in its attempts at emotional depth, and so mean-spirited in its approach that it leaves viewers feeling deflated.

The second season appears to go in a The White Lotus-esque direction with Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan as a couple whose fight is witnessed by two country-club employees.

Expecting logic from a movie with the line, 'Mommy's got to fight some f*cking sharks' is always going to be a losing proposition. The problems begin at the script level.

Santos and Mel's duet of Alanis Morissette's 'You Oughta Know' strikes the right chord, imploring they let their hair down and vent their ineffable frustrations into the mics.

Falling in love with a show can lead to heartbreak if it gets canceled before you feel like you got any real closure.

In season 2, Coop is challenged by Ash, a charming Gatsby-type figure who may also be a weapons trafficker, forcing Coop to question his moral limits.

Margo's Got Money Troubles takes what could be a bundleful of clichés and turns it into a wonderful show that's as charming as it is rewarding to watch.

"I think we're in a place where we're trying to make marriage seem more like a positive choice, rather than an obvious obligation. It's a fascinating fiction that those who get married subscribe to, hoping that the fiction becomes true."

Via tentative rebel student Agnes Mackenzie, the drama meticulously illustrates the ways disempowered people hoard what little agency they have in Gilead's oppressive environment.

In the fourth season of Industry, everyone has a story to sell: a neutered fund or loveless marriage, shamed husbands, a life aimless after retirement, a payment-processing firm hampered by its ties to porn and sex work. These labels seem to indicate mistaken priorities or misplaced trust. But they are just narratives to be refined or redefined. Everything is up for grabs if you tell the right story.

The television show I'm most enjoying right now: There is a Hollywood story in David Niven's autobiography Bring on the Empty Horses, in which the screenwriter Charles MacArthur asks Charlie Chaplin how to make the comic pratfall scene of a person slipping on a banana peel new again. Chaplin suggests that MacArthur start with a lady walking down the street and cut to a shot of the banana peel on the sidewalk, which the lady steps over-right before she falls down a manhole.