The NBA Playoffs are my favorite time of the sports TV year, and it’s not really close. I wrote about two relevant new documentaries: Prime Video’s “Jerry West: The Logo” and Netflix’s “Untold: Jail Blazers.” Both teams played hard my man. And, if I must: OKC over Boston in 7.
Deeply enjoyed This Vast Enterprise, the new Lewis and Clark book by Craig Fehrman. It’s a lively work of character-based history — the chapters are organized by the perspectives of different characters — that spotlights the people not named Lewis or Clark who made the Corps of Discovery possible.
In this week’s Autopilot I get Freaky and Geeky on the teen TV show with the cuteness rubbed away, with the sex comedy reduced to a hazy afterthought, with the socially awkward desire to fit in foregrounded.
Back in the One Special Thing chair this week to write about The Insider. An under-appreciated, operatic ode to two of my favorite things: journalism and cinema. I’ve seen it at least a dozen times, in varying moods and circumstances, and I keep coming back to it like an old and loyal friend.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles, and an OnlyFans following, in David E. Kelley’s new series starring Elle Fanning and Michelle Pfeiffer. I admit to some awe at the longevity of Kelley’s career. And cool that he gets to work with his wife.
Happily watched HBO’s Ramy Youssef: In Love. Riffing on everything from dogs to the controversial Riyadh Comedy Festival, Youssef, known for his autobiographical Hulu series “Ramy,” showcases an undervalued comedic strength: a mellow delivery that makes it easy to say pretty much whatever you want.
Empathy? We don’t need your stinking empathy. The Audacity, premiering tonight on AMC, converts Silicon Valley narcissism into scabrous satire. I spoke with star Billy Magnussen and creator Jonathan Glatzer about what the hell is wrong with these people.
In this week’s Autopilot feature I look at both of the Star Trek pilots, neither of which was the first episode to air. Space is strange.
Excited to write this week’s One Special Thing feature, on Elvis Costello’s baroque masterpiece Imperial Bedroom. An album I can listen to on an endless loop.
I’m a big fan of Big Mistakes, the nuevo-screwball comedy series starring Dan Levy and Taylor Ortega as bickering siblings who get mixed up with the Russian mob. Also featuring a sublime Laurie Metcalf. Starts today on Netflix.
In this week’s Autopilot I look back at the beginning of Justified. A killer modern crime/western hybrid with roots in the great Elmore Leonard, it’s also concerned with what it means to come home when you’d really rather not, to a place that never really let you go. Also, Walton Goggins.
Unless you’re a physicist — and, statistically speaking, chances are you’re not — a book about the ins and outs of space-time might feel heavy in your hands. But I really dug The Edge of Space-Time, Chanda Prescod Weinstein’s Afrofuturist, feminist explanation of why space is the place.
I love a good puzzle box show (which is ironic, since I’m really bad at putting actual puzzles together). Maybe I just savor confusion. Anyway, I rounded up some streaming favorites, from Twin Peaks and The Prisoner to Lost and Severance.
Wrote about For All Mankind, Project Hail Mary, and pop culture’s persistent but ever-shifting fascination with space exploration. We choose to go not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
Really enjoyed Bait, Riz Ahmed’s new series about a struggling actor whose life unravels after he auditions to be the next James Bond. Absurdist, darkly comic tone with London hip-hop energy.
“Trump turns the dog whistle into a train whistle”: The new doc White With Fear looks at the shameful history of racial fearmongering in American politics, and how the current administration increasingly says the quiet part out loud.
He told me everybody’s fly: Spoke with Fab 5 Freddy about the earliest days of hip-hop, the start of Yo! MTV Raps, and his new memoir.
The new season of The Comeback addresses Hollywood’s AI anxieties — and thrives on the very human art of perfect casting.
Gee, could you vague that up for me? In this week’s Autopilot I look at the Buffy the Vampire pilot, which brilliantly tapped into the idea of high school as horror show.
This week, TV delivers not one, but two new dramedy series in which faculty members sleep with students and campus culture is depicted as a hothouse of neurosis and dysfunction. Young adults are coddled like they’re vulnerable children, while professors actually behave like children.
Few series came in as hot as The Newsroom, which I look at in my latest Autopilot installment. We could use a little Will McAvoy right now.
If Howard Beale were truly the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves he might have foreseen…2026. I looked at the prophecies and gonzo entertainment value of Network, 50 years later.
The only constant is change, even when progress moves too slowly for us to pay attention. Wrote about Rebecca Solnit’s new book, The Beginning Comes After the End.
The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins has Italian neorealist jokes and Sinners jokes and Moby Dick jokes, and a lightning-quick “Epstein Island” gag that revolves around an optometry office. And Tracy Morgan is still one of those guys who makes damn near everything he says sound funny. I dug it.
Space, still the place: a new Sun Ra doc tries to make sense of an epically out-there artist — and largely succeeds. Just an endlessly fascinating dude.
I’ve been a little taken aback by the idea that Wuthering Heights (the novel, that is) is some staid, musty artifact. It is, in fact, freaky, and kinky, as all get-out, even more so than the new movie.
Three cheers for the red, white and blue (ball): The new documentary series Soul Power shows how the high-flying ABA shook up the sports world — and shaped the NBA that we know today.
We’re starting a new series at the Globe, One Special Thing. Every week one of our arts writers will share their passion for a great work. I get the party started here with The Friends of Eddie Coyle, George V. Higgins’ Boston crime novel known for its mastery of dialogue. The film ain’t bad either.
Keeping my theater chops sharp: I enjoyed Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s production of Little Women. Kate Hamill’s adaptation unfolds as a sort of dialogue between Jo March and her creator (Alcott, that is), on ambitions, options and identities for women in 19th-century New England.
