TV of 2025

[knives]

While Caped Crusader has some modern animation problems particularly with facial expressions it also has some of Timm’s best writing and production. The Firebug episode, which I just finished, really feels like an alternate reality TAS where they could let loose and show the psychological depths and cruelty such a setting must have. Also, weirdly, the Selina Kyle here has more in common with Burton’s vision of the character then the one mandated with similarities. She’s a vision of Bruce without a sense of responsibility. It’s great.

The acting is also incredible. Bender’s voice literally makes my skin crawl after years of laughing from it.

[jazzo]

Yeah, it’s pretty good stuff. I think having Ed Brubaker sit as showrunner was a very smart move.

[brundlefly]

Trailer for Dying for Sex, from Elizabeth Meriwether (New Girl). With Michelle Williams, Sissy Spacek, Jenny Slate, Rob Delaney.

And Tina Fey has remade Alan Alda's The Four Seasons into a Netflix series. With Fey, Colman Domingo ,Will Forte, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Steve Carell.

[The Curious Sofa]

Adolescence on Netfilix is the sort of show that would have been on the BBC or Channel 4 a few years ago, and it is astonishingly good. It works with a format I am not generally a fan of, each episode is a single camera take. Unlike many such experiments there is no slack, no extraneous running around to get from one point to the next, every second counts and it really adds to the urgency of the drama. The show works perfectly at 4 episodes, moving from procedural to something far richer, more disturbing and ultimately really quite moving. I wanted it to go on much longer.

Child actor Owen Cooper is a real find. Even though he is a year or two older than the character he plays, he looks so incredibly young, reminding you of what a 13 year old actually looks like, compared to all the 20something actors who play teenagers on screen. This adds greatly to the impact of one of the episodes in the second half. The whole cast is incredible, but a special mention to Erin Doherty, who only appears in one episode, a two-hander and Christine Tremarco and Amelie Pease, who come into focus in the final episode, and heartbreakingly so, as the suspect's mother and sister.

After the first episode, which gives a blow-by-blow account of what it's like to be arrested as a juvenile murder suspect, the other three episodes focus on hours that could almost be chosen at random. There are no major revelations that would drive a murder mystery, it is the details

Spoiler

(that surveillance technician who thinks he is being helpful but is interfering with the psychologist's process)

and the emotional states of the characters that count, and as such becomes utterly compelling. This really blew me away in the last two episodes

Spoiler

with the psychologist in episode 3, trying to keep her professional composure in trying circumstances and the family in the final episode, doiung their best to get through the recent trauma, by just trying to have one good day.

[alacal2]

Couldn't agree more. Adolescence is sensational televsision. No answers but lots of very troubling questions.

[Sloper]

I had mixed feelings about Adolescence. Technically it’s very impressive, and the one-take approach is thematically appropriate in some ways – making us feel that we are in a situation we can’t escape, showing us the inexorable cause-and-effect process whereby one action or event leads to a whole network of other actions and events. But as with other long takes in recent films and TV shows, I often felt there were moments that would have benefitted from editing. If it’s done well, editing makes a story more immersive, whereas long takes can seem artificial, both because you find yourself wondering how they manoeuvred the camera into these new positions (or onto a drone or whatever), and because the single take exposes the actors in a way that some members of this cast really suffer from. Editing can smooth over those awkward pauses and make characters’ reactions seem more spontaneous, less like the actors are hyper-focused on remembering their lines and hitting their marks in a meticulously choreographed piece of live theatre. Especially in Episode 2, the most logistically ambitious one, this show felt very theatrical, with all the artifice that you accept in a stage-play but that works against the point that (I think) Adolescence is trying to make.

Still, overall I did find the show powerful and moving, especially in Episodes 1, 3, and 4, and some of the central performances are fantastic. The bigger problem has been well outlined by Kate Manne, and has to do with the way the show handles its central theme. I was truly surprised that Episode 2 didn’t focus on Katie’s point of view, in a flashback to the night before Episode 1. The exclusion of her perspective is mentioned briefly, in an exchange so awkward and crowbarred-in that I almost expected the actors to glance nervously at the camera. But an episode about Katie would have added so much to the telling of this story, and I don't think we would have missed the one set in the school.

Spoiler

One thing Kate Manne doesn’t mention, understandably because the show itself glosses over this, is that Katie was being cyber-bullied: a boy she liked had pressured her into letting him take naked pictures of her, and he then shared these widely with other boys at school. Katie’s so-called ‘bullying’ of Jamie is part of her reaction to the bullying she suffers, an attempt to claw back some social status by weaponising incel terminology against another boy who tries to take advantage of her. Viewers of this show, if they didn’t know much about the manosphere to begin with, might be forgiven for assuming that this terminology (80/20 etc.) is primarily used by angry women to taunt men.

I’m not saying we needed a history lesson about the origins of online misogyny, but the essential point could have been made vividly and economically by showing Katie, on the last night of her life, trying to distract herself from online harassment by making online jokes about incels, then by having IRL fun with her friends, then being harassed IRL by Jamie and his friends, culminating in the scene in the car park. Maybe a night-time shoot would have been too ambitious (does this need to happen at night?) but I can’t imagine it would have been more difficult than filming in a school with moving crowds of children. We could have seen Katie’s friendship with Jade and understood why they were so important to each other, instead of vaguely hearing about this from Jade and then ignoring her. We wouldn't have needed the police officer to say 'what a shame we're not focusing on Katie' or the therapist to say 'you realise whatever claims you make about her, she's gone and will never come back,' because we would have been shown rather than told these things - we would know Katie, we would feel the significance of her murder, and we would appreciate the impact of her absence in the other three episodes.

Most importantly, we could have found out how Jamie looked and sounded from Katie’s and Jade’s perspectives – having seen him as a confused, sympathetic, and pitiful child in Episode 1 (which, as Manne says, is an important way to see him) we could also have seen him as the terrifying figure he must have become for Katie in that last hour. This would add extra layers to the therapist’s view of Jamie in Episode 3, as she encounters this innocent child / rage-filled murderer, and to the family’s view of Jamie and themselves in Episode 4, as they struggle to re-orient their lives in terms of their own domestic dynamics and their place in society.

[colinr0380]

I don't have Netflix so I'm out of the bubble on this, but Adolescence has been getting a surprising right wing champion in the form of Carl Benjamin, who makes an fascinating case for the show being less about the current media talking points, but more about (accidentally?) critiquing the failings of societal institutions in a damning manner.

(Just going off of the description in that video, it also sounds as if it is containing some similar themes to those going on in Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day too)

[The Curious Sofa]

One thing that's great about Adolescence is that it isn't about just one thing and how non-didactic it is about the issues it raises.

[TMDaines]

Episode 2 of The Studio is so perfect. Has taken me 24 hours to realise quite how clever and self-referential it was.

[therewillbeblus]

Episode 2 of The Studio is so perfect. Has taken me 24 hours to realise quite how clever and self-referential it was.

I winced through the pilot but agree the second episode was clever and promising. I hope it’s not a one-off idea

[Walter Kurtz]

You guys must be alien invaders because earthlings find Seth Rogen unwatchable.

[swo17]

Episode 2 of The Studio is so perfect. Has taken me 24 hours to realise quite how clever and self-referential it was.

You misspelled The Rehearsal

[therewillbeblus]

You guys must be alien invaders because earthlings find Seth Rogen unwatchable.

That's how I normally feel, hence my cringe reaction to the first ep, but the second's creative approach overwhelmed Rogen's faults for me. I have my doubts that they'll continue to integrate bottle episodes riffing on real movies at the cost of stunting the larger narrative, but that would be cool

[jazzo]

I wish I was enjoying it as much as I want to, and episode 2 was certainly the highlight so far, but mostly I find it painfully unfunny and so married to its long-take/workplace chaos format that it becomes distracting in its artifice, and I feel like I'm watching an improvised student film where the theatre school actors don't know what to do with themselves until they hit their marks, so they yell, stutter and swear through most of their interactions like a bunch of assholes.

Even though I'm a big fan of The Player, I also found it dated itself by having so many real-life film figures play cameos of themselves. It wasn't perfect, but it also had a really dark genre story to hang its satirical cleverness on, so that softened things a bit. I'm only halfway through, but so far The Studio does not have that.

Get Shorty comes off the best of these types of inside baseball pictures, at least to me. While certainly less artfully directed than The Player, the satire is sharper, the characters have a more grounded depth to them, nobody plays themself, and the genre story is perfectly woven into the comedy.

The best thing about The Studio is that Seth Rogan, while playing an often obnoxiously vain character, approaches Matt Remick as a film history buff suffering from imposter syndrome, desperately trying to navigate and push against the nepo babies and profit algorithms running the modern studio system. He does it with a lot of love and affection, and it engenders a lot of empathy in the viewer.

So, I don't hate him and I don't hate the show, I just wish it was less self-referential and that every episode didn't go exactly where I think it's going to go.

[Murdoch]

You misspelled The Rehearsal

This new season really is fantastic , and very timely. Fielder folding the show in on itself over and over really is a marvel to watch.

[swo17]

If he had this idea before all our planes started crashing, then he's a prophet

[okcmaxk]

Even though I'm a big fan of The Player...

Naming your studio head that was such a dumb move. Viewers who know what you're doing are reminded of something better (if it's meant to be reverent, Michael Tolkin was not informed), while it's being tacked onto Cranston as Odenkirk as Evans...overkill.

But, I'm enjoying the show. Supporting cast is carrying: Ike Barinholtz as Larry Levy, Kathryn Hahn as the head of marketing, Chase Sui Wonders essentially playing Rogen's real-life assistant (who's an EP/wrote episode 5). When it locks into inner workings (the pilot, eps 2 & 5), it's solid. When it wanders from that to be gimmicky (want to hear Ron Howard say fuck? want a noir parody no one asked for?), it's a slog.

No surprise for an Apple show, they're pulling their punches with streamers and big tech, feels intentionally peripheral––hope the back half of the season will get into it.

[Matt]

No surprise for an Apple show, they're pulling their punches with streamers and big tech, feels intentionally peripheral––hope the back half of the season will get into it.

It certainly did!

I was fully on-board for the first few episodes and then found myself laughing less and less. By the end of the ninth, I was dreading having to watch just one more episode. It goes from screwball to madcap and then, eventually, to manic. Long takes of a group of people screaming at each other underpinned by loud drumming does not make, to me, an appealing show. And they also unforgivably wasted the talents of Rebecca Hall (a tragic theme in her career). The final episode redeemed the show somewhat for me, but I can't imagine being eager to watch a second season.

I've got to single out Kathryn Hahn for being one of the most excruciatingly annoying screen presences of the last couple of years. And I used to actively seek out her work! I liked her a lot in "Parks and Recreation" and "Transparent," thought she was great in Tamara Jenkins' Private Life and "I Love Dick," and fun in "WandaVision." But in "Agatha All Along" (admittedly, I only lasted two episodes) and "The Studio," I wanted to plug my ears and close my eyes every time she came on screen. It's like someone turned her acting dial all the way up and snapped it off. I know the old saw is that if you hate a character it means the actor has done a great job, but all I see now is someone playing annoying characters annoyingly. Come back to us, Kathryn!

[therewillbeblus]

She toned it way down in Glass Onion too. Did The Studio ever deliver another episode like the Birdman-aping second one, formally riffing on art films? Or did it just do a one-off and then go back to a bunch of shouting without a clever skeleton to make it work, like the pilot?

[jazzo]

The second episode was the highlight of the season. Every other episode was what you described, and honestly, none of it funny, just fucking irritating.

And I agree, Hahn's performance (and character) grates beyond reason in this show. Only Catherine O'Hara and Seth Rogen come off as remotely tolerable.

[therewillbeblus]

What a shame, and a tease of potential. If the series continued that self-reflexive trend, it could've been a blast.

[Matt]

Hacks, which always has bizarre needle drops, like John Cale's "Paris 1919" over a simple scene of driving, used the Faye Wong version of The Cranberries' "Dreams"—in full—in the season finale. Feels sacrilegious.

[The Curious Sofa]

Sacreligious to The Cranberries or to Wong Kar-wei?

[Never Cursed]

Surely to Wong, unless Matt also hates Chungking Express. That movie owns that version of the song, at least outside of China

[Matt]

Yes, an affront to Wong and the importance of that track to Chungking Express. I should probably rephrase my criticism of Hacks to say that the show regularly uses “unearned” needle drops.