Until recently, “The Sandman”—Neil Gaiman’s magnum opus about the eternal being who oversees the universe of dreaming—has remained an impossible quest.
Television
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
Reading the news is torture enough. Watching TV shouldn’t be.
Watching the same character fall short of redemption, or meaningful contrition, over and over again, dozens of times, is torture.
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
‘Ms. Marvel’ isn’t just a superhero story. It’s an exploration of Pakistani-American religion and culture.
When it came to bringing Kamala Khan to the screen, Marvel has made all the right choices.
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
Time travel and trauma: Netflix’s ‘Russian Doll’ is an exercise in therapy
“Russian Doll” is kind of a Jewish “Fleabag” meets time travel, a mind-bending exploration of trauma that reads like an exercise in self-therapy.
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
Apple TV+’s ‘For All Mankind’ is a space race show that will restore your faith in government
“For All Mankind” invents a Soviet victory in the space race and imagines a tempting counterfactual: What if Americans’ faith in government was never shattered?
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
‘Ted Lasso’ and ‘Fleabag’ and all the shows that are too awesome to watch (so I won’t)
My heart is not large enough, my consciousness is not spacious enough for all the spot-on characters, the hectic energies, the ripping stories. I am not skillful, I think, at TV.
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
The new ‘Star Trek’ has moments better than my best homilies
While “Star Trek” has presented itself as a show about exploring strange new worlds, at its heart it has always been about elevating those whom society has ignored.
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
The misfits of HBO Max’s ‘Somebody Somewhere’ are the kind of loving community we go to church looking for
“Somebody Somewhere” is not a show about religion, but it is in its own way an exploration of what a truly religious community offers—namely, a space of radical acceptance.
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
‘Sex and the City’ didn’t change. We did.
HBO’s “And Just Like That,” like “Sex and the City” before it, is an exaggerated funhouse mirror of its viewers’ world.
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
‘Killing Eve’ deserved better than a botched Christian conversion narrative and a cheap, shock-value ending
Despite its first three seasons of ambitious, campy, violent fun, “Killing Eve” lost its way in its final season with a failed conversion subplot and problematic treatment of queer characters.