The Last Thing He Told Me
Hollywood not giving Jennifer Garner the roles she deserves is hardly its biggest sin. That said, it's fairly disappointing that the powers that be have so rarely found projects worth of the actor in the past 30 years. Continue Reading →
American Gigolo
NetworkShowtime,
SimilarBlack Scorpion, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,
Watch afterMINDHUNTER, The Sandman, Tulsa King,
StudioParamount Television Studios,
Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo is a 1980 neo-noir starring Richard Gere as a male escort caught up in a murder investigation. The film gave the world Gere as a leading man and the iconic Blondie song “Call Me.” In Showtime’s eight-episode reimagining, Jon Bernthal takes on the role of Julian Kaye (AKA John Henderson), the titular American Gigolo. He's living the high-paced high-society dream until the murder of one of his clients leads to his wrongful incarceration. Continue Reading →
Bel-Air
Over the course of the first three episodes of Bel-Air—Peacock's downbeat reimagining of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as a modern, self-serious prestige-adjacent drama flipping the script on the original comedy's inherently sulky premise—new kid on the block Will Smith (played with smooth-as-ever charm by Jabari Banks) plays basketball, dodges a gang hit, and contends with an obnoxious cousin who is seemingly his complete opposite. So is this dramatization really all that different from the culturally-defining '90s sitcom? The answer, like the show itself, is complicated. Continue Reading →
Panic!
Now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Panic is a new series about doing whatever it takes to break free from your dead-end, small-time town without dying in the process.
Adapted from Lauren Oliver's eponymous 2014 YA novel, Panic is an exciting, gripping teen drama that blends the small-town delirium of Riverdale with the high-stakes plotting of Pretty Little Liars, then adds in a light dash of The Hunger Games to produce something a bit more unique and interesting than all these comparisons might immediately suggest.
The show takes place in Carp, Texas, a small town with some big secrets. One of them being a dangerous game called "Panic," where every year, the graduating high school class competes in a series of death-defying stunts and challenges to win a massive prize. Most of these kids have no other way of exiting Carp for greater things, so an influx of cash is just about their only ticket out. The challenges themselves are essentially a more advanced, devil-may-care take on Fear Factor, with huge emphasis on how the teens need to form shaky alliances and ultimately screw each other over, sometimes literally, because like I said, this show wants to be a sharper, more grounded version of Riverdale with a less heightened tone. Because it's on Amazon, it does leave a little extra room for swearing and sex, but nothing too gratuitous. Continue Reading →
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
The Law & Order: SVU and Law & Order: Organized Crime crossover event on April 1st will mark not only the premiere of a new Law & Order spinoff, but also the return of one Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni). For the first 12 seasons of SVU Stabler and Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) were the SVU team, the perfect partners. Continue Reading →