18 Best TV Shows Similar to The 100
Death and Other Details
SimilarThe Twilight Zone,
Watch afterThe 100, True Detective,
StudioABC Signature,
Hulu’s entry in the massive cast mystery trend starts with sexy confidence before collapsing under its own weight.
Mysteries have steadily made a comeback on screens and in multiplexes over the past several years. Kenneth Branagh offered old-school fun with his triptych (so far) take on master of the genre Agatha Christie’s works. Rian Johnson took Christie into modern times with a helping of class insight in Knives Out and Glass Onion. Things even get meta with the murder at an Agatha Christie play shenanigans of See How They Run. Series like The Afterparty and Murder at the End of the World took the genre to the small screen. With all this competition, of course Death and Other Details would try to find a new way of telling a familiar tale.
Early on, it seems series’ creators Heidi Cole McAdams and Mike Weiss have hit upon a simple but ingenious solution. Let’s get some sex in here! For all the delights of the massive cast mystery revival, each project has been noticeably short on heat. Daniel Craig can still fill out some swim trunks with the best of them, but he’s a married man with a barely glimpsed sweet hubby back home. Emma Corin’s Darby Hart had a romance with Harris Dickinson’s Bill in End of the World, but by the time we know them, those days are over. Death and Other Details, however, boldly declares that, to paraphrase High Fidelity, it’s ok to be investigating a murder and horny at the same time. Continue Reading →
American Horror Story
A quick overview of the high highs and middling disappointments in horror this year.
With the social media app formerly known as Twitter now a shell of its former self, horror fans have been forced to return to Facebook to continue such interminable debates as “What does or doesn’t qualify something as ‘horror’?” “What the hell is ‘elevated horror,’ anyway?” “Are remakes inherently bad?” “Have horror movies gotten too ‘woke’?” “Were we wrong for letting women make horror?”
In a year when both David Gordon Green and M. Night Shyamalan released new movies, the horror discourse was especially spicy, and that’s before we get to the really interesting stories, like the surprise viral success of Skinamarink, which, with the way time seems to be passing nowadays, feels like it was released five years ago. Both indie and mainstream horror made daring choices, not looking to appeal to as broad a range of audiences as possible, and treating the genre as a serious art form, as opposed to just a machine that prints money. But the biggest surprise came in October, with the release of Saw X, the tenth film in a seemingly unkillable franchise, which ended up being one of the best, most coherent entries in the entire series. Continue Reading →
Mission: Impossible
From De Palma's series launcher on, Cruise has used the tales of Ethan Hunt to ponder the nature of cinema as performance, perception, and manipulation.
The Mission: Impossible movies begin in perhaps the most inauspicious fashion possible: a computer tech, played by Emilio Estevez, watching security camera footage of clandestine crime scene clean-up. One of the men he's watching happens to be Tom Cruise in heavy prosthetics and a wig. It's an odd opening for an eight-film mega-franchise, a globe-trotting stunt spectacular that has attracted some of the world's biggest stars and most interesting actors—America's answer to Bond movies. But as the opening to a Brian De Palma movie, it's a no-brainer. Of course it starts with a dorky guy in a cramped little room watching unappealing CCTV footage of a crime of passion. That's De Palma.
Though Robert Towne wrote the script (he and Cruise were friends and artistic confidants; Cruise produced his 1998 movie Without Limits), the film is thoroughly De Palma's, never more so than when indulging in its covert operations. He films the opening sting from Cruise's POV, and its dizzying effect is rather like the opening to Dario Argento's Opera or its fellow perverse Italian horror thrillers. It is always disconcerting when movie characters address us but speak to someone else when we see what the hero sees see but cannot control what they do. We are seeing a performance from the inside, knowing that if the scene doesn't go off without a hitch, it could mean death for the man whose eyes we've been given for the duration. The Mission: Impossible movies have since changed directors four times, but their central tenet remains: they are about performance. They are about making movies to make sense of a senseless world. Continue Reading →
The Ark
NetworkSyfy,
Watch afterThe 100,
A saying goes for bad thespians: “They can’t act their way out of a paper bag!” When it comes to the ensemble for the latest Syfy channel original series, these people can’t act their way out of a deep space cryo chamber. The Ark, also streaming on Peacock, is an intriguing science fiction premise in search of capable hands that can live up to the material, but there are none to be found in this part of the galaxy. Continue Reading →
Bad Sisters
SimilarCatterick, Murder Most Horrid, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Three Days of Christmas,
StudioABC Signature,
From Promising Young Women to Big Little Lies, we’re in a golden age of female revenge stories. Looking to add to the ranks is AppleTV+’s new series Bad Sisters. It follows the tight-knit group of sisters who slowly turn on their prick-ish brother-in-law after years of misogynistic torture. It’s a dash of thriller Big Little Lies with a sprinkle of the comedy of 9 to 5, all set in a coastal Irish town. Continue Reading →
The Thing About Pam
NetworkNBC,
SimilarStar-Crossed Lovers,
The thing about The Thing About Pam is that there’s no thing there. Tonally run amuck, the limited series is a whimsical take on a deadly serious story that can’t come to grips with its darkness. There are moments to enjoy, but overall the series does little to prove itself necessary. There’s a lot of play happening, but little of it is constructive. 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 →
The Expanse
SimilarCrusade, Golden Years, Missions, Stargate Atlantis, Terra Formars: Bugs-2 2599, The Ark, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
StarringShohreh Aghdashloo,
There’s a song that was popular in the aughts with the lyric “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end,” and it feels like the most fitting description of The Expanse. It’s a show that has changed identities more times than Sidney Bristow and managed to retain a strong, cohesive narrative, with this season bringing its final arc full circle. Not to the proto-molecule, but to the struggle of the Belters to get their fair shake from Earth and Mars, something Joe Miller (Thomas Jane) dreamed of in the very first episode, something Fred Johnson (Chad Coleman) lived and died for. Continue Reading →
I Know What You Did Last Summer
In 1973, Lois Duncan created the perfect premise for a thriller: a group of teens on a midnight joyride run over a pedestrian and make a pact to keep it a secret. They think they're successful in hiding the crime. Then, a year later, one of them receives an ominous note stating simply, "I Know What You Did Last Summer." While the teens try to solve the mystery of who is harassing them, they soon realize that whoever knows their secret wants them dead. Continue Reading →
Baby
KinoKultur is a thematic exploration of the queer, camp, weird, and radical releases Kino Lorber has to offer.
Dinosaurs are the ultimate symbols of The Past. They represent deep time, natural history, and the chaos of the wild. It's no wonder that cinema has always been fascinated by them. One of the first exhibitions of what we might now call "cinema" was presented in 1922 by Sherlock Holmes' own Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “footage of moving dinosaurs” from the exhibition at the center of his 1912 novella, The Lost World. From the very beginning of the medium, creatives have sought to reanimate the awesome creatures on the silver screen.
When dinosaurs appear on film, they frequently bring with them a host of cultural and ideological anxieties. Dinosaurs threaten humanity's imperial dominance on the planet. When they appear, we become prey. And they remind us that even the mightiest powers can be reduced to dust. Continue Reading →
Marvel's M.O.D.O.K.
SimilarBatman, Birds of Prey, Family Guy, Marvel's Spider-Man, Power Rangers, Static Shock, Ultraman Tiga,
StarringSam Richardson,
M.O.D.O.K. isn’t set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but it is firmly set in the newest trend in adult-sewing American animation. Popularized by Rick & Morty and BoJack Horseman, these cartoons put on an exterior dick jokes and fart gags but are actually about deeper explorations of weighty turmoil’s. Considering this phenomenon has produced shows like Horseman and Harley Quinn, it’s one of the better TV trends out there. The best parts of M.O.D.O.K. exemplify why. There’s something enduringly impressive about balancing out raunchiness with genuinely insightful drama. Continue Reading →
Pride
Despite it being mid-May, the first signs of summer are already upon us. No, I’m not talking about rising temperatures or the release of tentpole blockbusters, I’m talking about my local PetSmart setting up its pride section. In recent years, gay pride month has gone from niche celebration to a new sort of corporate holiday, with major brands such as Target, McDonald’s, and the aforementioned PetSmart creating advertisements and apolitical merchandise designed to invoke a sort of fun that’s a far cry from the anger that sparked the Stonewall riots. (And let’s not forget how many corporations spend money on both pride floats and homophobic politicians.) Continue Reading →
The Luminaries
Part melodrama, part gold rush adventure story, part soulmate fable, and part astrology app come to life, The Luminaries, Starz’s 6-episode adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s 2013 novel, is much like the gold its characters seek: shiny, ephemeral, and ultimately cold. Adapted by Catton and directed by Claire McCarthy, The Luminaries wastes no time in unfurling several plot points in media res, with dramatic but confusing results. Continue Reading →
The Stand
SimilarFrom, Sám vojak v poli,
This review was written jointly by Spool staff writers Beau North and Megan Sunday. Continue Reading →
Locke & Key
Netflix's adaptation of the Joe Hill comic series takes a while to get going, but hits a dark-fantasy stride by the end.
For better and worse (but mostly better), Locke & Key imports the tone and feel of its comic book inspiration almost entirely to its TV adaptation. Show creator Carlton Cuse has proven increasingly adept at helming smart, faithful adaptations for television from books (The Strain) and comics.
For those unfamiliar with the source material by writer Joe Hill and artist Gabriel Rodriguez, Locke & Key concerns the titular Locke family, who, after a personal tragedy back in Seattle, move east to a small Massachusetts town. There waits a large manor home, Key House, one that deceased patriarch Rendell Locke (Bill Heck) hated so much he left in the rearview and never spoke of to his family. His brother Duncan (Aaron Ashmore) has been left caretaker, but largely avoids the property even though he remembers very little of his childhood. The Lockes, though, are in need of a change, and Key House seems to be the easiest place to start. Unfortunately, they quickly find that the home offers much less refuge (and much more danger) than they ever expected.
Part of Locke & Key’s charm is how closely it hews to the comics on which it’s based. It diverges here and there, but never in ways that existing fans will resent. In fact, they may appreciate how it gives the narrative a few surprises while maintaining what made the series so popular in the first place. It’s the rare adaptation that manages the feat of feeling like its source material while not simply being a retread. Continue Reading →