5 Best TV Shows Similar to The Secret World of Alex Mack
The Fall of the House of Usher
The most gripping moment in 2022’s Academy Award-winning documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is when members of the now disgraced Sackler Family, whose pharmaceutical company manufactured and marketed the highly addictive painkiller Oxy-Contin, are ordered to attend a virtual hearing in which they're confronted by families who had been impacted by the drug. Listening to tragic stories of accidental overdoses, birth defects, and young men cut down in their prime due to a prescription medication that had been promoted as safe and non-addicting, the Sacklers could not look more bored, even slightly annoyed. It’s a chilling reminder that extreme wealth often results in a loss of empathy, if not one’s entire soul. Continue Reading →
Der Schwarm
The sea is always a great setting for a story. It’s both soothing and menacing; water is cleansing and purifying, and a consistently replenishing source of food. But it’s also dangerous and uncompromising. Water is one of nature’s greatest antagonists, it can get into virtually anything, softening it, weakening it, eventually breaking it apart. But nothing on earth would survive without it. It’s a brilliant metaphor for so many things, as it’s constantly changing and moving and covers wondrous and monstrous secrets. It works even better in visual mediums like TV and film because it’s beautiful to both look at and listen to. The CW’s new eco-thriller, The Swarm, makes good use of its watery locations in establishing an aura of tranquil menace: everything seems calm and orderly, but there’s trouble bubbling up just below the surface. 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 →
Jupiter's Legacy
Hollywood's year-long hiatus on major comic-book adaptation movies has left ample room for streaming services to pick up the slack and then some. Amazon, for example, has wisely curated high-profile releases from existing superhero stories that subvert the genre in ways that would probably ring unfamiliar if attempted by the more mainstream Marvel and DC fare. The Boys is all about poking a gory hole in how superheroes can be vapid, unchecked, and even monstrous celebrities. Invincible just ended its first season with a bang of a finale, taking its colonizer version of Superman to task. And then there's the curious case of Netflix's Jupiter's Legacy. Continue Reading →
Ginny & Georgia
While Netflix’s Ginny & Georgia (created by Sarah Lampert) has so far been hailed as a sort of edgier Gilmore Girls, the new young adult series arguably has more in common with Richard Benjamin’s Mermaids (1990), starring Cher and Winona Ryder. In essence: what if Cher’s Mrs. Flax kept two pistols in the house? Continue Reading →