13 Best TV Shows Similar to White House Plumbers
All the Light We Cannot See
Early in For All Mankind Season 4, Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and Dani Poole (Krys Marshall) reencounter each other for the first time in years on the Happy Valley Mars base. Smiling warmly, each says, “Hi, Bob,” to each other. For fans of the show, it has an immediate impact. The significance of the silly greeting reminds those audience members of the deep bond between these two astronauts. Newcomers likely won’t grasp the specifics of the importance, but Marshall and Kinnaman’s performances make it quite clear that it isn’t some random bit of silliness. Continue Reading →
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 →
Full Circle
Seeing creators pull together disparate threads into a cohesive whole can often feel like a magic trick. “Oh, that woman on the train platform was the same one waiting outside the bodega. I get it!” and all that. For the attentive viewer, it can feel like an affirmation of one’s thoughtful focus. For the more casual audience members, it can impress and beguile. Push it too far, though, and one might feel less rewarded and more led by the nose. Full Circle dances on that line before stumbling, too far, into EVERYTHING is connected territory. Thankfully, several strong performances and director Steven Soderbergh’s gift for conveying immediacy through his imagery prove enough to redeem the series’ far too nicely wrapped up with a bow conclusion. Continue Reading →
The Crowded Room
Danny Sullivan (Tom Holland) sits in interrogation. He's been picked up for a seemingly random shooting on the busy streets of New York City. He insists that his friend Ariana (Sasha Lane) fired the gun, but the police can’t find her. Nor can they locate Danny’s Israeli landlord Yitzhak (Lior Raz). Worse, when they start digging, they find a pattern of people disappearing around the young man. NYPD Detective Matty Dunne (Thomas Sadoski) feels confident the department has accidentally brought in a serial killer. To prove his point—and find the victims—he brings in his ex, Professor and Psychologist Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried), to conduct a series of interrogations. Continue Reading →
Class of '09
Welcome to the future. America is “the safest country on Earth,” as FBI Agent Tayo Michaels (Brian Tyree Henry) assures us. And it is all thanks to a program that is one part Minority Report, one part that computer Lucius Fox gets all bent out of shape about in The Dark Knight. It started as a sort of interrogation tool, but it has blossomed into a prediction machine that lets the FBI anticipate criminal activities. Comic book fans, think Force Works. Law enforcement has gotten “proactive.” Continue Reading →
Silo
By the time Silo’s action builds to a crescendo in its back third, it causes a deep ambivalence. On the one hand, after episodes of fastidiously building to this moment, it is akin to arriving at that fireworks factory. Conversely, there is a certain sadness in disrupting the series’ strange, contemplative tone. Continue Reading →
Extrapolations
Much of the pre-release buzz about AppleTV+’s new original series Extrapolations was concerned with its potential to be preachy. In much the same way this writer doesn’t mind a bit of emotional manipulation in entertainment, I can be fine with preachiness. Some things are worth preaching about. Extrapolations’ flaw isn’t that it has a soapbox and is using it. It’s that it’s such a mess. Continue Reading →
Daisy Jones & the Six
The story of Daisy Jones & The Six begins, fittingly, at its dramatic end. The show opens with the members of the titular band taking their seats for a series of talking-head interviews before a title card that reads, “On October 4, 1977, Daisy Jones and the Six performed to a sold-out crowd at Soldier Field in Chicago, Illinois.” Despite being one of the biggest bands in the world at that time, “It would be their final performance.” From there, we jump back in time to learn exactly how Daisy and the five members of the Six (yes, five) became a band. Continue Reading →
Copenhagen Cowboy
Episode one begins with a chorus of pig screams. The camera pans through endless cages with the poor little oinkers cramped inside. Then we cut to a woman being strangled. We can’t see her face or who’s attached to the hands squeezing the life out of her. The victim cries out, but we can’t hear anything over the pigs. Continue Reading →
The Staircase
A blandly suited district attorney steps up to the podium to make his opening statement.“In a very real sense, this case is about pretense and appearances,” he intones. “It’s about things not being as they seem.” Continue Reading →
The Long Song
On Christmas Day in 1831, tens of thousands of slaves in Jamaica rebelled against their masters, burning acres and acres of sugar cane. By the end of the first week of January, the rebellion had been brutally quashed by Britain. But from that point on, it was clear that the days of slavery in the colonies were coming to an end. In 1833, that’s exactly what happened. The Long Song tells the story of July (Tamara Lawrance), a slave woman who lives through this transitory period as the primary maid to Caroline Mortimer (Hayley Atwell), the mistress of the plantation. The series frames these events through the narration of an older and wiser July (Doña Croll), decades after the events of we're witness to. Continue Reading →