Briarpatch on Peacock

I was late to Andy Greenwald and Rosario Dawson’s single season television series Briarpatch. The series, cancelled after one season at the start of 2020, was based upon a novel by Ross Thomas. Dawson plays a U.S. Senate investigator who has left D.C. and returned to her small hometown in Texas to investigate the car …

On Alex Garland’s Heady and Frustrating DEVS

After not updating this blog in nearly two months, I felt compelled to write again after spending months watching, taking breaks from, and then returning to writer-director Alex Garland’s eight episode mini-series Devs from Hulu and FX. While I try to make my essays about the texts I critique and not my personal experience in …

Mark Ruffalo and Co. Soar in I Know This Much Is True

Try as I might to watch less television, Derek Cianfrance, Wally Lamb, and Ruffalo’s mini-series I Know This Much Is True has been too good to pass up. The series is based on Lamb’s novel of the same title about two Connecticut brothers and their shared family history and traumas. In the series adapted and …

Counterpart is Smart, Understated Espionage Sci-Fi

I was late to Starz’s two season series Counterpart, which began back in 2017. The show’s premise itself isn’t exceptional, but a lot of exceptional work is built off it. In the series, a second reality is created or discovered through a physics experiment in Berlin circa 1989. In the present, a hangdog worker bee …

Adrien Brody Did It Better

I haven’t been able to shake how unfunny this season’s episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm with Jon Hamm was. In it, Hamm played himself as he was researching a role based on Larry David. As the episode progressed, Hamm spent more time with Larry and started mimicking his phrases and mannerisms. It wasn’t funny. I’ve …

“Neon Joe Werewolf Hunter”, He-Yump!

I was late to watching the second and likely final season of Jon Glaser’s Neon Joe, Werewolf Hunter, which aired on Adult Swim between 2015 and 2017. Like all Adult Swim products, Glaser’s show is an outrageous and absurdist postmodern pastiche of small town soap operas, horror films, sitcoms, and even romance novels. The show …

Suffering Through Amazon’s “Zero Zero Zero”

While socially isolating this weekend, I watched Amazon’s new original series Zero Zero Zero. To put it more accurately, I suffered through the series, if watching a streaming show from the comfort of an indoor mattress while eating Doritos can be called suffering (it can’t). Joking aside, the series is relentlessly, punishingly bleak. On the …