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Boston Globe
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
The 15 best TV shows of the year so far
'Adolescence' (limited series, Netflix) Where to begin? The long, cinematic camera takes that make you feel like you've intruded on a reality already in progress? The searing performances from Stephen Graham, Owen Cooper, Erin Doherty, and a stable of largely unknown UK actors? This tight, four-episode drama, about an adolescent (Cooper) accused of killing a female classmate, is a gut punch that diagnoses a world of contemporary problems without ever feeling like a sociological treatise. Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks in "The Better Sister." JOJO WHILDEN/Jojo Whilden/Prime ' ' (season 1, Amazon Prime Video) The apple doesn't fall far. TV luminary David Milch's daughter, Olivia Milch, created this high-grade pulp drama with Regina Corrado, a key writer on David Milch's series 'Deadwood' (speaking of peak TV). Jaggedly funny and compulsively watchable, it follows two adult sisters (Jessica Biel and Pittsfield native Advertisement 'Black Mirror' (season 7, Netflix) A funny thing happened to Charlie Brooker's future-shock sci-fi anthology series on the way to 2025. It now feels more wickedly plausible than ever, and it therefore cuts closer to the bone. The season opener, starring Rashida Jones and Chris O'Dowd, is a soul-crushing masterpiece in which life and death become a matter of coverage tiers. It's still engineered to make you laugh until it hurts really, really bad. Matthew Goode in "Dept. Q" on Netflix. Jamie Simpson/Jamie Simpson/Netflix (season 1, Netflix) Scott Frank, who made chess exciting and sexy with his 2020 Netflix limited series ' Brian Tyree Henry in "Dope Thief." Apple TV+ 'Dope Thief' (season 1, Apple TV+) Brian Tyree Henry has been doing killer supporting work for a few years now on TV (' Advertisement ' ' (limited series, HBO) From the Department of Good Timing: At a moment when the principles of the civil rights movement are under attack, HBO released the third installment of a vital project that started back in 1987. These six chapters cover the period from the late 1970s to the present, exploring issues including fair housing, the war on affirmative action, the AIDS crisis, the Obama years, and more. It plays like a series of deeply reported feature stories. 'Forever' (season 1, Netflix) The Judy Blume renaissance continues with this series inspired by her 1975 novel about two teens dealing with raging hormones, societal expectations, and, yes, first love. Series creator Mara Brock Akil has moved the action to Los Angeles in 2018, where two Black high school athletes (Michael Cooper Jr. and Lovie Simone) fall head over heels and face highly realistic obstacles. Few series have so viscerally captured the pains of being a teenager. 'Inside the NBA' (TNT) Gone, but not forgotten. In fact, not exactly gone. TNT's freewheeling pregame and halftime show is the most spontaneous and entertaining sports enterprise on the air. Now Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith, Shaquille O'Neal, and ringmaster Ernie Johnson are moving (for NBA broadcast rights reasons) to ESPN and ABC, where the flavor promises to be a little different. But hopefully not too different. Here's hoping the new bosses let the mountainous Shaq tumble into some more Christmas trees. Advertisement Bella Ramsey in "The Last of Us." Courtesy of HBO ' ' (season 2, HBO) It takes nerve to kill off the main character early in the second season of a hit series. It takes skill and imagination to keep the train rolling along in the aftermath. You won't find a more assured mix of prestige and popular appeal than HBO's zombie apocalypse drama, which, of course, is about far more than a zombie apocalypse. And you won't find better evidence for the blurring of high and 'low' culture than the fact that one of HBO's best series is based on a video game. ' ' (season 2, Netflix) Palestinian-American actor/comedian ' ' (documentary, HBO) A penetrating study of what it means to have a popular alter ego, and what happens when that alter ego takes over. The late Paul Reubens, better known as Pee-wee Herman, makes for a controlling, passive-aggressive, but somehow still appealing subject as he thrusts and parries with filmmaker Matt Wolf. The end results, in two parts and about four hours, ask probing questions about identity, fame, and the many guises we try on to get ahead. Advertisement 'The Rehearsal' (season 2, HBO) Comedian Nathan Fielder's first-person docuseries has moved well beyond the point of stunting. The recently completed season culminates in a surreal plane flight, with Fielder at the controls and the plane full of actors, all coordinated to make a point about cockpit communication and preventable crashes. It makes for riveting television and deadpan advocacy, delivered in a self-conscious monotone that belies a passionate sense of purpose. 'Saturday Night Live' (season 51, NBC) Maybe it was the re-election of Donald Trump, or just the right meshing of cast and writers. Whatever the reason, 'SNL' felt energized this season, like a big league pitcher getting his fastball back. The 'White Potus' sketch melded pop culture heat with political satire. The Please Don't Destroy team found a groove with its digital shorts (go to YouTube and search for 'First Class'). Michael Che and Colin Jost refined their vibe of friendly antagonism on 'Weekend Update.' And a big, 50-year-old dog showed it can learn some new tricks. Seth Rogen in "The Studio." Apple TV+ ' ' (season 1, Apple TV+) Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen's painfully funny send-up of the current movie business is certainly insidery, but it's also madcap, slapstick fun, a tasty poison pill and a lament for the difficulty of making art in a world defined by fast commerce. Throw in cameos from a weeping Martin Scorsese, a frustrated Sarah Polley, an enraged Ron Howard, and more, and you've got the satire that contemporary Hollywood deserves. Advertisement ' ' (season 3, HBO) At some point Mike White's formula of narcissistic tourists behaving horribly in paradise will wear out its welcome. But that point hasn't arrived yet. The writing and the acting — this season's standouts include Walton Goggins, Carrie Coon, Parker Posey, and the returning Natasha Rothwell — are still top-shelf, and the American idiots abroad motif carries a little extra oomph in this day and age. The coconut milk is off! What do you think the best show of 2025 is? Sound off in the comments and let us know.
Washington Post
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
The gritty, unglamorous truth about the antiheroes of the Wild West
I've long been obsessed with the fact that, in 1869, even as the Brooklyn Bridge rose, you could board a train in New York City and some days later disembark into a parallel universe where horse-mounted Comanche warriors still reigned unconquered over the Great Plains. The two worlds coincided for the briefest moment, a time when, under the big skies of that untamed frontier, so too rose that most American icon the cowboy — and his even more heroic alter ego, the Old West gunfighter. I grew up with them; we all did, no matter what year we were born. Even in the twilight of Clint Eastwood's career, you can stream a modern western of one form or another on any given night, among them one of the greatest television shows ever written, David Milch's Shakespearean drama 'Deadwood.' Bryan Burrough's 'The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild,' a history of that era (ideally paired with S.C. Gwynne's fantastic 'Empire of the Summer Moon,' about the Comanche during the same period), is a great debunking, Burrough forewarns. He's not out to prove that those legendary figures of the frontier were purely mythological, but he does set his sights on the way that they were mythologized. Forget facing off in the streets of Dodge City and Tombstone, saloon doors swinging to Ennio Morricone's soundtrack as time slowed and both men reached for their guns. More often than not it was just murder — a sudden, explosive violence, often with a racial component against Black people, Latinos and Native Americans, especially in the earliest years in Texas. People were shot in the eye. In the back. In the hands. No trick shooting required. They were shot through doors, and they were shot through walls. They were shot with pistols, and they were shot with long guns, and they were shot holed up in hotels, brothels, ranches, trains and banks, or out in the open on the streets, everywhere and anywhere. Of the legendary John Wesley Hardin — memorialized by Rock Hudson in a 1953 film, by Johnny Cash in two songs and by Bob Dylan on a whole album — Burrough writes: 'Hardin ranged the Texas backcountry shooting men in the face. … He killed just about anyone who irked him in any way, from Black men he found disrespectful to white men who beat him at cards or jostled him in a crowd; most famously, he probably killed a man for snoring. He may have been the first 'great' gunfighter, but it's also clear he was a maniac.' The story — and death — of Wild Bill Hickok, one of the most famous of them all, is typical. His early legend was fantastically exaggerated and his denouement (by which time he was an alcoholic and arthritic gambler not yet 40) came as he played poker at a saloon (in Deadwood, of course). When 'a drunk named Jack McCall was losing big,' Hickock encouraged him to take a break and McCall left the table, only to return the next afternoon. He circled behind Hickock and 'placed a Colt .45 beside his temple, and with the words 'Damn you! Take that!' Pulled the trigger. Hickock died instantly.' There was no gunfight at all, which 'Deadwood' the show seems to have gotten right. This is no weighty, soporific tome of history, but a gallop through the years 1869 to 1901, when a specific set of conditions aligned: the end of the Civil War and the expansion of the railroads and open range cattle ranching, which sent large numbers of Southerners, particularly Texans, driving herds west and north into territories that had little government or law enforcement. 'If you think of postwar Texas masculinity as a bubbling cauldron,' Burrough writes, 'its roux was the Southern honor code, but other ingredients were crucial as well: the tumult of war, the persistent and ongoing risk of Mexican and Native American raiders, the rigors and isolation of frontier life, the searing hatred of northern dominance. … From this combustible brew rose a stridently martial way of experiencing the world, tribal, heavily armed, hypermasculine, hyperviolent, and acutely sensitive to slight.' Oxidizing this simmering explosion was the introduction of the Colt revolver, the first mass-produced, easy-to-carry handgun able to fire rapidly. In this lawless landscape of frail masculine egos clinging to cockeyed, and often booze-fueled, notions of honor, the bullets fly, the bodies pile up, the pages turn fast and easy, and other places and other ideas come to mind: how these glorified American icons aren't so different from other men in other cultures and times much more readily vilified — young men who nowadays fill our prisons. Or of honor cultures everywhere — the Pashtuns of the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, for instance — who have never been celebrated in film, television and popular music. Indeed, Burrough makes clear that there wasn't a whole lot to celebrate in these men and their stories, and at the time it was happening, 'the gunfighter wasn't really a thing.' 'Though they fought in the nineteenth century, the fame of men like Earp and Hickok mushroomed during the twentieth, thanks to modern media, especially Hollywood films.' It is a reminder that we are selective about our heroes. And that American history was made not just by the Founding Fathers but also by the messy rascals and gamblers and liars and killers who have long filled out its more sordid chapters. Our nation has always been shaped by the latter, too, it turns out, and reading about them years after the fact, antiheroes though they may have been, is still a hell of a good time. Carl Hoffman is the author of five books, including 'Liar's Circus,' 'The Last Wild Men of Borneo' and 'Savage Harvest.' How Texas Made the West Wild By Bryan Burrough Penguin. 430 pp.
