Sophie Gilbert
The Challenge of Margaret Atwood
With her new book—the much-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale—the Canadian author is leading a resistance. But it’s not the one you might think.
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Netflix How Is Jeffrey Epstein Still So Elusive?
A new four-part Netflix documentary strains to handle a subject who’s always out of reach.
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Netflix / Amazon / Hulu / FX / ... 25 Half-Hour Shows to Watch Now
If your attention span is frazzled, explore the compact joys of the 30-minute format.
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Starz / The Atlantic An Old-School Crime Drama That’s Thoroughly Modern
Hightown deepens the procedural genre by expanding its focus beyond a singular murder to the opioid epidemic at the edges of its story.
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Getty / The Atlantic A Pandemic Novel That’s Oddly Soothing
Lawrence Wright’s The End of October has been heavily touted for its prescience, but the one thing it didn’t anticipate is heartening.
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Amazon / Paul Spella / The Atlantic Upload Satirizes a Capitalist Heaven
The Amazon show is one of several recent works in which the afterlife darkly mimics earthly existence.
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Illustration: Paul Spella; Apple TV+ Trying Is a Sadcom in the Fleabag Mold
A new generation of TV comedies probes life’s bleak truths more pointedly than many dramas do.
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Hulu / The Atlantic The Irresistible Intimacy of Normal People
The Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s hit novel ushers an addictive, messily human portrayal of young love to the small screen.
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Netflix / BBC America / The Atlantic 20 Undersung Crime Shows to Binge-Watch
Propulsive thrillers, slow-burn procedurals, and more for your every quarantine mood
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Hulu We’re Living in Phyllis Schlafly’s America
A striking new miniseries reveals the conservative author’s deep impact on contemporary politics.
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Getty / Nick Wall / The Atlantic The Woman Who Is Remaking AMC
“The least safe thing to do is something safe,” says Sarah Barnett, the unconventional TV executive behind Killing Eve, which is back for a third season.
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Netflix The Most-Watched Show in America Is a Moral Failure
Netflix’s Tiger King is the apotheosis of extreme storytelling: The more unfathomable and ethically dubious, the better.
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Quentin Bacon / The Atlantic Ina Garten’s Quarantine Playbook
In an inordinately stressful moment, the Barefoot Contessa’s Instagram page has become one of the most soothing and wholesome places on the internet.
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HBO The Show That Illustrates the Numbness of Staying Alive
The British HBO series Years and Years imagines a near-future defined by two phenomena: catastrophe and resilience.
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martin-dm / Getty / Paul Spella / The ... The Controversial Novel That Immerses Readers in Teen Abuse
The difficulty of My Dark Vanessa lies in its adult narrator, who refuses to acknowledge her childhood trauma even as she recounts it.
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Rose Wong Why You Can’t Stop Streaming Seinfeld. Or Frasier. Or Bones.
On the psychology of comfort TV
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Netflix Marc Maron’s End-of-the-World Anxiety
In his new Netflix special, End Times Fun, the comedian turns his attention to angst during ongoing crisis, with uncanny timeliness.
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FX Why TV Is So Worried About Free Will
Alex Garland’s new show Devs and Season 3 of Westworld find dystopia in determinism.
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Netflix The Teen Dramas That Reject Modernity
More and more TV shows about adolescence are defined by their idealized depictions of the past—even when they exist in the present.
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Netflix The Most Unadaptable Book in Fiction
Dee Rees’s new Netflix film tackles the Joan Didion novel The Last Thing He Wanted. It may have been a futile task.
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Amazon The Problem With Amazon’s Nazi-Hunters Show
The Al Pacino–fronted series is a sweaty smorgasbord of cartoonish simplicity and wanton violence.
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