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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Paul Spella / HBO / Netflix / Getty ... TV Captured Trump by Looking Away
The best shows of the 45th presidency captured the essence of an unprecedented leader by seeing past his act.
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Courtesy of Focus Features Promising Young Woman Sets a Ravishing Trap
Emerald Fennell’s debut movie is a revenge thriller explicitly designed to subvert assumptions about femininity and serious works of art.
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Des Willie / Netflix Margaret & Diana & Elizabeth & Nancy
Netflix’s The Crown and Showtime’s The Reagans offer four different models of female power colliding with history, and with one another.
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Starz / HBO How to Tell the Story of a Cult
Two docuseries about NXIVM present a question: Are the people who have escaped a controlling organization the most reliable sources on what happened to them?
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HBO Max The Radical Exposure of Amy Schumer
The miniseries Expecting Amy captures the comedian’s complicated pregnancy with extreme honesty.
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Dominic Valente / Hulu Padma Lakshmi’s New Food Show Is a Trojan Horse
Taste the Nation is breezy in tone, but it exposes the betrayals at the heart of “American” cuisine.
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HBO The Conundrum of a New Perry Mason
A fresh HBO adaptation imbues the classic character with unnecessary darkness and biographical trauma, when what’s most relevant about him has been there all along.
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Sonia Moskowitz / Getty HBO’s Roy Cohn Documentary Is a Lesson for Trump
The new film explores the path of the president’s mentor from relentless aggressor to unwilling victim.
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The Atlantic The Unreality of Cops
For 32 seasons, the longest-running reality show in history sold a valorizing view of police that’s never seemed more out of touch.
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HBO I May Destroy You Explodes the Idea of Consent
The British writer Michaela Coel’s HBO series is a brilliant drama about an evening that’s more complicated than it seems.
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Wolfgang Volz Christo Found Beauty in Realizing the Impossible
The conceptual artist, who died yesterday at 84, made constructing quixotic, monumental projects his life’s work.
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Netflix Space Force Tells a Terrible Joke About America
And the timing couldn’t be worse.
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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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