“I like laughin’ shows,” Georgie Cooper (Montana Jordan) declares in the opening scene of “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage.” “Some shows you can hear people laughin’, and some you can’t. ‘The Wonder Years’ — no one’s laughin’. Is it funny? We’ll never know!” Georgie makes this observation while watching “Frasier,” a bit of ambient exposition that […]

The Apple TV+ dramedy “Shrinking” is — or at least, was — about a therapist, Jimmy Laird (Jason Segel), throwing professional ethics out the window in the wake of his wife’s tragic death. Whatever one thought of how the show portrayed therapy, and plenty were appalled by the idea that doctor-patient boundaries are more annoying […]

No one films the ocean as a proxy for emotional extremes like Alfonso Cuarón. In films like “Children of Men,” “Gravity” and “Roma,” the Mexican director — often in conjunction with Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki — makes roiling waves a metaphor for everything from rebirth to safety to cathartic rebirth. In this respect, the new Apple TV+ […]

SPOILER ALERT: The following story contains plot details from “Hello Goodbye,” the Season 4 finale of “Slow Horses.” “Slow Horses” is not, as a rule, a sentimental show. Deceptively disheveled spymaster Jackson Lamb’s (Gary Oldman) idea of caring for his “joes” is to negotiate up their active-duty death settlement on a bureaucratic technicality. Yet the […]

For all that comedian Ali Wong talks about sex onstage, her first three specials came from a place of inherent sexual constraint: a long-term, monogamous marriage. In “Single Lady,” her fourth, self-directed hour, all guardrails are off. Two years ago, Wong got divorced from her husband of nearly a decade. What followed was a carnal […]

Though HBO’s latest comedy is called “The Franchise,” there’s never any doubt which franchise creator Jon Brown (“Succession,” “Veep”) has in mind. The beleaguered crew, stressed-out producers and insecure stars of “Tecto: Eye of the Storm” comprise a tiny fiefdom of a sprawling empire. Overseen by an invisible puppetmaster, the master narrative is a jumbled […]

There’s a listlessness to “Grotesquerie,” the new FX horror drama that is not a season of “American Horror Story” for reasons known only to co-creator Ryan Murphy. Ostensibly, the series pits grizzled detective Lois (Niecy Nash) against the titular serial killer, who contorts his victims’ corpses into Biblical tableaus. But rather than play up the […]