Sophie Gilbert

Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed seems more interested in the dramatic potential of intimate deceit. What is storytelling if not its own scam, its own manipulation of our confidences and expectations? In this case, the trick is an intriguing one, but you may have some doubts.

It’s hard to watch this charming, wholesome show and not support Margo’s endeavors, not weep at her family coming together to endorse her as a mother. .... Margo is well worth the subscription.

It offers little in the way of insight. .... The point of ANTM was not to create models, Reality Check suggests. It was to make TV entertainment, no matter what happened to the contestants in the process. This conclusion seems fairly obvious, and it skirts the more interesting purpose of revisiting ANTM, which is to consider its legacy.

When most series seem intent on keeping us mindlessly half-engaged and monetizing the minutes we watch, there’s something inherently satisfying about a series that actually wants us to think. And, even more crucially, to care.

Snook is fantastic as Marissa, delivering complicated anguish in a series of chunky knits. Fanning’s Jenny, trying to secure a new whale of a client for her publishing company while her feckless husband perpetually clocks out of activities with their son, is also compelling to watch, particularly when Jenny and Marissa find ways to bolster each other. Nevertheless, All Her Fault starts floundering midway through and never quite finds its footing again.

I found the first four episodes largely joyless and grim, right up until a moment that seemed to reset the show, or at least to capture some of the connection and spirit that used to make it so compelling. .... If Stranger Things can locate more of that humanity in its last few episodes, it’ll be much easier to swallow everything else it’s trying to sell us.

Scenes start, jarringly, without introduction or fanfare, as though we’ve been vaulted into the action; the plot resists all attempts by the viewer to impose any kind of order. .... The writing suggests that ChatGPT was asked to emulate Fifty Shades’ E. L. James, and however cringeworthy and brand-name-peppered that sounds, I can promise you it’s so much worse.

The more I’ve come back to the show, the more its slack, unromantic approach to love looks intentional. Jess and Felix couple up not because they’re giddy with feeling, drunk on proximity and intimacy and connection, but because each offers something specific that the other person needs. .... In the place where the show’s heart should be is instead pure pragmatism: This is love for a cold climate.

There are still a handful of dream sequences and surreal interludes that seem to want to underscore the show’s deep psychological curiosity, and its unwillingness to be an easy watch. But after the slow-drip, languorous suffering of Season 3, it’s thrilling to see the characters and the action move so purposefully and gratifyingly forward.

Fully Netflixed by Metzler into a five-episode adaptation, the final product is a triumph of the popular-novel-to-series genre: funny, caustic, absurd.