Willa Paskin

Even as it centers Beanie Feldstein’s generous, humane portrayal of Lewinsky and builds to her abhorrent treatment—and a few good episodes—it keeps heading for more ambiguous waters. ... With repeated exposure to Tripp, the major beneficiary of the show’s overly long episodes, her sourness starts to seem a little hilarious, like she’s a supporting character in The Office, by way of a horror movie. Her mercilessness, her bluntness, the chip on her shoulder coalesce so that you begin to see what Monica might have seen in her.

Where The White Lotus ends up is, in some ways, the slyest joke of all. The Love Boat with class tensions, a smart summer soap, is fundamentally fatalist—and less riotously, a bit didactic. Still I wonder if The White Lotus’ indictment of class and race privilege doesn’t lose a bit of its bite from the company it keeps.

It’s so concerned about empathy it’s a little dull. ... Having money gives these high schoolers a rarefied, strange, challenging life, and on the show it’s the people who don’t have it, who want it, who have their face pressed up to the glass, who get warped. But the show can’t extend this insight as far as it should go.

The documentary makes the compelling case that the idea of Spears as a woman unfit to take care of herself, as well as the late-aughts breakdown that got her into the conservatorship in the first place, are the end products of the leering and judgmental treatment she’s always faced. ... If I have one quibble with Framing Britney Spears, it’s that it inhabits the new, gentler celebrity culture a little too thoroughly. It glosses Spears purely as victim of our gross culture.

Through the first three episodes, the Marvel mythology recedes even as it provides enough stakes and structure to keep the old-timey sitcom riffs from having to shoulder the series. Over the years there have been all sorts of attempts to bring back the laugh-track sitcom, but WandaVision is more successful than most of them (I know, knock me over with a feather) because it’s all icing on the cake—the cake actually being the grim and complex Marvel mythology and backstory.

It’s TV chick lit, a rom-com in a foreign location where nothing bad ever happens and the cute protagonist gets laid a lot on her way to having it all. But the complicating thing about Emily in Paris—the best thing about it really, the thing that turns it from a trifle people enjoy into a curiosity they enjoy insulting—is how brittle its protagonist is.

This is a highly professional endeavor, and there’s nothing (too) embarrassing happening here. The show’s self-seriousness leans toward the dull more than the ridiculous, although some ridiculousness would be more fun. It doesn’t help that Rock, who has described this as the best part he’s “ever, ever, ever” had, is in such single-mindedly dramatic mode that he does not bring any looseness or lightness to his role

The resulting character, swoony in love, a loyal if misguided friend, a competent administrator, a practitioner only of techniques she believes help, is more sympathetic, but also more banal. No longer a chilling avatar of implacable, self-satisfied state violence who needs no reason to exist other than that the system will always find people like her to keep running, Nurse Ratched is now just another poor, misunderstood antihero.

Like Murphy and Rhimes, Green isn’t concerned that being too entertaining will somehow undermine the series’s capital T themes so much as make you invest in them, and, in the first five episodes, she’s more disciplined than either of them, to boot. Every installment contains its own near-stand-alone pulp fiction, a structure that grounds the show and reminded me a bit of another series full of repartee, monsters, and metaphor: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Lovecraft Country has an extraordinary ability to wink and keep a straight face at the same time, to be fun and serious simultaneously.

The episode started well. ... But the velocity was disrupted, increasingly frequently, with throws to NBCUniversal content. ... Where there had once been toothless rebellion, now there was eager compliance—even if the show had trained me to see insincerity floating in the air, like the afterimage from decade-old flash.