Saving Law & Order, soaring with Masters Of The Air, and more from the week in TV

True Detective: Night Country recap: The ice men cometh

Frostbitten corneas, ruptured eardrums, chewed-off limbs—it’s clear that the frozen scientists at the center of True Detective: Night Country’s main mystery were already going through it well before they coagulated together into the glacial gorefest that we now know as the Corpsicle. Read More

Can NBC’s Law & Order shows be saved?

As an NBC programmer, you don’t renew the three Law & Order shows to worry about them; you expect Dick Wolf and his army of showrunners to keep the melodrama flowing in a pleasingly pressurized stream. (The network’s Chicago dramas, particularly Fire, do this incredibly well, with formulas that are so tight that cast members are basically interchangeable. Knock an eight-season veteran or two off Fire’s heavy-breathing roster, and viewers hardly notice.) Read More

Masters Of The Air review: A brutal, beautiful World War II miniseries

Are you the sort of person who saluted the screen when the fleet of little boats arrived at Dunkirk beach in Christopher Nolan’s much-lauded war film? Did you choke back a sob when Sgt. Warren “Skip” Muck and Pfc. Alex Penkala were killed instantly (and together) by an artillery barrage in Band Of Brothers? And do the endings to Saving Private Ryan and Blackadder Goes Forth live rent-free in your head forever more? Then you need to watch Masters Of The Air, which premieres January 26 on Apple TV+. Need to. Because this brutal and beautiful show was absolutely made for you. Read More

How the hell do you adapt a game like The Last Of Us Part II?

Two weeks ago, news broke that actor Kaitlyn Dever was joining the cast for the second season of HBO’s The Last Of Us TV series—which is still floating along without a release date, with “some time in 2025” the best anybody in TV land can guess. But despite that mild ambiguity, Dever’s casting kicked off a small firestorm of speculation, because it was revealed that she’d be playing a character named Abby Anderson when she joined the Emmy-winning video-game adaptation’s second season—which means The Last Of Us is almost certainly diving whole hog into the story of 2020’s The Last Of Us Part II. And that means things are about to get … messy. Read More

Expats review: Nicole Kidman leads a beautifully devastating drama

Expats is designed to both emotionally wreck and inspire its audience. Prime Video’s six-part series, which premieres January 26, has a keen understanding of womanhood, with the type of brutal authenticity that only comes from having women in front of and behind the camera. Helmed by The Farewell’s Lulu Wang, the all-female writers’ room doles out an affecting hit in Expats. To top it off, the show is led by Nicole Kidman who, not surprisingly, is a force of nature here. She’s the big hook, of course, but Kidman isn’t the only marvel. Her co-stars, Sarayu Blue and Ji-young Yoo, are equally powerful, helping to tell a profound story about grief, loss, and the burden of trying to move on. Read More

Good Trouble’s final run marks the end of an era for coming-of-age TV

To misquote Paula Cole: “Where have all the coming-of-age shows gone?” Well, to streaming, of course. Over the last few years, Netflix & Co. have become the de rigueur destinations if you’re looking for young-adult TV titles that are both spirited and substantial, that don’t render the plights of its bright-eyed subjects as overly sensational or silly. (See Heartstopper, Never Have I Ever, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Sex Education, and Ginny & Georgia for proof.) But back in the day, that safe zone was Freeform, an era that will sadly come to a close with the end of its flagship series, Good Trouble. Read More

Jacqueline Novak on her comedy special Get On Your Knees and putting penis jokes into iambic pentameter

Jacqueline Novak’s new special Get On Your Knees is ostensibly about a “certain body part,” per Netflix’s description, but on this she would like to correct the record. The show, she says, is about overreaching; she didn’t set out to make penis jokes, “I was just forced to, to make my points,” she explains to The A.V Club. The comedian had more than three years to hone those points to perfection, culminating in an unmissable performance. Read More

Avatar: The Last Airbender first trailer is a huge improvement on the last adaptation, if not the original

Hollywood rarely lets a good thing lie—see the ever-increasing number of remakes and reboots—but the truth is, lots of fans wanted to see Avatar: The Last Airbender brought to life in live action. The reason M. Night Shyamalan’s attempt at adapting the animated series is remembered as such a notorious flop is not just simply that it was bad, but that it was such a particular disappointment to see a beloved series mishandled so badly. When Netflix announced it would take another stab at it with original showrunners Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino on board, fans rejoiced. Then Konietzko and DiMartino exited, and fans got worried again. Now we finally have a trailer for the series, premiering February 22, so let’s see how they did! Read More

Zach Woods on the anxiety of joining The Office, James Gandolfini’s kindness, and his new Peacock show

The actor: Zach Woods has been part of two of TV’s most unflinching, hilarious comedies. He might be best known for playing The Office’s awkward Gabe Lewis or Silicon Valley’s sad-sack Jared Dunn (a performance that, by the way, should have earned him an Emmy). But those roles only scratch the surface of his comedic capabilities. He’s also appeared in a number of other impressive projects, ranging from a satirical must-watch by Armando Iannucci and heartfelt films like Other People to Steven Spielberg’s The Post and procedurals such as The Good Wife. And now, he’s going all in on Peacock’s new series In The Know, a delightful stop-motion comedy he co-created, co-wrote, and co-directed. In The Know is set in an NPR-like workplace and Woods voices a narcissistic radio host, bringing him closer to his lifelong dream of becoming a version of Terry Gross. Read More

Was Tony Sirico one of the best comedic presences of our time?

Just don’t call him a bully. According to David Chase, the only time an actor ever convinced him to change a line of dialogue on The Sopranos was when Tony Sirico, deeply resentful that his character, Paulie, a mob captain and stone-cold killer, would be characterized as such. Reddit rabbit holes are stuffed with such favorite Sirico stories, rumors, legends, near-fables. He claimed he would refuse to play his part if Paulie ever turned rat. Upon first meeting new writer Terence Winter, Sirico told him, if he was killed off, “First I die, then you die.” Sirico wouldn’t let anyone do his hair, often waking in the middle of the night to wing-and-sculpt himself at home before he came to set. Famous was his preference for copious cologne, and for Binaca, but not just for his own body or mouth—whoever he might be sharing lines with might be given a spray too, to “blow the stink off.” While filming “Pine Barrens” in West Point he sent a PA two hours back to Brooklyn to fetch his preferred pillows. Thinking a celebrity such as himself could be a target during the post-9/11 anthrax scare, he began to microwave all his mail, figuring this would kill any chemical agents. Back in the day, he used to give wedgies to Jimi Hendrix while bouncing at the Cafe Wha? But, hey, “remember when” is the lowest form of conversation. Read More