The week in TV: The problem with The Golden Bachelor, and WandaVision confirms a fan theory
A look at The A.V. Club's top television coverage from the week of November 27 to December 1
The Golden Bachelor is a morally corrupt nightmare
Hello, it’s your friendly neighborhood Golden Bachelor recapper here. We’ve been on a long, strange trip over the past nine weeks. If you’ve been on it with me, the rest of this essay shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. If you’re new to the mansion, well, here’s my confessional: I hate The Golden Bachelor. Read More
New WandaVision deleted scene confirms a popular fan theory
We’ve spent a lot of time singing the praises of physical media recently, mostly because huge streaming services can’t disappear an actual piece of plastic from your collection at the drop of a hat. But there are a lot more benefits to actually owning your favorite shows. One big one: bonus features! Remember cozying up on a Sunday morning to watch some bonus features? The world is a less fun place since those went away. Read More
Every season of The Great British Bake Off, ranked
Who would have thought that a show featuring a group of complete unknowns baking in a tent would be a hit? And The Great British Bake Off is not just a hit, but one that has spawned 14 seasons and continues to hold as much charm as it did when it first began. Read More
Fargo recap: One of the show’s best, most cryptic episodes to date
Last week, I mentioned that Fargo has always been a story about the distinctly human ability to ignore. Dot’s singular focus on making her house an impenetrable fortress is coming at the cost of her family’s trust (even the ones she’s trying to protect, however clumsily). Indira’s husband Lars seems plenty content to let the credit card bills rack up while he works on his golf swing. Roy considers himself quite literally untouchable and above the law, dismissing the FBI agents who visited him last episode with something worse than contempt: playful indifference. It’d be a stretch to say these people have had it too good for too long but with season five’s emphasis on debt only becoming more explicit, the message seems clear: The bill’s on its way. It’s less a question of who’s going to pay than how. Read More
Slow Horses season 3 review: Tight, twisty, and bloody as hell
For a British spy series whose flawed and fallible agents are the antithesis of James Bond, the third season of Slow Horses, which premieres November 29 on Apple TV+, has a rather Bond-y cold open: exotic locale, sex, and a chase scene that ends in murder. Read More
The Ex Files: TV’s 15 greatest recurring exes
You know a love interest is noteworthy when they become integral to a TV show, even it’s only as a recurring ex. Take Frasier’s Lilith Sternin, for example, who returns in Paramount+’s current reboot. There’s a reason past partners like her are hard to get over—or hard to get rid of, depending on the situation. Instead of just reminiscing about our favorite TV exes, we decided to celebrate them. Sure, they’re not regular characters, which means they appear on and off, but these series would be incomplete without them. These are our top 15 picks, in chronological order. Read More
A Murder At The End Of The World recap: Darby drills down in the show’s best episode yet
[Editor’s note: This recap, like all recaps on The A.V. Club, contains spoilers.]
Shedding that extra weight has made A Murder At The End Of The World a nimble little mystery. Granted, it’s not that we’ve lost the flashbacks entirely, but they’ve drastically reduced, creating an economy of language in the present that makes the show more engaging and compelling. With “Family Secrets,” the show even finds new ways of telling its story, using the below-freezing temperatures to heighten the drama. Read More
December TV preview: The Crown, Percy Jackson & The Olympians, and a dozen other notable shows
We’ll be honest: December is a pretty slow TV month in 2023. But that doesn’t mean the next few weeks don’t boast some highly anticipated shows, like The Crown, which ends with the second half of season six. And that’s not all: Canadian sitcom Letterkenny and FXX’s beloved Archer also bow out for good, while buzzy projects like Disney+’s Percy Jackson & The Olympians arrive just in time for the holidays. To help you navigate what’s what, here’s The A.V. Club’s guide for the next month. Read More
How the new Doctor Who specials are fixing the show’s biggest misstep
After what had to be the most drawn-out farewell tour in Doctor Who history, David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor finally regenerated into Matt Smith in the 2010 special “The End Of Time,” but not before he had a chance to say goodbye to, or at least revisit, all of the significant companions and allies he’d known during his five-year tenure. No matter how much showrunner Russell T. Davies tried to wrap Tennant’s departure from the show (and his own) in a tidy bow, though, one major thread was left tragically unresolved—a thread that goes by the name Donna Noble. Read More
The Curse recap: “Under The Big Tree”
I know The Curse is supposed to be a comedy (and it’s a cringe-inducing one at that), But can we talk about how every episode turns up the Lynchian vibes to give us plenty of scary moments that will haunt us for a good long while? “Under The Big Tree” ends on one of those moments. For there is nothing scarier, I find, than Asher trying to be “funny.” And yes, that demands to be put in quotation marks because my god can Asher (Nathan Fielder) only ever approximate what it means to be actually funny. He’s sometimes like an AI simulation of an awkward regular guy, with all the glitches in human kinds of comedy as you’d expect. Read More