Shows You Should Be Watching
Honest reviews. Zero hype.
Four mutant turtles, a rat sensei, a pizza fixation, and a theme song that infected a generation. The 1987 series took Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s indie comic, ran it through the kid friendly filter of the decade, and became…
A prototype supercar, a rotating team of police test drivers, and a premise lifted so straight from Knight Rider that only the transformer gimmick counts as original. Viper’s car reconfigures from a sleek interceptor to an armored pursuit vehicle, the…
Four wronged Green Berets, one van, and a rule that the good guys never land a punch that shows. The A-Team is eighties action television reduced to a formula so pure it became a language: Hannibal sketches the plan, Face…
One season, one car, one miscalculation. The reboot swaps the drifter mystique of the original for Justin Bruening’s by the book Mike Tracker, keeps Hasselhoff behind the camera, and puts Val Kilmer in the voice box, reading KITT’s lines like…
A dead crime fighter, a dying driver, and a car that calls him Mike. Knight Rider distilled is a car commercial with a body count, but David Hasselhoff’s long haired loner Michael Knight became a genuine eighties icon because the…
The Buffy spin off moved the vampire with a soul to Los Angeles and quietly became a different, better show than most people remember. Where Buffy was about surviving growing up, Angel is about a grown man trying to atone for a century of atrocities and learning that redemption is not a finish line but a job. Angel Investigations, a detective agency that helps the helpless, gives the series a noir spine Buffy never had, and the early case of the week years use the city's neon rot far better than most LA dramas.
Joss Whedon's high school horror riff did something television had not managed before: it took the dumbest possible premise, a cheerleader kills vampires, and used it as scaffolding for the most literate genre drama of its era. Buffy Summers moves to Sunnydale, a town built on a Hellmouth, and over seven seasons the show treats every monster as a metaphor for something real: first love that literally leaves a scar, the person you sleep with turning into a monster after, a mother's death that no slayer strength can fix. The gimmick was monsters, the subject was growing up.
Shawn Ryan's adaptation of Matthew Quirk's novel became Netflix's surprise smash of 2023, and the reason is simple: it is a straight ahead, professionally built conspiracy thriller with no self importance and no dead weight. Gabriel Basso plays Peter Sutherland, a low level FBI agent stuck monitoring an emergency phone line that never rings, until it rings, and he is suddenly protecting Rose Larkin, a tech CEO played by Luciane Buchanan, while uncovering a mole hunt that reaches the White House. Ten episodes, one escalating night of it, and a full second season set in Bangkok.
Joe Rogan in a black turtleneck asking ordinary people if they want to eat a pan of buffalo meat that has been allowed to rot slightly, while their families watch from a platform above. Fear Factor is the purest reality…
Guy Ritchie does television, and somehow it works. Theo James plays the aristocrat who inherits a title along with the family business: a cannabis empire tucked into the grounds of a country estate. Kaya Scodelario is the brilliant, terrifying business…