Shows You Should Be Watching
Honest reviews. Zero hype.
Cast & Key People Hannah Waddingham Judith Burton Octavia Spencer Debbie Claybourne Ed Skrein Billy Donovan Calam Lynch Sam Savannah Steyn Queenie Williams Jamie Parker David Claybourne Sylvia Hoeks Ana Bill Nighy The Director Watch the Trailer ▶ Our Review…
The Disney era handed Russell T Davies the biggest budget in the show's history and Ncuti Gatwa the keys to the TARDIS, and the result is the most confident Doctor Who has looked in a decade. After three 60th anniversary specials gave David Tennant a victory lap, The Church on Ruby Road properly introduced Gatwa's Fifteenth Doctor on Christmas 2023: a flashier, flirtier, more emotionally open Doctor with Millie Gibson's found family orphan Ruby Sunday alongside. The production upgrade is immediate, with cinematography and score that finally match the ambition the scripts always had.
JP Ahonen's webcomic about a black metal family man made the jump to animation and lost none of its warmth in translation. Sløth, frontman of the world's least successful satanic band, is a stay at home dad raising Lilith and Leviathan with his wife Lucyfer, and the show's genius is playing every domestic beat completely straight: school interviews, in law visits, band practice in the garage, all conducted in corpse paint. The mockumentary confessionals, where family members speak to a documentary crew that is never explained, give it a Modern Family rhythm filtered through church burnings.
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.
Special number seven takes on the weight loss drug era with the show's usual lack of mercy. When Cartman is denied the new miracle medication because he is not diabetic enough, he and Butters start sourcing it from Canada, and the plot builds to a full Cartman empowerment arc that satirizes body positivity discourse and pharmaceutical gatekeeping at the same time. A Lizzo subplot, where she is rebranded as the face of the drug to make it relatable, drew the loudest headlines and remains the special's boldest swing.
The sixth special is the influencer economy takedown fans had been waiting for. A new energy drink called Cred takes the school by storm, and the boys' quest to score it becomes a genuinely cutting look at how brands manufacture belonging and sell it to kids who cannot afford it. Meanwhile Randy launches an OnlyFans career with tragic optimism, and the special's most savage joke is that the adults' exploitation economy and the kids' hype economy are the same machine wearing different outfits.
The fifth special is the multiverse parody everyone saw coming and nobody expected to be this pointed. Cartman dreams of a universe where everyone is diverse and it drives him insane, while the real plot follows a displaced multiverse version of him landing in our world and a desperate Disney executive, an unflattering Bob Iger caricature, trying to fix a company whose adult fans have turned on it. The special's take on pandering, box office panic, and the grown man Star Wars discourse is bracingly mean to everyone at once.
Part 2 pays off the cliffhanger with the reveal everyone expected handled in the least expected way, and the back half turns into a full parody of prestige crime dramas, complete with a Detective Harris investigation that eats half the runtime. Pi Pi, the urine obsessed water park owner, becomes the special's unlikely breakout villain with a crypto and NFT endorsed pitch to run Colorado's water supply, and a running joke about everyone in town having a podcast gets funnier each time it is deployed.
The third Paramount+ special trades pandemic gloom for drought farce: a ManBearPig caused water shortage has Denver rationing, and Steve Black discovers he can sell his stream to the city reservoir, which quickly turns into a subscription streaming service, boats of water sent downstream to paying customers, while water park owner Pi Pi lurks with his own recycling scheme. Cartman's battle with his mother over breast implants as an investment strategy is the special's engine, and Talnua Cussler's golf course compound looming over the abandoned hot dog stand gives the kids a genuinely new antagonist setup.