It’s not easy writing a five-hour television event that incorporates the casts and storylines of no fewer than six separate ongoing concerns. Past the writing, consider for a moment the logistics. You have to figure out how to get actors time off from their regular schedules to shoot material for…

I need a new genre show. It’s important. I’m preparing to be annoyed and disappointed by the new Picard series, and a necessary part of my future rants about how the Star Trek franchise has lost its way is having examples of what storytelling avenues they ought to be exploring…

I’m still struggling to finish Ryan Reynolds’ latest grown-up action movie, 6 Underground, which is so relentlessly kinetic that it gives me motion sickness if I leave it on for longer than 20-minute intervals. But I was charmed by Pokémon Detective Pikachu, which is not a great or even good…

No new Assassin’s Creed game last year, which was a relief. Ubisoft’s relentless release schedule led to even me, a dedicated series fan with ample free time, allowing a couple of titles to fall through the cracks. …

I’m thinking, again, of the sad priest. Many of the admirers of Greta Gerwig’s very fine Lady Bird don’t even remember the sad priest. I couldn’t tell you the name of the character, or the actor, without looking it up. (Father Leviatch, played by Stephen McKinley Henderson.) But whenever Lady…

As a TV personality, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has a left-wing enthusiasm and taste for original dirt that often leads her show down conspiratorial avenues. As an author, she’s overqualified to be a TV journalist. Blowout, a thoroughly researched account of international oil company malfeasance in the new century, is surprisingly…

It’s that time of the year when TV critics start framing everything in powers of ten, and as always, I wonder if I’m missing the point of the exercise. Am I watching TV wrong? If you consult the experts, the answer is obviously yes. With the melancholy exception of the…

Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s, Jeff Pearlman Entertaining, quick-reading books about sports history are an endlessly renewable resource, but truly timeless sports stories are not. That’s why there’s so many books in the field that revisit the same few subjects, and books that…

In the last few episodes leading into the end of its sixth year and its series finale, I realized I was more invested in HBO’s Silicon Valley than I ever had been before. It was a show I never quite loved even though I stayed tuned in for its entire…