IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Hank Stuever has ideas for those who think they’ve seen everything.
What else can physically distance us from each other more effectively than television, while keeping us together as a culture? There is so much of it now that this sense of belonging is fading — we are rarely all watching the same thing.
My advice: Subscribe to everything. Whatever you’re no longer spending in the outside world use to let yourself have Crave and Netflix. Buy an Amazon Prime subscription. Get Disney+. Get Apple TV+. Cancel anytime.
I hope this helps get you through these long days and nights.
FOR PEOPLE WHO IGNORED 2019’S BEST SHOWS
At the top of that list is HBO’s Watchmen, a stunningly realized drama about race and vigilante justice in a fictional America suffering from a peculiar sort of superhero complex. Regina King’s performance alone will quickly convince you.
The rest of that list: When
They See Us (Netflix); Unbelievable (Netflix); Succession (Crave, seasons 1 and 2); Gentleman Jack (Crave); Fleabag (Amazon Prime, seasons 1 and 2); This is Us (NBC and CTV, currently in season 4, with the first three seasons on Netflix); Chernobyl (Crave); Dead to Me (Netflix); and Leaving Neverland (Crave).
FOR PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY’VE WATCHED EVERYTHING ALREADY
You’ve watched all the amazing previous seasons of FX’s Better Things and are up to date on the current season? Then you, too, share my belief that Sam Fox (Pamela Adlon) would be the ideal person to quarantine with. What about Crave’s Insecure, which returns April 12? What about all of Netflix’s BoJack Horseman? (And Big Mouth?) You’ve watched Ramy on Crave? Dickinson on Apple TV+? I’m sure you’ve watched both seasons of Pose on FX. (And the network’s Fosse/Verdon?)
You found time to figure out what the producers were trying to tell us in last summer’s Euphoria on Crave? You’ve considered the beguiling meanings and extreme creativity in Crave’s Kidding, including this current season? You’re deep into FX’s Devs, Silicon Valley’s answer to Killing Eve?
Right now, I’m committed to enjoying the second chapter of Crave’s masterfully envisioned Italian drama My Brilliant Friend. I really blew it in 2018, deciding to pass on writing a review of the first chapter — because I was too busy. Now it’s back, like a mesmerizing gift.
FOR PEOPLE WHO’VE WATCHED EVERY PANDEMIC MOVIE OR SHOW THEY COULD FIND
Yes, but have you watched
The Strain? Lighter and more conclusive than the redundant socio-horror slog that is AMC’s The Walking Dead, Guillermo del Toro’s FX series, about a viral vampire pandemic aired from 2014 to 2017, and I always admired the way it tapped into modern anxieties while honouring old-school horror techniques, which ought to be fun rather than torturous. Great ensemble cast, too, including Corey Stoll as an epidemiologist struggling with alcoholism and a tweenage son.
PBS has added an encore presentation of Ken Burns’s 1994 epic documentary Baseball — free on any PBS platform. Sure, it’s meant to soothe baseball fans who are going to suffer withdrawal pangs this spring, but it’s also a fine metaphorical history lesson about a fever that spread across America and still keeps many in its grip.
FOR PEOPLE WHO WOULD LIKE A LITTLE ANXIETY ON TOP OF THEIR ANXIETY
Yes! Wallow in it. It’s called adrenalin and it will keep you on your toes. The current, final season of Crave’s Homeland is coping frenetically with a storyline involving a helicopter carrying the president (Beau Bridges), which was shot down by the Taliban. And Claire Danes is good at stoking one’s jangled nerves.
David Simon and Ed Burns’s just-launched Crave miniseries
The Plot Against America is a faithful adaptation of Philip Roth’s what-if novel that imagines a 1940s United States run by Nazi sympathizers — a disturbing reminder that things always could have been (and still can be!) worse.
Parents who love anxiety can’t do much better than Apple TV+’s morosely absorbing Servant, a sort of haunted-house story with baby monitors.
Of course, if you love awful and uptight people, Larry David has delivered what I think is the best season of Curb Your Enthusiasm we’ve had in a long time, currently airing on HBO. I’m sure he’d have a lot to say about the hoarding of hand sanitizer — in fact, I assume he has quite a stash himself.
FOR PEOPLE TRYING NOT TO HAVE AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS
If official statements have failed to convince you that the end isn’t near — or you’re just spooked in general about your own mortality, the absurdity of existence, and the meaning of moral goodness, well, you’re primed and ready for TV’s brightest, wittiest and most thorough exploration of life’s big philosophical concepts. I’m talking, of course, about NBC’s The Good Place, which wrapped in January (the first three seasons are streaming on Netflix).
Maybe you tried to watch it before and found it too clever by half. Try again. It’s a reassuring primer for understanding human behaviour, which might come in handy as you gird yourself for your next trip through that apocalyptic hellscape once known as Whole Foods.
The Washington Post