When I reviewed the first season of AppleTV+’s big IP series Foundation back in 2021, my main criticism was that the series didn’t take the time to ground its narrative and develop its characters, choosing instead to churn through centuries of plot in at attempt to give us an understanding of this world but less […]
Author: Jean Henegan
Secret Invasion – Beloved Review
“Beloved” made clear two glaring issues with Secret Invasion that its writers (and Marvel) appear perfectly content to simply ignore. First, the narrative structure of the series is a complete mess. In order to have a cliffhanger last week, the writers were keen to ignore a key plot point (and a really cool, important one!) […]
The Afterparty Season Two Review
If you’re a suspect in one murder case during your life, that’s bad luck, but to have it happen a second time? Well, then it might be something about the company you keep. But that’s the situation Aniq (Sam Richardson) and Zoë (Zoë Chao) find themselves in in season two of AppleTV+’s The Afterparty. The […]
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – Among the Lotus Eaters Review
What’s it going to take to get Ortegas her own standalone episode? Because every time she – and by extension, actress Melissa Navia – was on screen in “Among the Lotus Eaters,” the episode went from a messy slog to a fun, tight race against time to save the Enterprise from certain doom. But when […]
The Horror of Delores Roach Review
Attend the tale of Delores Roach. In an unabashed riff on the class story of Sweeney Todd (unabashed in the sense that the series has a character compare the story to that of the Stephen Sondheim musical late in the first season), The Horror of Delores Roach isn’t all that original. However, in its leading […]
Secret Invasion – Betrayed Review
Sigh. G’iah, we hardly knew ya. (Seriously, thanks to an utter lack of character development and a narrative that has been so concerned with showing us various plots to get humans to kill off each other that are so thinly developed that we only hear about them moments before their execution so we’re half in […]
The Best Television Series Set in Each of the 50 States
When my colleague, Kieran Freemantle, tweeted me earlier this week, asking me to name the best television series set in each of the 50 states (sorry Washington D.C.), my first thought was, “Oh my gosh. 50 is a lot of TV shows and that sounds like a lot of research.” But the more I noodled […]
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow Review
No Trek series is ever truly a Trek series until they do a time travel episode*. So, Strange New Worlds choice to introduce James T. Kirk to the series by sending an alternate future Kirk back to the past with La’an – in an episode that also tackled the always interesting “What happens if you […]
Secret Invasion – Past and Present Review
Well, two episodes into Secret Invasion and it appears that only Olivia Colman is having any fun with the rather crazy and outlandish story we’re in the middle of. Her unrestrained glee at getting to torture the captured Skrull operative certainly brought some energy to a rather uninspired episode of television. If the series can’t […]
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – Ad Astra per Aspera Review
In my previous professional life, I was a practicing attorney. Which means I can be pretty darn harsh on legal stories – in fact, I can almost never manage to watch shows that are all about lawyers because they are often so horribly inaccurate under the guise of making legal practice interesting (spoiler alert: being […]