Reacher, Season Two, on Prime

In Lee Child’s novels, Jack Reacher is a decorated veteran, whose medals and citations include a Purple Heart after surviving the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. Yet, he ultimately sabotaged his own career because he was more interested in justice than politics. Viewers will see his fateful last case as in the Military Police Corps through flashbacks when he learns somebody is killing former members of his fictional investigative unit in season two of showrunner Nick Santora’s Reacher (adapted from Child’s Bad Luck and Trouble), which premieres Friday on Prime Video.

Reacher is a blues-loving veteran, so everyone should identify and sympathize with him. After the military, Reacher took up drifting, essentially emulating the lifestyle of many of his itinerant blues heroes. Fortunately, his old Sergeant, Frances Neagley figures out a way to contact him when members of the 110^th Investigative Unit start to turn up dead.

At first, they only have one body, Calvin Franz, who always idolized the big guy, but soon two more are discovered. However, in addition to Reacher and Neagley, ladies’ man-turned-family man David O’Donnell and Reacher’s former work-wife and not-so-secret crush Karla Dixon are also present and accounted for. However, their former colleague Swan is missing-in-action. The question will be whether he stayed a friend or turned foe. The remaining 110th is lucky in one respect. Det. Gaitano Russo, the cop assigned to Franz’s case, might have a prickly personality, but he is scrupulously honest.

A whole heck of a lot of henchmen and assassins will be killed (mostly in self-defense, mostly) during the course of season two. Like the first season, each episode of Bad Luck and Trouble features plenty of gritty action and a satisfyingly high body-count. The only thing season one lacked was a strong villain, but season two rectifies that with Robert Patrick, who is appropriately ruthless as Shane Langston, the corporate head of security pulling most of the strings.

Alan Ritchson is still perfectly cast as Reacher (whose description in the Child books is nothing like little Tom Cruise). He still looks huge and has the same swagger from season one. Ritchson also quickly develops solid chemistry with Serinda Swan (from Coroner). Together, they deliver a lot more heat than the first season. Swan also shows off some serious action chops of her own that could make her the breakout star of season two.

Merry Little Batman, on Prime

Cops work on Christmas and so does the MTA, so superheroes should too. However, Batman doesn’t think he has to anymore, because he supposedly eradicated all crime from Gotham. It was all for the sake of his young son Damian, whom Bruce Wayne hopes will eventually succeed him as Batman. In the meantime, he is an over-protective parent, but somehow, he is still tricked into leaving Damian “home alone” in Mike Roth’s animated feature, Merry Little Batman, which premieres tomorrow on Prime Video.

Admittedly, Damian’s parentage and origins are a little complicated. Wayne is his father and super-villainess Talia al-Ghul is his mother, but screenwriters Morgan Evans, Etan Cohen, and Jase Ricci do not dwell on his demonic backstory. Instead, he is a bratty kid with superhero dreams. He cannot wait to start fighting crime alongside his father, especially when he receives his first utility belt as a Christmas present.

Unfortunately, Damian will be spending Christmas Eve alone when Dr. Freeze fakes a distress call from the Justice League luring Batman to the Arctic. For a while, Damian (a.k.a. “Little Batman”) gets to act like Macaulay Culkin, giving a pair of burglars holy heck. Nevertheless, they manage to get away with one treasured item, Damian’s new utility belt, so the young wannabe superhero tracks them back to their hideout. Initially, their boss, the Joker, is rather disappointed in his thieves’ performance, but when he realizes who Damian really is, he improvises a fiendish scheme to exploit the lad’s naïve enthusiasm. Just like the Grinch, the Joker is going to steal Christmas.

The truth is the best recent superhero movies have been produced by DC Animated, because they have not been afraid to venture outside the recognized “canon.” The alternate history Superman: Red Son, the Lovecraftian Batman: The Doom that Came to Gotham, and the Chanbara-inspired Batman Ninja were way more interesting and quite a bit more fun than any of the recent live-action movies from either Marvel or DC. Seeing familiar characters in radically different contexts really keeps the superhero genre fresh.

Merry Little Batman somewhat follows in this tradition, but it was clearly conceived for an even younger audience. Most adults will consider Damian the Hellion his name might suggest. Nevertheless, when he finally faces the consequences of his actions, it is pretty dramatic. This is also a more comedic Batman, voiced by Luke Wilson, than many fans are used to. Yet, the father-son dynamic is endearing.

Wilson’s Batman might be contentious within the DC fanbase, but they all should dig how gleefully evil David Hornsby (of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) sounds as the Joker. He definitely enjoys his super-villainy, so viewers will too. James Cromwell also brings a lot of warmth and dignity as Alfred Pennyworth.

007: Road to a Million, on Prime

Brian Cox actually resembles French thesp Michael Lonsdale, who played Hugo Drax (in Moonraker), the only Bond villain who always looked bored with his own villainy. Perhaps fittingly, Cox now sort of plays a Bond villain, but he seems much more amused by his role. This is not a Bond movie, it is a reality TV, in which “The Controller” gives nine pairs of contestants a series of Bond-related challenges that could possibly win them a million Pounds. Of course, Cox is not going to make it easy for them in the eight-episode reality series, 007: Road to a Million, which premieres today on Prime Video.

The music is clearly adapted from the classic Bond theme and Barbara Broccoli is on board as an executive producer, so everything is legit. The cast is also entirely British, but the locations are suitably exotic. Throughout the series, the contestants visit Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio, Venice, Jamaica, the Alps, and the Atacama Desert in Chile. At each stop, they must retrieve a nuclear-football-looking briefcase, through which the Controller will ask them a trivia question, worth escalating sums of money. During the initial rounds, the questions are pretty easier, but they get trickier as the money increases.

Do you remember Bond’s connection to Atacama? That is where the Quantum of Solace villain had his lair. The glaringly obvious lost opportunity in Road to a Million is it never takes the time to establish the connections to the Bond movies and how their stunts inspired each challenge. It might have cost a bit more in licensing, but since Broccoli is on-board, she would just be paying herself, right?

Of course, the Sugarloaf challenge is an homage to Moonraker and maybe so are the Venice excursions. The live crocodiles of another challenge presumably refer to Live and Let Die. However, when you cannot immediately guess the connection, Road to a Million feels more like The Amazing Race than James Bond-related programming.

Nevertheless, Cox is quite amusing as the Controller. In fact, he seems to quite enjoy tormenting the players. Cox is not necessarily their antagonist, but when some contestants struggle with easy questions, he looks like he would call in a drone strike on them, if he could. A lot of viewers would feel that way too.

Totally Killer, on Prime

All the best slashers take you back to an Eighties state of mind. This one literally takes Jamie Hughes back to the 1980s. Late in the awesome 80’s, the mysterious Sweet Sixteen Killer murdered three high school girls, stabbing them sixteen times. Then, suddenly, he reappears in 2023, killing her mom. Through an odd chain of events, she travels back in time to stop the killer in Nahnatchka Khan’s Blumhouse-produced Totally Killer, which premieres today on Prime.

For years, Pam Hughes was preparing for the killer’s return, like Laurie Strode in Halloween (2018), but she wasn’t quite prepared enough. The killer targets her daughter next, but Hughes (as in John?) escapes in her best friend Amelia Creston’s science fair project, a time machine. Somehow, it works when the killer’s knife gets jammed in the control panel.

Obviously, returning will be a problem, especially since it needs wifi. Fortunately, Creston based her designs on plans in her mother Lauren’s old notebooks. The 1980s Creston will work on the technical problems, while Hughes tries to catch the killer, but it will be even more difficult than she expected. For one thing, the teen Pam and her mean girl friends are too busy partying to take her warnings seriously, until they start getting killed.

Screenwriters David Matalon, Sasha Perl-Raver, and Jen D’Angelo score some laughs at the expense of 80’s attitudes that now look dated, as seen through the eyes of the woke-entitled Hughes. Yet, despite their intentions, the Reagan decade still looks like way more fun than our current scoldy watch-what-you-say times.

Surprisingly, their take on time travel is more consistently fun and entertaining. Hughes will indeed change things, but not always in the way she hoped. Murders still happen, but the victims and locations change. It turns out fusing slashers and time travel resulted in a fresh take on both.

Wilderness, on Prime

Marriage, ambition, commitment—in the real world these things all lead to happiness, stability, and success. However, in the new subgenre of post-Gone Girl “unreliable narrator” thrillers, these never contribute to happy endings. This time around, Olive “Liv” Taylor (not Tyler) will explain the source of her scorn to viewers and show us what she did about it in creator Marnie Dickens six-episode Wilderness, based on B.E. Jones’ novel, which starts streaming today on Prime.

Taylor’s home life was a mess growing up, but she thought she was past all that when she married the well-heeled, socially-ingratiating Will Taylor. She even agreed to sideline her journalism career when his hospitality company transfers him to New York. It is a sacrifice, but it comes with the bonus of much more distance between her and her high-strung mother Caryl. Then Taylor discovers her husband cheated on her.

Of course, he makes all the usual excuses and prevarications: it didn’t mean anything, it was a one-time thing, blah blah blah. She sort of maybe believes him, until she discovers it was even worse than she thought. Nevertheless, she agrees to his suggestions of a healing dream vacation to Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon, and other big western marvels of nature. However, she starts harboring homicidal ambitions, as she relentlessly explains in the ponderously overwritten narration.

Wilderness would have been a lot more fun if it went for a Hitchcockian vibe rather than emulate the Adrian Lyne-style of sexual thriller exemplified by Deep Water and Fatal Attraction. Dickens’ adaptation (assisted by Matilda Feyisayo Ibini for episode four) cannot seem to decide whether viewers should wish a plague on everyone’s houses or root for Liv Taylor, who increasingly displays sociopathic tendencies, especially as innocent people get swept up in the chaos she unleashes.

However, the extent to which Wilderness humanizes and even empathizes with Cara Parker, “the other woman,” adds a surprisingly interesting dimension. In fact, Ashley Benson’s portrayal of Parker might be the best thing going for this series. Eric Balfour (the CTU freelancer who used to date Chloe on 24) is probably the second best thing, playing her clueless boyfriend, Garth. Unfortunately, though, we spend must more time with the Taylors, for obvious reasons.

Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity, on Prime

Any and every jazz listener was a Wayne Shorter fan. Yet, when it came to science fiction movies and comics, he was a fan too, just like the rest of us nerds. In fact, one of his final releases was a three-disc set that came with an accompanying graphic novel that Shorter wrote. Dorsay Alavi leans into the saxophonist’s otherworldly interests (without losing sight of his music) in the three-part Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity, which premieres tomorrow on Prime.

It is almost three and a quarter hours of Wayne Shorter, which is just fine with us. Like his former boss, Miles Davis, Shorter had distinctive periods. The first episode starts in childhood and takes him through the “Second Great Miles Davis Quintet,” including most of his Blue Note tenure. The second installment covers Weather Report, the fusion super-group that went through nearly as many phases of its own, as well as some of his subsequent projects, like Native Dancer, featuring Milton Nascimento. The final hour mostly focuses on his celebrated quartet (with Danilo Perez, Brian Blade, and John Patitucci), as well as the orchestral works he merged them into. Sadly though, each period is also marked by at least one terrible personal tragedy, sometimes more than one.

Casual fans may not be aware the TWA flight 800 crash impacted Shorter in a very direct and personal way, but it certainly did. In fact, one of the most memorable interviews of the entire docu-series is that with Shorter’s former road manager, who had to break the news to the jazz legend while he was on tour. However, Alavi mostly focuses on Shorter’s childhood relationship with his brother Alan, a much freer avant-garde trumpeter, who died suddenly in 1988, soon his betrothal to a cousin of Herbie Hancock (one of Wayne Shorter’s closest friends and musical collaborators), largely glossing over their adult relationship.

Jazz listeners will be happy to see Alavi scores sit-downs with just about everybody they would want to hear from, who are still alive, including Hancock, Ron Carter, Sonny Rollins, Dave Holland, Curtis Fuller, Reggie Workman, Wallace Rooney (obviously recorded before his tragically early demise), Peter Erskine, and the other three members of Shorter’s Quartet. Conversely, Shorter’s history is also a sad reminder of how many greats we have lost, often far too soon.

Harlan Coben’s Shelter, on Prime

Harlan Coben's Mickey Bolitar novels were conceived as a YA spin-off to his popular Myron Bolitar adult novels, but you wouldn’t know it from the streaming adaptation. The bestselling Myron is Mickey’s uncle in the books, but he is nowhere to be found in the series. Now the moody teen has a single aunt, perhaps to avoid conflicts with Coben’s Netflix deal for his grown=up titles. Regardless, Mickey still has a troubled mother struggling with mental health issues and his father is still dead, or is he? That will be one of the mysterious questions preoccupying the Myron-less Bolitar in the eight-episode Harlan Coben’s Shelter, adapted by the name-in-the-title Harlan & Charlotte Coben, which premieres today on Prime.

Coben writes thrillers, but the old dark house seen in Shelter’s trailers looks rather spooky. It also starts with the two of the most terrifying words you can see together: “New” and “Jersey.” When he was a kid, Mickey Bolitar’s father Bradley was double-dog dared to sneak into the supposedly haunted mansion where the neighborhood weirdo “Bat Lady” lives. According to Aunt Shira, he was never the same afterwards. After his first eventful day of school, Mickey is also drawn to Bat Lady’s house, where she tells him his father is not really dead.

Of course, Bolitar would like to believe her, but he saw his father die before his eyes. Yet, the more he recalls the tragic accident, the more some strange little details stand out in his mind. The day started great, when he thought he was developing chemistry with the cute new girl in school, newbie to newbie, but then she ghosted him. The next day, he finds she has mysteriously withdrawn from school. He is suspicious and soon his new friends, geeky Arthur “Spoon” Spindell and gothy Ema Winslow, agree something sinister is afoot, presumably involving Bat Lady, a mysterious man with an octopus facial tattoo, and the still unsolved disappearance of Bradley Bolitar’s little league friend.

The tone of Shelter is pretty dark, but you can still see the young adult roots. In fact, the best thing going for the series is chemistry shared by Bolitar, Spindell, Winslow, and Rachell Caldwell, the captain of the cheer squad, who joins their Scooby Drew Crew halfway through. It is consistently entertaining watching them snoop and investigate, even though we could do without so much attention to Caldwell’s straight frustrations with her dumb jock boyfriend and Winslow’s lesbian interest in the school’s leading online influencer.

Jaden Michael is believably angsty as Bolitar, but never to an obnoxiously overbearing degree.  The wacky character of Spindell is a lot, but Adrian Greensmith keeps him kind of somewhat grounded, which is something. Abby Corrgian manages to convey Winslow’s sensitivity and intuition without making the character a complete wallflower. Howerver, the real discovery is Sage Linder, who outshines everyone as the gutsy, gun-toting Caldwell.

Constance Zimmer has a tough job, since she plays Shira Bolitar, replacing Myron, who was the commercial hook the source novel was surely originally sold with. However, she provides a nicely down-to-earth easy-to-identify-with adult influence om the series.

The Horror of Dolores Roach, on Prime

During the sixteen years Dolores Roach was in prison, Washington Heights considerably gentrified. The streets are now safer and the property values have greatly increased. Apparently, these are bad things. At least Roach can rectify the safer streets in creator Aaron Mark’s eight-part, Blumhouse-produced The Horror of Dolores Roach, based on his original podcast, which premieres tomorrow on Prime.

Empanadas are the meat pies of New York City, so it makes sense to make them the vessel for Mark’s modern-day Sweeney Todd riff. Getting us to sympathize with the notorious mass murderer will be a trickier proposition. The actress playing her in a one-woman show likes to think she humanizes the killer, but Roach begs to differ, when she introduces herself to the thesp after the opening night performance. She insists on telling her the full, supposedly unvarnished truth (if ever there were a narrator with the potential for “unreliability,” Roach would seem to be it, but Mark and the battery of writers do not play that game).

Roach was happy with Dominic, her drug-dealer lover, back in the era of Giuliani New York, except for the fact criminals like them were getting busted. Eventually, it happened to her, but not Dominic. Since she refused to turn on her lover, they threw the book at her. When she finally gets out, the Washington Heights she knew is completely changed (she even missed the Broadway musical—so unfair). Fatefully, the only thing that stayed the same is the empanada shop, now operated by Luis Batista, the late original owner’s son. Conveniently (or maybe not), he always carried a torch for Roach, so he is delighted to let her stay in his spare room.

For a while, Roach actually thinks she might get her life back together as an unlicensed masseuse, but then she starts killing people. It always happens in a one-darned-thing-after-another kind of way. Usually, they are asking for it too, like Batista’s sleazy landlord, Gedeon Pearlman (of course, the socially conscious series makes the implied Jewish character a greedy landlord). However, Roach and Batista are subsequently stuck with Pearlman’s son Jonah hanging around looking for his father and chatting up Nellie Morris, their cashier. Fortunately, he won’t look for his father where Batista has him hidden: in the meat locker and in the empanadas. In fact, Batista will need more “meat” when the new flavor becomes a hit. Reluctantly, Roach keeps obliging.

The writing is intermittently clever, but it is frequently undermined by the urge to offer social commentary. Frankly, HoDR is at its most interesting when Roach puts her pity party on hold, to start contemplating her own culpability—it does happen, eventually. The slightly meta twist towards the end is also genuinely amusing. If you can slog through the first episode, which is the longest and the slowest, you might as well go all the way.

Citadel, on Prime

Citadel is a lot like U.N.C.L.E., but it is not an acronym, at least not as far as we know yet. The super-secret, trans-national spy agency’s backstory is getting filled in as the series goes along. The problem is, there are not a lot of people left who would know. Nadia Sinh and Mason Kane are two of the handful of agents who survived their enemies’ lethal purge, but their memories were wiped clean, as per agency protocols. With or without their memories, Kane and Sinh will reteam to save the world and themselves in the first season of showrunner David Weil’s Citadel executive produced by the Russo Brothers, which premieres today on Prime Video.

There was definitely some awkward but potently charged history between Sinh and Kane when they found themselves on the same assignment that fateful day. Unfortunately, they were being set up, like every other Citadel agent, as part of a worldwide gambit launched by Manticore, a more buttoned-down corporate cousin of SPECTRE and THRUSH, fronted by the ruthless Dahlia Archer.

Kane basically started over when he woke up in an Italian hospital with no memory of his previous life. In the eight years that followed, he married and had a daughter, but occasionally he has visions of Sinh. The feeling of incompleteness spurs him to launch a highly advanced DNA search, which alerts his old boss, Bernard Orlick—and their old foes at Manticore.

To protect his family, Kane agrees to help Orlick recover Citadel’s global nuclear code skeleton key, before Manticore figures out how to use it. Kane still has no memory of his past, but he can get by on his reflexes and muscle memories. However, when things really get bad, he will need to find Sinh.

Citadel is a lot like a lot of other shows and movies (call it The Bourne Citadel), but it is way more expensive (reportedly the second costliest series ever). At least it is much more watchable than the tedious, de-Tolkien-ized The Rings of Power (assumed to be the #1 most expensive). There are non-stop stunts, punctuated by a bunch of explosions, set-off against a rapidly changing panorama of exotic backdrops. There is even a flashback to a mission targeting the Iranian regime, which earns Weil and company credit for actually taking on a real-life bad guy who is really bad.

Dead Ringers, on Prime

Yes, it is another reboot gender-switcheroo, but in this case, Stewart and Cyril Marcus probably would not object, even if they could. They were the late identical twin gynecologists, whose mysterious deaths inspired the novel that was later adapted by David Cronenberg as Dead Ringers. Weirdly, this series remake-reboot-re-conception is more disturbingly graphic than Cronenberg’s film—way more. A lot is different, but at least they still have the crimson red surgical smocks in showrunner-writer Alice Birch’s six-part Dead Ringers, which premieres today on Prime.

Beverly and Elliot are still sort of strangely unisex names, since the latter has reportedly become more popular for girls in recent years. Regardless, the Mantle twins remain physically identical, but psychologically weird in very different ways. Beverly thinks she is the shy one, but her passive aggression is also quite manipulative. In contrast, Elliot’s foul-mouthed aggression comes right at people. She sees herself as Beverly’s protector and sometimes procurer, helping her shy sister lure lovers, with the understanding they will be quickly disposed of.

Much to Elliot’s surprise, Genevieve (presumably named as a hat-tip to Genevieve Bujold, who co-starred in Cronenberg’s film) is different. Once Elliot handles their first “date,” Beverly starts swooning for her new lover, even considering a long-term commitment with her. The resulting strain on their sibling relationship is exacerbated by the stress of opening their state-of-the-art birthing center, with capital supplied by Rebecca Parker, a truly toxic pharma heiress, who plays the part of philanthropist, but it really just working her own angles.

As issues arise at the new center, the shoot-from-the-hip Elliot grows increasingly unstable. Heck, maybe she even kills a homeless woman, but to be fair, she was even more obnoxious than Elliot. Regardless, Birch and the writers and directors play a lot of games with the twins’ perceptions of reality that undermine the main narrative rather than enhance it.

However, there is a good chance most viewers will not get that far. Frankly, the first episode almost entirely consists of harrowing birth complications and crude sexual conversations that make it an uncomfortably repetitive viewing experience to endure.

This should go without saying, but doctors should not sleep with their patients. Even if you gloss over the Beverly-Genevieve relationship, there is a lot of virtue signaling on behalf women’s health in Birch’s Dead Ringers that basically deconstructs on closer viewing. The Mantles are constantly talking about making their birth center feel safe and welcoming to pregnant women, but every examination room and operating theater seems to have observation windows any passer-by can open. Seriously, what is that all about?

Yet, there are flashes of inspired writing in the series, particularly two scenes, in which a mystery woman and a disgraced journalist both strip off Elliot’s façade and utterly expose her tortured psyche. Unfortunately, that quality is fleeting. Soon, the series repeats the same melodrama, driven by Elliot’s potty mouth, Beverly’s neurotic twitching, and their test tube horror shows. This story would be better executed in feature length, as indeed it was, by Cronenberg.

Yes, Rachel Weisz is frighteningly committed in the dual role of the Mantles, creating two very distinct, deeply troubled personas. However, they are both so much, it is hard to believe either could function or be accepted professionally in the real world. (In contrast, Jeremy Irons’ before-Mantles at least projected the appearance of learned competence.) Jennifer Ehle’s ice-cold snark as Parker is highly amusing, but way too abrasive to be credible in a serious dramatic context.

Reggie, on Prime

Along with Pele, he was the personification of New York sports in the late 1970s. Reggie Jackson’s play on the field and his contentious relationship with Yankees manager Billy Martin were welcome distractions from “The Summer of Sam.” However, Jackson nearly became a notorious murderer himself, when he was brainwashed to assassinate the Queen in The Naked Gun. That is way more movie references than most athletes get, but Jackson was always at the center of the New York media’s attention, whether he liked it or not. Jackson looks back at his career highs and controversies in Alex Stapleton’s documentary Reggie, which premiers today on Prime.

For baseball fans, hearing Jackson take a call from Pete Rose at the beginning of the film might just overshadow everything that follows it. Jackson always shot from the hip, despite taking flak for it, so his candor in Stapleton’s film should not be a surprise. Jackson has a lot to say about black participation in Major League Baseball, both past and present. He also has a lot to unpack from his own career, including five World Series rings and two World Series MVPs.

Jackson won three World Series in Oakland, made the post-season twice with the California Angels and now works for the Houston Astros, but he will always be remembered as a New York sports legend. Therefore, it is fitting both Derek Jeter and Aaron Judge make appearances to discuss Jackson’s mentorship.

Surprisingly, the late George Steinbrenner’s image might be somewhat burnished by the film. On the other, it might lower Billy Martin’s stock. Regardless, watching Reggie will bring slightly more mature fans right back to the time when the manager was constantly generating NY tabloid headlines, right alongside Jackson. Love him or hate him, a good Billy Martin doc is seriously overdue.

Jackson has a lot to say about the state of the game and society, which is important, but the fun parts feature Jackson reminiscing with his friends and teammates, like Rollie Fingers and Dave Stewart. There is also a lot of material that will be new to more casual baseball fans, like Jackson’s unsuccessful bid to buy the LA Dodgers, which didn’t fail due to a lack of money, considering Bill Gates and Paul Allen were part of his management group.

The Consultant, on Prime

Much to their surprise, the employees of this mobile gaming company will have to return to the office, whether they like it or not. Regus Patoff, the corporate consultant now calling the shots is not exactly old school, but he certainly does not care what people think of him. He might even pull their accounts back into the black, but it could cost more than their corporate culture in creator Tony Basgallop’s eight episode The Consultant, adapted from Bentley Little’s novel, which premieres today on Prime.

Elaine Hayman assumed her boss’s unexpected death would also mean the demise of CompWare, but then Patoff shows up a few days later with a contract signed by the late Sang Woo, giving him complete operating authority. At his first company meeting, everyone logging-in remotely is given one hour to come into the office or they are fired. Patoff also threatens to pink-slip any employee he deems foul-smelling. He never appears to leave the office, where he constantly demands Hayman meet him at unprofessionally early hours. Yet, he always seems fresh and immaculately dressed.

The clever thing about the early episodes is the ambiguity surrounding Patoff. His name is revealed to be an alias right from the start, but his strategies are not always utterly irredeemable. In fact, the Mephistophelean consultant is open to new game pitches from frustrated staffers like Craig Horne, Hayman’s former office hook-up whom she still keeps flirting with, despite his engagement to the decidedly Catholic and un-slackerly Patti. However, as Patoff pushes the company to launch Horne’s unlikely game concept, he forces everyone around him to make Faustian bargains, especially Hayman.

Frankly, The Consultant cannot really be called a “workplace” comedy or drama, because CompWare is not a proper workplace, at least not until Patoff shows up. Unfortunately, Patoff’s potential for creative destruction eventually dissolves into predictably sinister and not particularly logical villainy in the later episodes.

Frankly, it is like Basgallop’s adaptation just implodes. For a while, Hayman and Horne sleuth out bizarre hints to Patoff’s backstory, but none of that intriguingly weird material pays off at the end. Even more troublingly, there are times when the character of Patti seems to be targeted for manipulation out of a desire to see a Roman Catholic corrupted, which constitutes religious bigotry (for instance, she has fantasy-delusions involving the confessional booth).

It is a shame that such a strong start eventually runs off course and crashes. The episodes, around thirty-five minutes each, are initially highly bingeable and promise mystery and intrigue at an unusually weird level. Christoph is perfectly cast as Patoff, delivering each verbal barb with gleefully sly understatement. He might be a monster to work for (literally), but it sure looks like he enjoys his job.

The Rig, on Prime

Deep sea oil rigs are an effective setting for movies like ffolkes and The Burning Sea and series like Brazil’s Ilha de Ferro (“Iron Island”), because when something goes wrong out there, the crew has to fix it out there. Far off in the Scottish North Sea, Kinloch Bravo station boss Magnus MacMillan has all the usual personnel challenges, but his team must also face a fantastical (and perhaps even primordial) threat in creator David Macpherson’s six-episode The Rig, which premieres Friday on Prime Video.

Many of the crew, especially Baz Roberts were already upset, because they were bumped from their scheduled rotational flight home, to accommodate a corporate meeting arranged by company hack, Rose Mason. Unfortunately, that chopper won’t be coming anyway when the weather takes a freakish turn and all the communications signals cut out.

Tempers flare when Roberts is hurt during the storm, perhaps because Mason’s not-so-secret workplace lover, Fulmer Hamilton did not fully follow procedures and protocols. On the plus side, Roberts physically recovers at a superhuman pace. However, he seems to have a personality-altering “infection.” Between creepy Roberts and Lars Hutton, an openly insubordinate, crusty old field worker, MacMillan will have unnecessary distractions inside the platform, diverting his attention from the growing danger outside.

As you might guess, there is an environmental angle to all this ominous chaos, not unlike Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter, but Macpherson and his co-writers present and explain it with much more intelligence. They are clearly sf-literate, considering MacMillan’s trusted manager Alwyn Evans is often seen reading John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes.

Three Pines, on Prime

The married, middle-aged Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is sort of like a French Canadian Maigret. However, he also has some the erudition and emotional baggage of Adam Dalgliesh. Obviously, it would be folly to deceive the good Inspector, yet people keeping trying, with often woeful results. Despite the community’s lack of cooperation, Gamache keeps solving murders in titular Quebec village throughout the eight-episode Three Pines, adapted from Louise Penny’s novels by Emilia di Girolamo, which premieres tomorrow on Prime Video.

Gamache is so competent and well-respected, he won’t be fired when he shows up his snotty boss, Superintendent Francoeur, but he will be assigned to investigate a freak death way out in Three Pines. Apparently, the town’s least favorite self-help guru was electrocuted in her chair while watching a curling match. Yes, this show is definitely set in Canada. Nobody liked the deceased very much, but they don’t have much to say to Gamache’s team: moody Jean-Guy Beavoir, First Nations single-mom Isabelle Lacoste, and the annoying local cop Yvette Nichol. You’d almost think they were all trying to cover for the killer.

Somewhat like Hjerson, Three Pines adapts several Penny novels in two-episode arcs, but it also maintains a series-long investigation into the presumed death of a missing indigenous teen, Blue Two Feathers. Gamache’s pal Pierre Arnot originally investigated her disappearance, but the trail has gone stone-cold, partly because Francoeur never allocates resources to such cases.

Tragedy begets tragedy when Gamache is next dispatched to Three Pines. The previous victim’s abandoned house, a former indigenous conversion school, has become the scene of a fresh crime. Bad karma seems to pile up in Three Pines, but it is not supernatural, in the Twin Peaks tradition, which the title inevitably evokes—except maybe the spooky dreams related to the Two Feathers case that plague Gamache’s sleep.

Even when Gamache checks into a luxury hotel outside of Three Pines for his anniversary, Three Pines still finds him. In this case, the estranged sister of one of the villagers turns up dead, after inheriting the family fortune, much to everyone’s surprise. The final arc is roughly drawn from Penny’s novel The Brutal Telling, in which a stranger is found dead after he inexplicably burst into the café to tell everyone they would get what’s coming to them, because he knew all their dirty secrets. It turns out that is not advisable in Three Pines. However, the case of “Arthur Ellis” gets squeezed to the margins, to make way for the resolution of the Two Feathers case.

The mysteries of Three Pines are just okay, at least as adapted by di Girolamo, but Alfred Molina still makes the series worth watching. He is terrific as the kindly but disillusioned Gamache. He also has great workplace chemistry with Rossif Sutherland and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers as Beauvoir and Lacoste. However, Sarah Booth’s bumbling shtick as Nichol clashes with the tenor of the series.

Frankly, the “secret” bad guy stands out like a sore thumb right from the start. It is like di Girolamo didn’t even bother to attempt any misdirection. That might be fine for an episode of Cannon or Columbo, but it will irk fans of Penny’s novels—and there are a lot of them, which is presumably why the series was produced in the first place.

The English, on Prime

Our cousins in the UK love to sniff disapprovingly at the violence in America, but these Brits brought plenty of it across the pond. The native population bears the brunt of it, but they won’t spare anyone. Cornelia Locke is the exception. She only wants to kill a very specific fellow countryman, but she might have to cut down many more to get to him in writer-director Hugo Blick’s six-episode The English, which premieres tomorrow on Prime.

Instead of the man who shot her Pa, Locke is looking for the villain responsible for her son’s death, the circumstances of which will remain murky for the time-being. Unfortunately, it does not look like she will get far. Richard Watts, a racist saloon keeper and fellow British countrymen intends to kill Locke for the considerable cash she is carrying and then frame Eli Whipp, a former Pawnee U.S. Army scout he trussed up for being uppity.

Of course, a warrior like Whipp (that would be his assimilated name) is hard to kill. Rather reluctantly at first, he will ally himself with Locke. He can tell she has some bad business to conduct, so he would rather make his way to Nebraska, where he hopes to file a homesteading claim (which he could have legally, since he was no longer affiliated with a tribe). Yet, he and Locke can’t help saving each other from the various predators roaming the plains. David Melmont, the man Locke intends to kill is definitely one of them.

Melmont has generated a lot of bad karma, beyond Locke. He was one of the worst perpetrators of a notorious native massacre that still haunts the town of Hoxem, Wyoming. In fact, the atrocity indirectly poisoned nearly every character, in ways that will not be immediately obvious.

As revisionist westerns go, The English makes Heaven’s Gate look like a John Wayne crowd-pleaser. The tragic sweep of Blick’s story is quite powerful, but its relentless historical social criticism gets to be exhausting. The sins of the past just won’t stay buried, which is how it usually works. The first episode is also a darned good traditional western that could almost entirely standalone.

However, Brock gets bogged down in a number of extended flashbacks that greatly slow the momentum of the next two episodes. Locke and Whipp’s ambiguous relationship is the best thing about The English, but they disappear for long stretches of time.

Both Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer are terrific as Locke and Whipp. In fact, Whipp is such a richly complex character, whom Spencer does full justice to, The English could make the thesp (and his Morgan Freeman baritone) a household name. As usual, the always dependable Stephen Rea provides understated but memorable support as the decent Sheriff Robert Marshall.

The Devil’s Hour, on Prime

Perhaps Lucy Chambers should have opted for the security of a freelance writing career. That way she could go to bed at 4:00 AM. Instead, she wakes up each and every night at 3:33 AM precisely. The stress from her work at Child Protective Services probably does not help, but the phenomenon certainly seems to be sinister and uncanny in nature at the start of creator Tom Moran’s The Devil’s Hour, which premieres today on Prime Video.

“Gideon” gives off Hannibal Lecter vibes during the in medias res opening. It appears he is being held in-custody in a police interrogation room, where he has requested Chambers presence, to explain all the madness viewers are about to watch. Rewinding a little, we clearly understand how much stress Chambers is enduring.

Her emotionally-frozen son Isaac is having very disturbing problems at school. For instance, he beats himself up, because other boys told him so. He also often exhibits spooky “shine”-like behavior, claiming to see people who aren’t there and the like, especially around the time Chambers wakes each night. Isaac has been a long-term issue in her life, but recently, Chambers has had premonitions of the grisly murders of an abused wife and daughter, whose cases she handles.

Somehow, those crimes that have not happened yet are related to the brutal case DI Ravi Dhillon is working. There might also be a connection to a notorious local unsolved murder that predates Dhillon. He is on the fast-track, but he still has difficulty stomaching blood. Fortunately, his gruff but understanding sergeant, DS Nick Holness, helps him cover as best he can.

Clearly, Devil’s Hour is intended to be a mind-bending serial killer mystery involving time-travel, or some kind of time-warping, much like Apple TV+’s Shining Girls. However, creator Silka Luisa did a much better job establishing the ground rules in the early episodes. Based on the first two episodes provided for review, it is hard to really understand what is going on, particularly where Gideon fits into it all. Still, episode two, “The Velveteen Rabbit,” ends on a heck of a cliffhanger.

Given what we have seen so far, the procedural stuff is by far more compelling than the melodrama involving Chambers and creepy little Isaac. Both Nikesh Patel and Alex Ferns are terrific as Dhillon and Holness. If they survive season one, we would be willing to watch further X-File-style investigations with their characters.

The Peripheral, on Prime

Flynne Fisher neither lives nor travels into the Matrix. She is in the real world when she puts on an experimental headset and she still is when it digitally transmits her nearly seventy years into the future. When she gets there, she is not remotely controlling an avatar. She has a physically constructed peripheral. She thought she was testing a game, but the story she is playing will actually happen IRL. It will also reach back into the past (from the future’s perspective, or the very-near future to us) to target her and her family in creator Scott B. Smith’s The Peripheral, based on William Gibson’s novel, which premieres today on Prime Video.

Fisher is a gifted gamer, but she is too grounded in her day-to-day reality to retreat into cyberspace. However, she often ghost-games on her brother Burton’s behalf, when he has high-paying gigs. Technically, he was the one hired by a mysterious start-up to test-drive what the Burtons assume is a new VR headset, but she is the one who ventures into the “game.”

It feels really real in this somewhat-far future London, because it is. Initially, she enjoys the intrigue instigated by her in-world guide, Aelita West, but it takes a dark turn during her second visit—very dark. Fisher vows never to return, until she starts getting ominous warnings from Wilf Netherton, who claims to be from the future London she visited. It is a lot to swallow, but the hit squad that comes after her is pretty convincing. Fortunately, Burton and his veteran drinking buddies can protect her and their ailing mother in the short term, but she will have to work with Netherton in her future peripheral to figure out who is trying to kill them and why.

The broad strokes of Peripheral might sound like cyberpunk in a familiar Matrix/World on a Wire kind of vein, but the details are very different. For one thing, there is sort of a time travel element. It is also weirdly timely, because the Russian oligarchs (“the Klept”) are one of the major factions vying for dominance in future London. That might be somewhat less likely now, after they were targeted with sanctions for supporting Putin’s war in Ukraine, but it was pretty darned insightful when Gibson’s novel was published in 2014.

The future London Fisher visits also looks really cool, in a way that is not a carbon copy of previous Blade Runner-esque dystopian mega-cities. Smith and the rest of the writing staff also depict Burton Fisher and his fellow veterans with unusual sensitivity and empathy, particularly Conner Penske, a triple amputee, who is still a formidable foe to fight. Understandably, the potential of peripherals will hold interest for him.

Still, the foundation of the series is the central sibling relationship, which Chloe Grace Moretz and Jack Reynor develop quite compellingly. They truly could pass for siblings and both convincingly sound and carry themselves like natives of border state hill country. Neither is a dumb hillbilly—quite the contrary, but they are definitely the products of their hardscrabble environment.

Moretz has immediate sibling rapport with Reynor, but she develops some intriguingly ambiguous, potentially romantic chemistry with Gary Carr’s Netherton over the course of the first six episodes (out of eight) provided for review. Carr definitely follows in the tradition of hardboiled dystopian anti-heroes (starting with Lemme Caution in Alphaville), but his Dickensian backstory adds a lot of complexity to the character, while illuminating the social divisions of future London.

Game of Spy, from Japan, on Prime

If agents of the Public Security Intelligence Agency’s secret Global Operations Service (GOS) fail, they will be disavowed. If that sounds familiar, wait till you hear the theme music. However, their impossible mission unfolds in a much more sophisticated and realistic geopolitical context. Yes, the main terrorist group hoping to destroy Tokyo is entirely fictional, but guess who is trying to exploit the situation for their own gain? Why that would be our friends in the CCP. Therefore, the scruffy band of GOS agents must always watch their backs in the first season of the Japanese series Game of Spy, which premieres today on Prime.

Takeru Hashiba is a bit absent-minded, but he fights like a bulldog. Masaharu Katsuki is the conservative family man, who is getting too old for this kind of service. They have both transferred from the general PSIA, but glamorous Rei Hiyama is a freelancer attached to their team. They meet in the secret basement of Shigenobu Kugayama’s fancy-dress costume store, where ex-hacker Atsuhiko Natsume provides the online support for their mission. They thought they had just finished their most recent assignment by foiling an attack on the Tokyo Skytree. Unfortunately, it was just a feint in a larger terrorist operation dubbed “Deus Gate.”

Technically, the attack will be carried out by Mundo, a radical terror cult headed by the messianic “Vince.” In two days, the plan to release a kaiju-sized strain of smallpox that would devastate Tokyo. However, the Chinese might have some relevant intel. They would be happy to trade it to the dirtbag Prime Minister, in exchange for all he knows about American embassy personnel in Japan and the scheduled movements of our Naval vessels. Yet, everything they dangle in front of the politicians, the GOS team can sleuth out on its own. Acting on it will be a different question, because of suspected betrayals from within.

Initially, the conflicting personalities of Hashiba and Katsuki make GOS look like it will be much more comedic than it turns out to be. They might grouse at each other, but their fights with the terrorists get decidedly brutal and bloody. Also, the portrayals of the politicians and senior government bureaucrats are cuttingly cynical. In addition to the sleazy PM, viewers will have reason at various times to question the loyalties of some top security personnel.

Paper Girls, on Prime

Remember how great the future looked in 1988? The music and movies were consistently fun and George H.W. Bush was poised to be elected president in a veritable landslide. So, how did the 2010s and 2020s turn out so badly? Maybe four newspaper deliverers will find out. They are about to be swept into a time-war in Stephany Folsom’s 8-episode Paper Girls, based on Brian K. Vaughan’s comics, which premieres today on Prime Video.

It is the morning after Halloween (but not for long), when many of the drunken teenaged troublemakers are still roaming the streets. Erin Tieng picked a heck of a first day to start her paper route. Tiffany Quilkin, a savvier paper girl helps show her the ropes. Soon, they meet up with tough-talking Mac Coyle and preppy-ish KJ Brandman, forming a temporary alliance to finish their deliveries together. However, the drunken bullies are not the only ones prowling around their suburban Cleveland neighborhood.

Fatefully, the four girls are caught up in a skirmish between future time-traveling revolutionaries, the STF (Standard Time Fighters), who want to prevent all the bad things from happening, and the “Old Watch,” the reactionaries fighting to protect their privileged positions (and maybe the integrity of the whole space-time continuum dealio). Disoriented after traveling through a worm-hole, the girls decide to hide out at Tieng’s home. They find she is still living there, but she did not turn out how the twelve-year-old would have hoped. As they navigate the future, other girls learn revelations about themselves from family members and in some cases, their future selves.

Folsom’s adaptation of Vaughan’s comics features some pretty intriguing time-travel twists. It is somewhat unusual to hear the old arguments against altering history so casually dismissed, but let’s be honest. The truth is the real, old-school Doctor Who would probably agree with the Old Watch. Nevertheless, the 1980s nostalgia always works and despite some themes of sexuality (brought on by observations of the girls future’s selves), Paper Girls is not annoyingly woke. In fact, the way Ronald Reagan acts as a sort of spirit guide for Tieng is kind of clever.

The battery of four directors (all veterans of episodic drama) keep action rolling along at a brisk pace. The generally shorter episode length (mostly around forty minutes) makes Paper Girls highly bingeable. However, it might be a mistake to end the first season without a greater sense of resolution. After all, it could suffer the same fate as Prime’s cancelled Night Sky (which is also a pretty good show, but we’ll never know its ultimate secrets).

The Terminal List, on Prime

According to the Navy SEAL Museum, 308 SEALs (and their predecessors, the Navy Underwater Demolition Team members) died in the service of their country. Understandably, Lt. Commander James Reece is quite upset to learn a shadowy cabal decided to add his men to that solemn list. Then they killed his family, as part of a plot to disgrace him. In response, Reece starts compiling his own roll of names in writer-showrunner David DiGilio’s eight-episode The Terminal List, which premieres today on Prime Video.

Reece’s team was due to be rotated back to the States, but they were not about to pass up one final mission. They thought they had the drop on an Iranian chemical weapons specialist, but instead, they were the ones who walked into an ambush. Only Reece and his close comrade Ernest “Boozer” Vickers survived the trap, but Vickers committed suicide soon after returning Stateside. Weirdly, he used his least favorite gun.

Despite suffering the lingering effects of considerable head trauma (which very definitely turns out to be serious), Reece starts questioning discrepancies in the official mission report and the circumstances of Boozer’s suicide. As a result, a hit team tries to take him out, in a manner that will look like suicide. They fail in that respect, but they had already murdered his wife Lauren and daughter Lucy, to frame him to look like a family annihilator. As you would expect, this makes Reece mad, so he starts sleuthing out who might be responsible.

At first, Reece’s only ally is his former SEAL colleague Ben Edwards, who now works at the CIA. However, he starts to trust journalist Katie Buranek. With their help, they start with the dodgy NCIS Agent whitewashing the attempt on his life and follow the trail up to the highest levels government.

There is plenty of SEAL-worthy action in DiGilio’s adaptation of Jack Carr’s novel, but it would have been more fun if the bad guys really were Iranian terrorists. Instead, we get yet another example of the villains being high-ranking American military officers and Big Pharma businessmen. Seriously, how different is this series’ worldview from that of AOC, if at all?

Still, it is clear DiGilio understand the military milieu.  It clearly helped that producer and star Chris Pratt made a concerted effort to hire veterans for positions throughout the crew. At this point, Pratt has instant screen-credibility playing a military officer and family man. We can easily believe him in the role of Reece and get the sense the he shares the values of military families, so we feel his pain and share his desire for payback. Constance Wu shrewdly manages to play up Buranek’s intelligence and minimizes her initial obnoxiousness, so viewers will really start to root for her too. We can also buy their relationship—it is really more of an alliance, not too close, but without any kneejerk antagonism.

JD Pardo and Christina Vidal bring some relatively rare grounded nuance to the series playing the FBI Special Agent and US Marshal pursuing Reece. However, the surprise turncoat-villain is blindingly obvious. Maybe the writing is more to blame than the thesp, but as soon as “X” enters the picture, any experienced thriller watcher will recognize the not-so-well-concealed crookedness.