![]() I wonder if anyone except the hardest of hard-core Euro TV fans are watching Sweden’s relentless crime thriller Snabba Cash, but this hidden gem on Netflix, now in its second season, is due for a breakout. Each episode is popcorn-light but beautifully done and just sophisticated enough to feel like an evening well spent. He has a small team of third-tier agents working for him, including the sprightly River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), whose grandfather (Jonathan Pryce) is a well-bred spymaster with a sterling reputation. Oldman is having a wonderful time as the disheveled, cranky, secretly brilliant Lamb, insulting everyone who comes near his office, nursing grudges, and holding his cards extremely close to the vest. The head of this satellite division, nicknamed Slough House (because it might as well be located in Slough), is Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), an unkempt, past-it field officer, who spends his days inside last-week’s clothes and a glass of whisky. Two seasons were released this year-both based on Mick Herron’s fleet-footed Slough House novels and featuring a collection of MI5 losers and misfits, intelligence officers who have made a mistake, failed to excel, or otherwise displeased their bosses, and have been shunted off to a forgotten London bureau to molder in irrelevancy. Le Carré lite? A thinking person’s Homeland? I kept trying to situate the tone and mood of the terrific espionage thriller on Apple TV+, Slow Horses, which is zippy, mordant, a little silly, bracingly violent in places, and extremely British in its celebration of irascibility, rainy London streets, geopolitical decline, and governing class contemptibility. You can still come for the sex and drugs (the new season has some startlingly hot moments), but you’ll stay for the way Industry nails post-lockdown anxiety, satirizes shifting workplace mores, and amps up power reversals at its fictional Pierpoint & Co, where everyone is busy trading moments of supremacy and control. There are new characters, higher narrative stakes, and the cast of young actors- Myha’la Herrold as Harper and Marisa Abela as Yasmin in particular-give, to my mind, the most exciting performances on television. ![]() It wasn’t a great show yet in Season 1-it had more mood than heart-but it was a very, very cool one, with a headlong energy that hit like a drug high. ![]() But the series was chillier and less attention-grabbing than Euphoria-and had none of the bombast of a one-percent show like, say, Billions. When Industry premiered in the fall of 2020, it felt like Euphoria at a London investment bank-a sex-and-drugs bacchanal full of attractive Gen Z junior bankers, all of whom were moving millions by day and their frequently naked bodies by night. ![]() A gripping and often surprisingly intimate portrait of power, pride, betrayal, and lust tearing a family in two (emphasis on lust in particular-the copious amounts of incest required a strong stomach) House of the Dragon’s greatest strength was also the stellar performances from its cast in particular, Emma D’Arcy, whose blazingly furious stare in the show’s final scene is still seared in my memory two months later.-L.H. But with House of the Dragon-set 200 years before the events of the original series, and charting the family conflicts and palace intrigue leading up to the collapse of the Targaryen dynasty-the show’s transportive magic returned in full, fiery force, this time as a Greek tragedy with added dragons. It’s safe to say that Game of Thrones fans were approaching the possibility of returning to Westeros this year with a fair degree of skepticism, after the blockbuster fantasy epic reached a disappointing conclusion back in 2017. The Game of Thrones spin-off, House of the Dragon, and Amazon Prime Video’s lavish new Lord of the Rings prequel The Rings of Power offered fantastical escape.Įmma D’Arcy and Matt Smith in House of the Dragon. To others, it was the welcome return of a gilded modern classic. To some, The Crown felt like homework-albeit with a slanted take on history and a far-too-handsome Prince Charles. Who knew that our fractured attention could be so collectively captured by Sunday night entertainment? It’s enough to revive a small-screen enthusiast’s waning attention span.īut even if la dolce not-so-vita wasn’t your cup of tea, there was an abundance of quality entertainment to be consumed on television and laptop screens this year, from critically acclaimed half-hour comedies like ABC’s Abbott Elementary, to the return of HBO favorites including My Brilliant Friend, Industry, and Barry, and brand new word-of-mouth hits ( Yellowjackets, The Bear). The year 2022 saw the return of the water cooler moment (if such a thing exists in our post-pandemic, hybrid work lives), with The White Lotus sending the chattering classes (and their TikTok) equivalents) into a collective frenzy of whodunnit enthusiasms on Mondays.
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