HBO’s The White Lotus took us by surprise last summer… but it shouldn’t have. After all, Mike White crafted another uncomfortably hilarious series a few years back with Enlightened, and here, with a sparkling cast populating his acid-tongued comedy of manners, Lotus ended up garnering more buzz and awards attention than Enlightened ever did. Now it’s become an anthology, and with Season 2 arriving on HBO this Sunday at 9/8c (I’ve seen the first two episodes), the question is: Can White recapture the old magic with a new cast? Or is Season 2 destined to feel like a trip to somewhere we’ve already been before?
Thankfully, the new season does add a few intriguing wrinkles to the formula — enough to help us overlook some of its more repetitive tendencies. Season 2 whisks us away to another White Lotus luxury hotel, a beach resort in Sicily that welcomes a fresh crop of overly pampered travelers, including a mismatched pair of young married couples stuck together on vacation and a newly divorced dad trying to reconnect to his Italian roots with his elderly father and son in tow. There is one repeat guest, though: Jennifer Coolidge reprises her Emmy-winning role as spacey socialite Tanya, bringing along a fleet of luggage, her now-husband Greg (Jon Gries) and a frazzled new assistant, Portia, played winningly by Haley Lu Richardson.
Season 2 hits on a lot of the same themes as last season — rich people wallow in their privilege amid beautiful vistas, while the less fortunate scramble to keep them happy — but White goes heavy on the marital dissatisfaction this time, too. Aubrey Plaza and Will Sharpe play Ethan and Harper, a newly rich couple sharing a getaway with the cheerfully oblivious Cameron (Theo James) and Daphne (Meghann Fahy) while working through nagging issues of their own. The Sopranos vet Michael Imperioli plays the divorced dad Dominic, fighting to keep his family together while indulging in his own self-destructive appetites. Even lovebirds Tanya and Greg are now bickering, with the goofy spark they shared in Season 1 now snuffed out.
The new season is decidedly more amorous as well, with several characters on the prowl for sexual adventure. (We even see Tanya and Greg in the act, although naturally, it’s played for laughs.) But at the heart of The White Lotus is White’s keenly observant eye for awkward social interactions and ear for naturalistic dialogue, where the characters say just as much by what they’re not saying. Yes, Season 2 does bring back its murder-mystery element, opening on another dead body — and more than one this time — but through White’s emotionally insightful writing, the real fireworks come from within.
I’m torn on the return of Tanya: In many ways, it feels like a rerun and a distraction from the other storylines, but Coolidge is so much fun as Tanya that it’s hard to argue with it. (Her presence here is kind of like Season 2 in a nutshell: maybe unnecessary, but still enjoyable anyway.) The new cast is once again studded with gems, highlighted by Fahy as chipper trophy wife Daphne and F. Murray Abraham as Dominic’s dad Bert, a raunchy old codger who flirts with every girl he sees. Actually, a mischievous pair of Sicilian girls, Lucia and Mia (Simona Tabasco and Beatrice Granno), might be the most refreshing additions of all, bringing some vibrant local color to the proceedings. The hotel staff, though, isn’t as interesting this time; the resort’s tightly wound manager Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore) feels too broad for an otherwise subtle series.
Season 1 of The White Lotus was such a breath of fresh air that it’s slightly disappointing at first to see Season 2 playing many of the same notes, just in a different key. But two episodes in, it had already started to grow on me, as long-held secrets and hidden resentments between the guests began to crop up. The season also has an old-world elegance and a continental flair to it that contrasts nicely with last season’s lush Hawaiian dream, indicating that this anthology could keep tweaking its formula for years to come. Even if it repeats itself a bit, The White Lotus is still head and shoulders above the vast majority of TV shows, and with the way it cycles in great new actors and tailors itself to its surroundings, I certainly wouldn’t mind making a stay at The White Lotus an annual trip.
THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Season 2 of The White Lotus hits on a lot of the same themes as last season, but it still offers a terrific cast and insightful social satire.
Prime Video’s new series 
We pick up in the year 2032, where Chloe Grace Moretz stars as Flynne, a small-town girl with an ailing mom who makes fast cash along with her military vet brother Burton (Midsommar’s Jack Reynor) as highly skilled virtual gamers in shoot-’em-up war games. Burton then asks her to beta-test a futuristic gaming headset with weird metal prongs, and when Flynne puts it on, suddenly she’s riding a motorcycle through futuristic London, controlling it with her mind like a dream. It’s an exhilarating experience, and the money is life-changing, but soon, the game turns sinister — and then Flynne gets a call from a man a hundred years in the future, warning her that what’s she “playing” is not just a game.
The cast adds some much-needed humanity to all the futuristic action, too. Moretz has always seemed wise beyond her years (I loved watching her trade barbs with Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock), and she brings real pluck and fire to Flynne’s quest. Reynor has Stephen Amell looks and a Tim Riggins drawl as Flynne’s protective brother Burton. Westworld‘s Louis Hertham makes a solid villain as sadistic crime boss Corbell Pickett — but the scripts have him do a bit too much mustache-twirling, ruling over Flynne’s dusty small town like the bad guy from Road House.
I’ll say one thing about AMC’s new take on 
Fifty years after their first encounter, ageless vampire Louis, played by Game of Thrones‘ Jacob Anderson, tracks down jaded journalist Daniel Molloy to help him tell his life story. (This is the rare TV show where the framing device is nearly as interesting as the main story, thanks to pointed references to current events and Eric Bogosian’s crabby, cerebral turn as Molloy.) Louis’ story, steeped in sex and violence, takes us back to the brothels and illegal gambling halls of 1910 New Orleans — and his status as a Black man in the South is absolutely a factor here, too. He meets Lestat (Sam Reid), a honey-voiced French charmer who takes Louis under his wing and guides him through the ways of being a bloodsucker, from proper feeding and sleeping rituals to the mystical art of reading minds.
The initial thrill of being a vampire eventually wears off, though, giving way to more mundane concerns, and so too does this Interview With the Vampire. After that dazzling premiere, Louis’ story gets less interesting as it settles in, dragged down by his tedious family issues. Anderson does have serious fire and gravitas as Louis, making him a solid, sympathetic lead. But I’m a bit torn on Reid as Lestat: He has a hypnotic, otherworldly quality that’s sometimes mesmerizing… and other times ridiculous. (Note: The child vampire Claudia, played by Kirsten Dunst in the 1994 movie, doesn’t appear in the first three episodes, but casting an older teen in the role — Bailey Bass plays her here — does inevitably blunt some of the shock factor.)
If any show is ripe for a reboot, it’s 
We pick up 30 years after the original show’s Sam Beckett was lost in time, with physicist Ben Song (Raymond Lee) leading a team that’s restarting the Quantum Leap project. Through a mysterious mishap, Ben soon finds himself in the same position Sam did, leaping into random people’s lives and figuring out on the fly what he needs to do to move on. Ben also has a hologram companion like Sam had with Al — but this time, it’s Ben’s fiancée Addison (Caitlin Bassett), who’s also a fellow member of the Quantum Leap team. He can’t remember her, though, due to leap-induced amnesia, and that bittersweet twist gives the reboot an intriguing emotional wrinkle that the original series lacked.
The reboot also gives equal time to the team at home, with Ben backed up by a quippy group of scientists straight out of a crime lab from a CBS procedural. Their scenes are stuffed with breathless exposition and tangled technobabble, and we get more answers than we ever got from Sam and Al — but do we really want to know all that? We didn’t need to know why Sam Beckett was leaping all over the place; we just enjoyed watching him do it. The premiere sets up a number of mythology-laden mysteries for us to puzzle over, like just about every show has to do these days. But by trying to overexplain everything, it threatens to ruin what made Quantum Leap so fun in the first place.
Rachel Bloom — and it’s so great to see her on TV again after she shined so brightly on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend — stars as up-and-coming writer Hannah, who’s riding high after making a buzzy Sundance indie with a name I can’t print here. She decides she wants to bring back the cheesy, TGIF-style family sitcom Step Right Up with the original cast, but she wants to put a modern, edgy spin on it. (“Let’s remake something original!” an executive declares.) The sitcom’s stars, though, are all in pretty bad shape these days, and they haven’t spoken in years. But they reluctantly agree to reunite, with the new project reigniting old feuds… and flames.
Plus, Levitan has assembled an all-star cast of veteran comedians, so it’s a lot of fun just watching them bounce off each other. Keegan-Michael Key plays pretentious Yale-trained actor Reed, who ditched the original series for more challenging roles. (His most recent acting gig was a voice in a hemorrhoid ad, for the record.) Judy Greer plays sitcom mom Bree, who is not ready to be a sitcom grandma, and Calum Worthy, from American Vandal, is hilarious as grown-up child star Zack, who’s brimming with awkward enthusiasm. But the best dynamic here is between Paul Reiser’s hacky sitcom writer Gordon, who created the original Step Right Up, and Bloom’s Hannah, the impatient young upstart. They have a great combative energy on screen together, and there’s a surprising amount of nuance here, too: Gordon could’ve easily been painted as an out-of-touch buffoon, but they both get to score points in the generation-gap battle as they fight to make a TV show they can both live with.
Less than two weeks after HBO debuted its Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, Amazon is unveiling its own rabidly anticipated fantasy epic: 
Now I did see and enjoy those Peter Jackson movies, but I haven’t read any of the original J.R.R. Tolkien books, and at certain points while watching Rings of Power, I felt like I needed a cheat sheet to sort out all the new characters. Even if you can’t spell their names, though, their innate humanity still shines through. (Plus, the series helps us out by pointing out each scene’s setting on a giant scrolling map of Middle-earth, introducing us to the various lands and inhabitants.) There’s no Gandalf and no Frodo here — though there are Harfoots, a primitive form of proto-Hobbits — and no rings, at least not yet. But we do get to see younger versions of elf heroes Galadriel and Elrond from Lord of the Rings… because elves are immortal, you know.
The cast is mostly made up of little-known actors — though I did recognize alums from Homeland and Game of Thrones — but that just helps make the series all the more immersive, like we’re meeting them here for the first time. And all the money Amazon spent is certainly up there on the screen: Rings of Power delivers eye-popping fight scenes like a bloody tangle with an ice troll, an encounter with a terrifying sea beast known as The Worm and a harrowing orc fight that plays like a zombie attack from The Walking Dead. But it also wows us with visuals of great beauty, from impossibly green valleys to towering ice walls to glittering elf cities. The sweeping, ethereal musical score from Bear McCreary adds to the sense of grandeur, too. It’s almost worth watching just to marvel at sights like a sprawling dwarf metropolis built inside of a mountain. (Pro tip: Watch this on the biggest screen you can find.)
The premiere hits the ground running, with Dr. Alan Strauss (Carell), a therapist still reeling from the death of his wife a few months earlier, waking up to find himself chained to a bed in a sparse suburban basement. He’s being held captive by Sam (Domhnall Gleeson), a sullen young patient of his who wasn’t opening up much during their regular sessions. “I wasn’t getting anywhere in therapy,” Sam explains, but here, in his basement, he can tell the truth: “I have a compulsion to kill people.” He’s done it a few times already, in fact, and he wants Alan to help him stop before he does it again.
We get a few flashbacks to Alan’s earlier life — he’s estranged from his Orthodox Jewish son Ezra, played by Barry‘s Andrew Leeds — and some very questionable parenting choices from Sam’s mother, played by Linda Edmond. But The Patient is essentially a lean and mean two-hander, like a particularly bloody season of HBO’s In Treatment, and Carell and Gleeson are both excellent. Carell is a long way from Michael Scott here, sporting a thoughtful beard and head of gray hair. But we’ve seen him do stellar dramatic work in movies like Foxcatcher, and he plays Alan’s alternating fear and empathy as a delicate balancing act. Gleeson is better known for more cheerful roles like the sweet rom-com About Time, but he’s chilling as Sam: dead-eyed and ready to snap at any moment, twitching and fidgeting with barely contained rage.
HBO has to walk a very fine line with its new Game of Thrones prequel 
The prequel takes place two centuries before Game of Thrones, when Daenerys Targaryen’s ancestors ruled Westeros with a fleet of dragons at their disposal. (17 of them, to be exact.) King Viserys (Paddy Considine) sits on the Iron Throne — and his own ascent wasn’t without controversy — but when tragedy strikes, he is forced to choose an heir: his unruly brother Daemon (Doctor Who‘s Matt Smith) or his teen daughter Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock). His decision leads to serious rifts between friends and family members — and as we learned many times on Game of Thrones, the issue of who rules the realm is never quite settled, is it?
The cast is stocked with standout performances, highlighted by Alcock, who is captivating as young Rhaenyra. (It’s easy to peg her as a mini Daenerys, but Alcock brings a distinct inner fire all her own.) Smith is equal parts charm and cruelty as brooding brother Daemon, and Rhys Ifans gives off major Littlefinger vibes as Otto Hightower, the calculating Hand of the King. Considine is a tad overheated as Viserys, though, and Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke, who play the adult versions of Rhaenyra and Alicent and are being touted as the series’ stars, strangely aren’t even introduced until the sixth episode.
The 1992 movie 
We pick up in 1943, with Broad City‘s Abbi Jacobson (also a co-creator here) as Idaho bookworm Carson Shaw, who heads to Chicago to try out for a new women’s baseball league while her husband is overseas. On the way, she meets sassy glamour girl Greta (The Good Place standout D’Arcy Carden), along with an eclectic group of female ballplayers eager to prove themselves as they take the field for the Rockford Peaches. (The series follows a completely different set of characters than the original film, for the record.) The vivacious Greta stirs confusing urges in Carson, though, who pens a letter to her husband confessing that “there’s something wrong with me”…
Then there’s Max, a Black pitcher played by Chanté Adams who’s not allowed to try out for the girls’ league, even though she has a better arm than all of them. Her storyline elaborates on a memorable moment from the film when a Black woman impresses Dottie by throwing back a ball, and Adams is a star in the making. But too often, it’s as though Max is on a different show altogether, stuck in a parallel storyline that’s awkwardly wedged in alongside the Peaches’ journey. She can’t play ball with the rest of them, so instead, she gets silly subplots like helping her friend chase all over town looking for crab (huh?) while also fighting to keep her baseball dreams alive. Like so much of this version of A League of Their Own, it sounds good in theory, but it just doesn’t work.
