Category: Reviews

To be fair, the 2022 Oscars had a very low bar to clear.

This year’s ceremony had nowhere to go but up, honestly: Last year’s Oscars were a trainwreck (one that took place at a train station, ironically) plagued by sluggish pacing and a humorless tone. Viewership cratered, too, with an all-time low of 10.4 million total viewers — less than half of the previous low mark. This year, though, with first-time producer Will Packer at the helm, the Oscars was able to return to its home turf at L.A.’s Dolby Theatre and restore some measure of its former glitz and glamour, thanks to falling COVID numbers. And yes, this Oscars ceremony did easily clear that low bar by getting back to what the Oscars does best: showcasing the very best of cinema and playing host to some very memorable moments. (Thank you, Will Smith.)

It kicked off with a majestic performance from Beyoncé of her nominated song “Be Alive” from King Richard, dressed in tennis-ball yellow on a Compton tennis court. But setting the number outside the theater robbed it of some of its power. (It felt more Grammys than Oscars.) Then after an overly sweaty hype-up from DJ Khaled — why was he there again? — hosts Amy Schumer, Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes came out for a shared monologue. They did get off a few good zingers, but the format was a little awkward, with the trio waiting for their turn to deliver the next punchline. Schumer was really strong, though, in what I guess we could call a secondary monologue (?) filled with stinging burns that kind of made me wish she got the gig all to herself. (Hall’s thirsty bit calling up handsome celebs for a backstage “COVID test,” meanwhile, landed with a thud.)

I was a little worried about how, let’s say, eclectic this year’s Oscars would be when the opening list of the night’s celebrities went straight from Tony Hawk to H.E.R. to Anthony Hopkins. It had an air of throwing just about everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. (Really, who better to introduce a James Bond tribute than Hawk, Kelly Slater and Shaun White?) Piling speeches on top of clip packages on top of pre-taped comedy bits made for a frantic pace at times, and the clear eagerness to reach a wider audience reeked of desperation, like bringing on K-pop superstars BTS to talk about Disney movies and announcing the results of a Twitter poll for the top five cheer-worthy movie moments of all time. Um, OK…?

But aside from a few odd choices, the ceremony thankfully went back to basics for the most part, with actual clips from the nominated performances (what a refreshing change!) and montages celebrating decades of Hollywood history, including a fittingly grand tribute to The Godfather. Plus, the broadcast had a cozy feel, with nominees seated in Golden Globes-style chairs and tables right up front, and the intimate close-ups during the acceptance speeches really captured the emotion in the room. CODA star Troy Kotsur’s speech, with Minari winner Yuh-Jung Youn by his side, was an adorable highlight… and hey, it doesn’t get much more unscripted than Will Smith slapping the hell out of Chris Rock for making fun of his wife! That shocker was an all-time awards show moment and turned Smith’s emotional acceptance speech into riveting, must-see TV.

One big change this year: A full third (!) of this year’s Oscar categories — eight of 23 — were handed out before the show and pre-taped, angering many in the industry who felt like the move diminished vital filmmaking elements like editing and score. But then they went ahead and announced those categories on the live show anyway and showed the winners’ speeches, so the much-derided move didn’t even save all that much air time! Was it even worth it, then, to annoy half of Hollywood just to shave a minute or two off the (still longer than last year!) running time? I say scrap it and bring back the full show next year.

No, these Oscars weren’t perfect, but let’s be honest: The Oscars are never perfect. At their best, they entertain us enough to make up for the inevitable groaners and give us a few timeless moments while reminding us why we love the movies in the first place. This year’s wild, freewheeling ceremony hit all those marks… and made it fun to watch the Oscars again.

Now it’s your turn: Give this year’s Oscars a grade in our poll, and hit the comments below to share your thoughts.

I have to tell you right up front: I may be too biased to do a fair review here. You see, I grew up an L.A. Lakers fan, smack dab in the middle of the “Showtime” era depicted in HBO’s new docudrama Winning Time (debuting this Sunday at 9/8c; I’ve seen the first four episodes). This is the team that made me fall in love with basketball, and to Winning Time‘s credit, it actually manages to capture the joy and exhilaration of watching those great Laker teams. Yes, it’s significantly overstuffed and surprisingly crude, and I do wonder if non-sports fans will get into it, but for me, it’s a hell of a fun ride. (A lot more fun than watching the current Lakers season, I can tell you that.)

It’s hard to remember now, after all the championships, but the Lakers were lovable losers once, always coming up short to their hated rivals the Boston Celtics. Winning Time picks up in the late ’70s, with flashy new team owner Jerry Buss determined to turn the Lakers into winners, and into a box office attraction as well. As played by John C. Reilly here, Buss is a cocky sleazeball, all chest hair and gold medallions, with a bevy of women on his arm. His top-to-bottom makeover of the Lakers, starting with the drafting of superstar Magic Johnson, turns into a classic sports story, with a ragtag band of misfits coming together to win it all, claiming five NBA titles in the ’80s — and, along with Larry Bird’s Celtics, injecting new life into a struggling league that was in serious danger of folding altogether.

Winning Time feels like a freewheeling party from that era: breezily paced, with lots of laughs and characters breaking the fourth wall to directly address the camera. (Adam McKay is an executive producer and directs the pilot, and the show’s style recalls his financial crisis explainer The Big Short.) The tone is decidedly old-fashioned, too, with gratuitous nudity and off-color humor that’s straight from the swinging ’70s. The visuals follow suit, with grainy 16-millimeter footage spliced into scenes alongside crisp HD images to create a vintage vibe. Plus, the funk soundtrack practically struts, with dramatic scenes scored by a moody synthesizer.

The basketball scenes crackle with kinetic energy as the Lakers adopt a fast-paced, run-and-gun style of play that revolutionizes the game. But the action here mostly takes place off the court. (We don’t actually see the Lakers play until the fourth episode.) Winning Time really gets into the weeds of basketball strategy and front office moves, painstakingly showing how a great team is built. It also dips its toes into salacious waters, shining a light on the rampant sex, drugs and fighting that accompanied the Lakers’ rise. (With sexy Laker Girls dancers and celebrities sitting courtside, Buss aimed to make Lakers games into a cross between Disneyland, the Playboy Mansion and the Oscars.) But it bites off more than it can chew by taking on too many characters. We follow more than a dozen characters through a flurry of flashbacks and strange psychological detours, explaining how this parade of damaged men came to be so damaged. (It’s ten episodes, but it could’ve easily be six, or even four.) Its dynamic style and the intriguing personalities involved help it rise above all of that, though.

Reilly is terrific as Buss, gliding through L.A. like a king while also letting us know that underneath all the flash, he’s a formidable businessman. (McKay was absolutely right to cast him over Will Ferrell, by the way.) It’s almost impossible to find someone as effervescent as the real Magic Johnson, but newcomer Quincy Isaiah comes damn close — he’s got the smile and the swagger. And there are great actors in small roles all over the place here: Michael Chiklis as legendary Celtics executive Red Auerbach, Sally Field as Jerry Buss’ skeptical mother, Tracy Letts as hard-ass coach Jack McKinney. Even when the sheer number of characters becomes overwhelming, the actors make it work with sharply observed performances.

So will a sports novice enjoy Winning Time? I can’t say for sure. I can see basketball junkies devouring this like they did ESPN’s recent Chicago Bulls doc The Last Dance, as a meaty slice of a bygone era in the NBA, but all the hoops jargon could be a turn-off for non-fans. The drama here goes beyond the basketball court, though, showing how fresh thinking can revitalize an industry. And those Laker teams were famous for putting on a show and turning skeptics into fans, so maybe Winning Time can do the same on TV. When it’s hitting on all cylinders, it feels just like watching those ’80s Lakers run up and down the court — and that’s the highest compliment I can give it.

THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Sports fans will have a ball with HBO’s Winning Time, a wild, crude chronicle of the L.A. Lakers’ rise to NBA dominance.

Shonda Rhimes already made her Netflix debut with Bridgerton, but her new true crime drama Inventing Anna — debuting this Friday; I’ve seen the first four episodes — feels even more Shonda-y than that. (She’s the series creator this time and wrote the pilot.) It’s a brisk, glamorous crime story that bears several of Rhimes’ hallmarks, along with several Scandal alums in the cast. It’s maybe too glamorous at times and does suffer a bit from streaming bloat, but it’s an engaging watch, powered by a ferociously weird, utterly fascinating lead performance from Julia Garner.

She plays infamous con artist Anna Delvey, a fake German heiress charged with scamming big money out of New York City’s elite upper crust. We learn the depths of her deception thanks to the intrepid reporting of Vivian (Veep‘s Anna Chlumsky), a pregnant journalist who knows there’s a story here and hits the pavement hoping for an exclusive interview with Anna. After a few prison visits while she awaits trial, Anna starts confiding in Vivian, claiming she’s innocent, and unspools the twisted tale of how she infiltrated the highest of high society just on charm and bluster.

It’s a great story, and in Garner’s hands, Anna is an instantly great TV character: a charismatic villain and a shape-shifting chameleon, adapting to whatever room she’s in. She’s blunt, bordering on rude (she asks Vivian, “Are you pregnant, or are you just so very, very fat?”), and endlessly obsessed with status. (She can’t understand why Vivian won’t apply for a media prison visit: “It’s VIP.”) Her accent is as over the top as she is: a snooty, affected creation that’s half German, half Russian and all vocal fry. She spouts off brash one-liners like “Anna Delvey is a masterpiece, bitches!” It’s a risky choice for Garner, an impressive young actor who already has two Emmys on her mantel from Ozark, but it pays off. She’s mesmerizing, and she singlehandedly makes this series worth watching with a performance that’s destined to be parodied and imitated for years to come.

The flashbacks to Anna’s glory days have a seductive, glitzy energy, as she happily uses other people’s money to lounge around on yachts, jet off to Ibiza and sip Champagne in nightclubs and art galleries. Through them, we meet Anna’s associates/stepping stones, including her tech developer boyfriend Chase (What/If‘s Saamer Usmani) and old money socialite Nora (Rhimes regular Kate Burton, who’s joined by Scandal vets Jeff Perry and Katie Lowes). The obscene displays of wealth are intoxicating, and even Vivian gets caught up in it. The series is surprisingly sympathetic to Anna, too, painting her at times as a #YasQueen girl boss — even as it shows she’s also a liar and a thief. She bluffs her way onto a private jet without paying and even disguises her voice (!) to pose as a German financier verifying her vast family wealth.

Scandal fans will recognize Rhimes’ signature verve and crackle in all of this: the pulsing soundtrack (one song’s chorus is actually “Manifest that s—t”), the cast full of hot young professionals and the combative dialogue that almost qualifies as a sport. Inventing Anna also serves as a love letter to old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground journalism, with Anna doggedly chasing down leads and hitting frustrating dead ends. It’s almost a tabloid version of All the President’s Men, updated for the social media age; instead of just working the phones, Vivian tracks Anna’s movements through her Instagram posts. But don’t worry: She still has an old-school conspiracy board, with string on it and everything.

Like Anna herself, though, Inventing Anna becomes a victim of its own excess. The episodes are all at least an hour long, some topping 75 or 80 minutes, and the narrative gets bloated at times, with too many side characters fighting for attention. (The legal scenes are pedestrian and sluggish, but at least it’s fun to see Succession‘s Arian Moayed, aka Stewy, as Anna’s defense attorney — and married to his Succession costar Caitlin FitzGerald.) In fact, any time Garner’s Anna is off screen, the series loses a bit of steam. I suppose it’s inevitable that a story about a phony heiress feels a little hollow… but it’s a fun ride while it lasts.

THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Inventing Anna brings the Anna Delvey saga to life in a glitzy, Shonda-y crime story with a great performance from Julia Garner.

Downton Abbey was such a resounding hit for PBS — a second movie spinoff debuts in theaters later this year — that it’s understandable TV networks would try to recreate that magic. So now we get The Gilded Age, a new HBO historical drama from Downton creator Julian Fellowes that’s also rich with luxurious interiors and finely crafted period costumes. (If you like to gawk at chandeliers, this is the show for you.) Unfortunately, the storytelling isn’t as rich, plagued by dull plotting and broadly drawn characters. The end result feels cynically calibrated to hit all the usual Downton notes… but doesn’t sound nearly as good.

The Gilded Age — premiering this Monday, Jan. 24 at 9/8c; I’ve seen the first four episodes — is set in New York City in 1882, back when carriage horses trotted across unpaved dirt roads and flocks of sheep grazed in Central Park. This is the world of Edith Wharton, of ornate gowns and lush garden parties, and the period details are indeed exquisite. (Emmy nominations for production design and costumes are an absolute cinch.) It’s here we meet young Marian Brook, who moves from Pennsylvania to New York to live with her rich aunts Agnes and Ada (Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon) after her father dies. We also meet the aunts’ upwardly mobile neighbors, railroad tycoon George Russell (Morgan Spector) and his wife Bertha (Carrie Coon), who are eager to fit in but are looked down on as (gasp) “new money.”

Agnes has a cutting wit, firing off snooty one-liners like Downton‘s Dowager Countess, and Baranski is an acid-dipped treat, her voice dripping with sarcasm and contempt. But apart from her, the performances are stiff and overly mannered. The Gilded Age is all a bit bland and stilted, like staring at beautiful wallpaper. Marian (played by newcomer Louisa Jacobson, another of Meryl Streep’s daughters) makes for a dull lead character, too noble to be interesting. Nixon’s Aunt Ada is dopey and sickeningly sweet, verging on brain-dead. Coon isn’t given much to play beyond various shades of “mildly annoyed.” And all the heroes and villains are very clearly delineated, with no room for nuance or complexity… or humanity, even.

Maybe there’s no room because this show tries to juggle way too many characters. There are a dozen main cast members listed in the opening credits, and at least a dozen more with prominent speaking roles. So we only have time for the bare minimum of characterization beyond the familiar tropes: the Wide-Eyed Newcomer, the Scheming Servant. This show follows the formula of a classy costume drama so closely, it verges on self-parody; it’s like a fake TV show that a character on another TV show would watch. There is one character who doesn’t fit the mold — Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), a Black writer who Marian befriends on the train to New York — but the show’s gentle treatment of her feels naïve and anachronistic. Would a stubborn snob like Agnes, who says things like “I’m opposed to her tribe” and “He is not fit to be one of your circle,” really welcome a Black woman to live in her house and work for her? She doesn’t like anyone!

There are some fun historical touches, like when two servants go see an early stop-motion film and duck out of the way of the train coming at them on screen. But the 80-minute (!) series premiere is a true test of one’s patience… especially since so little happens in it. The story bounces between tedious boardroom dealings — railroad deals and stock manipulation do not make for exciting television — and weepy melodrama. We do get a twist that might have been shocking, if it weren’t directly lifted from Downton. And just in case we missed the subtext, the story’s themes are spoken aloud by the characters. (“If you are the future, they must be the past.”) The Gilded Age is a feast for the eyes, and its aesthetic pleasures are undeniable — but those are the only pleasures to be found here.

THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: HBO’s The Gilded Age boasts gorgeous sets and costumes, but they’re spoiled by dull plotting and broadly drawn characters.

The producers of Hulu’s How I Met Your Father would really like you to not call it a reboot. Instead, they say, it’s a sequel to CBS’ long-running sitcom How I Met Your Mother — and of course, they’d like it to run for nine seasons, too. But having seen the first four episodes (premiering next Tuesday, Jan. 18), I have to say it: This is a reboot! Yes, there are a few passing connections to the original series I’m not allowed to reveal yet, but they’re just superficial, at least so far. This is essentially a new take on the same story… and unfortunately, one that doesn’t quite live up to the original.

It’s hard to remember now, after that dumpster fire of a series finale, but How I Met Your Mother was actually a pretty good show for most of its run, putting a few new touches on the standard sitcom formula and creating something both fresh and familiar. It helped that its core cast was so talented, and How I Met Your Father boasts a talented cast of young actors, too. But the material doesn’t rise to their level. It lacks the sharp wit that made How I Met Your Mother so appealing, and it relies too heavily on sentimental schmaltz that doesn’t feel earned.

Hilary Duff stars as photographer Sophie, who, in flash-forwards to the year 2050 (where she’s played by Kim Cattrall), is telling her off-screen son “the unabridged version” of how she met his father… with all “the sexy bits” included. Back in present day, Sophie is still single and just wants to meet the right guy already. In the premiere, she meets a lot of them, including her Uber driver Jesse (GLOW‘s Christopher Lowell), whose rejected marriage proposal went viral, and his pal Sid (God Friended Me‘s Suraj Sharma), who owns a bar that serves as a convenient hangout for the crew.

Duff knows the rhythms of TV comedy well and serves as a sturdy anchor for this ensemble, which also features Francia Raisa (grown-ish) as Sophie’s wild-child roommate Valentina and Tien Tran as Jesse’s lesbian sister Ellen, who moved to New York from Iowa “to ask out Kate McKinnon.” The cast is plenty likable, but the punchlines they’re given are lame, with lots of tired Tinder jokes, and the laugh track is loud and distracting. (That’s one aspect of HIMYM they could’ve left in the past.) How I Met Your Father has a real CBS sitcom feel to it, somehow, despite being on a streaming service. It does get a lot racier than HIMYM, though, with a sex toy mishap that would never play on CBS.

It all makes sense that you learn that creators Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger hail from This Is Us: They lay it on thick, giving the characters big emotional monologues set to strummy Bon Iver music. (HIMYM got serious at times, too, but they earned it over time. The ratio of comedy to drama here is just out of whack.) Plus, the mystery of who the father of Sophie’s kid is isn’t all that compelling — especially when we know how torturously long it got dragged out the first time around. Who wants to go through that again?

By the fourth episode, How I Met Your Father does start to find its footing and show glimmers of promise; Josh Peck is a nice addition to the cast as vice-principal Drew, another possible contender for Sophie’s heart. And there are times when the cast’s considerable charms make the whole thing work. But at this rate, we may have to wait (for it) a long time before it becomes legendary.

THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Hulu’s How I Met Your Father has a strong cast, but lame jokes and an excess of schmaltz make it fall short of the original.

Are network sitcoms making a comeback? Not too long ago, things looked dire for the genre — NBC didn’t even bother to put a single comedy on its fall primetime lineup — but CBS’ Ghosts, ABC’s Abbott Elementary and NBC’s Grand Crew have proven to be reliable sources of laughs already this season. And that hot streak continues with Fox’s newcomer Pivoting (premiering this Sunday at 8:30/7:30c; I’ve seen the first three episodes), a low-key hangout comedy bolstered by a very strong trio of lead actresses and an irreverent energy that helps lighten up a very heavy topic.

The story centers on Amy (Eliza Coupe), Jodie (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Sarah (Maggie Q), three childhood pals whose close friend just died after a brief illness, and her death makes all three of them rethink their lives and plunge headfirst into big changes. Amy, a workaholic morning show producer, dials things back at work to spend more time with her kids; Sarah, a successful doctor, up and quits to pursue a more fulfilling career bagging groceries; and Jodie, a bored mom trapped in a bad marriage, indulges in a flirtation with her trainer. But yeah, their big epiphanies wear off pretty quickly, and they realize that completely revamping their lives is actually a lot of work.

This is a tricky tone to pull off, finding the comedy in such a brutal tragedy, but showrunner Liz Astrof (2 Broke Girls) manages to squeeze laughs out of the grieving process with a chaotic, quick-witted tone and heavy doses of gallows humor. The three ladies hold a wine-soaked makeshift memorial at their friend’s gravesite… and then realize they’re whooping it up at the wrong grave. (It’s kinda like A Million Little Things, but a lot funnier.) The show allows these women to be substantially flawed and messy, and it resists the urge to get too mopey and maudlin. Plus, their banter is fun and snappy, in the vein of Coupe’s Happy Endings. If you’re still holding out hope for a Happy Endings revival one day — like I am — this might be the next best thing while we wait.

The three leads have excellent chemistry right off the bat, too: They feel like old friends, and we can sense their years of shared memories as they affectionately roast each other. Coupe is fully back in Jane-from-Happy Endings mode here, and it’s a glorious thing to behold. She’s backed up by two TV drama veterans who show they have a flair for comedy: Goodwin, from Once Upon a Time and Big Love, turns Jodie from a potentially whiny character into maybe the most relatable of the bunch, and Maggie Q, from Designated Survivor and Nikita, brings a solid deadpan appeal to Sarah as she applies her hard-charging, Type A personality to the art of grocery bagging. Tommy Dewey is solid, too, as Amy’s somewhat supportive hubby Henry.

Like the ladies’ short-lived life changes, I’m sure that Pivoting will quickly shake off its initial premise in the weeks to come and just be about three friends hanging out — and that’s just fine with me. After all, isn’t that the key to a good TV comedy? Just a bunch of people we want to hang out with each week, no matter what the premise is? Pivoting has that already, which puts it way ahead of the game, and I’ll happily stick around to see where these ladies’ new lease on life takes them.

THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Armed with a great cast and snappy banter, Fox’s Pivoting puts an appealingly light twist on some heavy subject matter.

I wasn’t quite expecting this, and you probably were not either. But HBO Max’s Peacemaker series is a bit of a blast, considering how polarizing its title character proved to be in 2021’s The Suicide Squad, of which it is spun off.

Premiering Thursday, Jan. 13 with the first three of eight episodes (I previewed five), the antihero-centered superhero series in large part asks: Can the unique style of comic book fare that filmmaker James Gunn turns out sustain itself on an episodic basis, spanning eight-ish total hours?

The answer is… pretty much, though your experience may vary depending on how you personally feel about what Peacemaker aka Chris Smith (winningly played by John Cena) did, and who he killed, on the big screen. (No spoilers here, but rest assured that the HBO Max series series freely flashes back to those divisive moments.)

Peacemaker picks up not long after the events of The Suicide Squad‘s second end credits scene, in which Cena’s character — assumed dead after such-and-such— is revealed to be not just alive but needed to “save the f–king world, that’s all,” per ARGUS agent Emilia Harcourt (played by Jennifer Holland).

The exact nature of that world-saving is slowly parsed out over the first several episodes, but it has to do with targets dubbed “butterflies.” Peacemaker of course scoffs at that silly moniker — much the same way that ARGUS agents Harcourt (again played by Holland), John Economos (The Suicide Squad‘s Steve Agee), Clemson Murn (Designated Survivor‘s Chukwudi Iwuji) and new recruit Leota Adebayo (Orange Is the New Black‘s Danielle Brooks) gleefully guffaw at his choice of garish get-up.

Filmmaker Gunn wrote all eight episodes and directed five (including the premiere), and his no-holds-barred style is on full display here. The language can get downright raunchy, the insults are crude (and at times racist), the violence is messy, and skin (other than Cena’s jacked torso) is occasionally on display. That makes for a rolicking premiere that mixes a dash of exposition with copious amounts of quips and action. That energy, though, doesn’t (and probably simply can’t) hold up across multiple episodes. As such, the slower, quieter moments here can feel very slow and very quiet, when what you are more likely wanting from this affair is, as in a midseason episode, a rat-a-tat-tat round of ribald banter as the team travels in the back of a van (and which is further escalated by the very accidental sharing of a sexted photo).

Peacemaker is here in part to relay the backstory of Chris Smith’s chrome-helmeted alter ego, a “vainglorious man who believes in peace at any cost — no matter how many people he has to kill to get it.” To that end, Robert Patrick (Scorpion) plays Chris’ father, Auggie, a white supremacist who finds nothing to celebrate about his son’s life choices. It’s in these scenes, where Chris regularly received Dad’s full-throated disapproval, that we get glimpses at the character’s softer side (as well as peeks inside their house’s improbably expansive secret armory). Luckily, the storyline finds a way to not only entangle the irascible, bigoted Chris, but potentially give him a lot more to do down the road.

On the “work” front, Peacemaker’s pals are a bit hit or miss. Holland is great as the requisite, icy-cold badass (yes, she gets one of those bar scenes that shows why you shouldn’t be too aggressive in buying her a drink), and she also can chop it up good when the goings get quippy. She and Patrick, meanwhile, are the ones to watch in the very entertaining, song-and-dance opening credits set to Wig Wam’s “Do Ya Wanna Taste It.”

Agee’s Economos, another carryover from The Suicide Squad, is a geeky galoot type we have seen too often before, though Peacemaker’s repeated targeting of him with an inane nickname somehow keeps being funny. As Murn (Amanda Waller’s No. 1), Iwuji is just the right degree of quietly inscrutable, and Brooks pairs nicely with Cena as the one colleague with a potential soft spot for the muscular meathead — even though he is, on paper, -ist and -phobic about so much that defines her. (Brooks’ Adebayo also is given the most interior life of the secondary characters, and it contains at least one surprise that I, at least, won’t be revealing here.)

Perhaps the biggest, most interesting casting surprise here is Freddie Stroma as Adrian Chase aka Vigilante, a comic book character who has been reconceived here as… well, as he never has been before. A kill-happy and sometimes whiny dork, he is as far removed as can be from the Dashing Hunk Persona that Stroma previously honed on UnREAL and Bridgerton, and because of that his scenes with his hero, Peacemaker, are a reliable hoot.

As a part of whatever DC is calling its extended movie and TV universe these days, Peacemaker also isn’t shy about directing some of its barbs at its world’s top-shelf heroes, as Chris regularly dishes embarrassing dirt on the likes of Aquaman, Superman and Batman (at least based on what Google has told him). Those wink-winks, though, don’t compare to the genuine comedy generated by larger team debates about, say, why the Riverdale kids can’t be pinned for an Episode 1 murder, and which enjoy extended cuts in end credits excerpts.

THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Peacemaker, if you can stomach the title character’s lunkheaded views (and temporarily forgive if not forget his actions in The Suicide Squad), is a lot of James Gunn fun.

Warning: This review contains spoilers from Thursday’s And Just Like That… premiere.

As a longtime Sex and the City fan — I even watch the butchered and bleeped reruns they air on E! — I was a little skeptical when HBO Max’s revival And Just Like That… was first announced. The movies weren’t great, the ladies are in their mid-50s now and Kim Cattrall isn’t even involved. So it’s a relief to inform you that And Just Like That… — the first two episodes are now streaming; I’ve seen the first four — does a decent job of bringing Sex and the City into the modern era, infusing it with new blood and finding fresh layers within its classic characters. There are a few sticking points here and there that will annoy fans (like me), but the mere fact that this series isn’t Sex and the City 2-level awful, even with its core foursome fractured, is a victory to celebrate.

And Just Like That… picks up in a post-pandemic New York, with Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) definitely older — Miranda’s signature red hair is now gray — but still close friends. The absence of Cattrall’s Samantha Jones, though, is glaring. (We’re told that Samantha has moved to London and doesn’t speak with the other girls anymore over a perceived slight, which doesn’t fit with the fiercely loyal Samantha we know.) Samantha was a bold trailblazer of sex positivity who gave the original series its sassy edge, and that edge is sorely missing here. The sex talk is minimal this time around, with a tone that’s closer to Sex and the City‘s later seasons — more relationship dramedy than raunchy sex comedy. (The episodes are around 45 minutes now, too, instead of the original’s half-hour, adding to the dramatic feel.)

We’re also introduced to a host of new characters… with some fitting in better than others. It’s clear that showrunner Michael Patrick King, who shepherded Sex and the City through its glory years, wants to atone for the original show’s objectively terrible track record on diversity. (As he should!) But the sheer number of new faces threatens to overwhelm the core characters at first. We meet Charlotte’s Black mom friend Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker) and Miranda’s Black law professor Nya (Karen Pittman) and Carrie’s queer podcast host Che (Sara Ramirez) all in the premiere, and it’s a bit dizzying. At times, it almost feels like a spinoff, or Sex and the City: The New Class. The writing can still be clumsy when it comes to race and sexuality, but to the writers’ credit, they do show Carrie and company grappling with these issues and often fumbling them. It’s not always pretty, but it’s encouraging that they at least acknowledge how not pretty it is.

And then there’s Mr. Big. Carrie is still with her beloved hubby when the show begins, but their relationship takes a sharp turn in the premiere, which sends shockwaves through the whole season. It’s a big storytelling swing, to be sure, but the mournful reaction to it from the other characters rings a little hollow. It also traces a lot of the same beats that Carrie went through in the first Sex and the City movie when Big left her at the altar. The twist just adds to the somber tone of And Just Like That…, with precious few flashes of the wit and verve of the original. (Even the peppy theme song is muted.)

Mostly, though, it’s just nice to spend time with Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda again. The actresses step right back into their roles, and their banter is just as quippy and zippy as ever. Though the new characters’ introductions border on awkward, Ramirez and fellow new addition Sarita Choudhury, who plays Carrie’s realtor Seema, bring a refreshing energy to the show. Plus, Miranda’s story takes an intriguing turn in Episode 3 that offers real promise as a storyline and makes us rethink everything we thought we knew about her. No, this is not the classic Sex and the City we first fell in love with… but what it is now isn’t bad, either.

THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: The Sex and the City ladies are back with And Just Like That…, a more muted but ultimately enjoyable new take on the original.