ScreenScribe

Barry | SoHo2, 8.00 Wednesday ☆☆☆☆ “Bill Hader and Alec Berg’s Emmy-winning Hollywood hitman comedy returns for a second season with fewer laughs and more pathos … Through its first three episodes of the season, Barry has simply become a half-hour drama, albeit one with occasional snarky jabs at the entertainment industry and a Chechen mobster […]

Ozark | Netflix, from Friday ➢➢ “Season 2 of the show—still tense and twisty, returning to Netflix on August 31—ramps up the inexcusably dumb behavior, raising stakes while still shielding the core family from any real consequences. Which is probably what keeps Mark Williams and Bill Dubuque’s series from truly becoming the highest-quality prestige television it […]

Good Girls | Netflix, from Tuesday ➢ “It’s a sleek, propulsive drama starring three misbehaving women lugging around stacks of cash and the occasional firearm; the cool criminality of it recalls TNT’s Good Behavior or USA’s Queen of the South, where the messy business of breaking the law is sweetened with a set of swanky […]

Shut Eye | Sky Box Sets, 7.30 Wednesday ➢ “Hulu’s new fortune teller/psychic/con man drama has fine performances from Jeffrey Donovan and KaDee Strickland, but no real identity … It’s no wonder that TV shows about con men or reformed con men have been a lucrative genre for years, with venerable hits like Psych and Leverage […]

The Son | Lightbox, from Saturday ➢ “A brash American epic filmed with cruel enervating tastefulness, The Son suggests a Faulkner novel adapted into a second-rate BBC drama. Adapted from Philipp Meyer’s 2013 book, AMC’s new series doesn’t lack ambition … I’m intrigued by The Son’s possibilities. The opening credits seem to promise an even more expansive […]

Snowfall | SoHo, 8.30 Sunday ➢ “The hook in this broadly conceived, thoroughly compelling Los Angeles crime epic is simple enough: It’s about the birth of crack cocaine, set in the summer of 1983 … Complicated? Yes, but once again an FX series artfully demonstrates the narrative discipline it takes to launch a story with multiple […]

Claws (TVNZ 2, 9.35 Monday) ➢ “Better in concept than execution (and higher in gloss than authenticity), TNT’s drama Claws follows the skeevier travails of an ambitious Florida nail-salon owner, Desna Simms (Niecy Nash), who, to finance her dreams of opening a fancier salon across town, helps launder the piles of cash coming out of […]

Mythbusters will screen for the first time in HD here when it airs 7.30 Thursdays on Prime from July 21. The channel is resuming the Discovery staple from episode two of season 15, in which Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman take on the opening scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark before trying to make an Indy whip. […]

When watching Netflix, do you “devour” or “savour” series? The streaming giant has just released research that reveals how subscribers around the world view its content. Using100 serialised TV series across more than 190 countries, Netflix’s “Binge Scale” found subscribers “blow through” shows like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead but are “captivated” by the […]

Spark this morning announced its customers would receive permanently free access to its TV streaming service Lightbox. This follows providing them with a year’s free subscription. Here’s the release in full: Spark has announced today it will be giving all of its home broadband customers a huge amount of extra value by shouting them a […]