📺 Black Mirror returns & Jon Hamm is a leading man again
Reviews of 'Your Friends & Neighbors' (Apple TV+) and 'Pulse' (Netflix), plus our 10 favorite Black Mirror episodes
Hi! The White Lotus and Severance may have just wrapped their seasons, but the next few days are still big for your Double Take hosts: tonight brings both the season finale of The Pitt and the return of Hacks, and The Last of Us returns Sunday. Starting next week, we’ll be breaking down new episodes of TLOU with our game expert, Falon—so stay tuned for those! Plus, Black Mirror just dropped new episodes, so today we’re sharing our picks for the 10 best installments from the show’s unsettling oeuvre.
In today’s edition:
Weekly Watchlist
Our 10 Favorite Episodes of Black Mirror
Your Friends & Neighbors (Apple TV+)
Pulse (Netflix)
— Jenni Cullen and Jess Spoll
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Below is a selection of new shows and movies premiering this week on streaming. Our unabridged list of April releases, including 4 movies premiering in theaters this week is available for premium subscribers.
G20 (Movie) — Viola Davis stars in this straight-to-Prime Video movie as a U.S. President who must defend her family, fellow leaders, and the world when the G20 summit in Cape Town is taken over by terrorists.
Watch on Prime Video: April 10Black Mirror (Season 7) — The Emmy Award winning dystopian anthology returns with six twisted tales that explore technology's impact on human nature, blending horror, satire, and existential dread.
Watch on Netflix: April 10 (all 6 episodes)Hacks (Season 4) — Deborah Vance and Ava Daniels are back to the cutthroat world of comedy pitted against each other.
Watch on Max: April 10 (2 of 10 episodes, then weekly)North of North (Season 1) — This new Arctic comedy follows a young Inuk mother seeking to rebuild her life after a divorce in small-town Nunavut.
Watch on Netflix: April 10 (all 8 episodes)Your Friends & Neighbors (Season 1) — Jon Hamm stars as a former hedge fund manager who loses his job and resorts to burglary to maintain his family’s cushy lifestyle.
Watch on Apple TV+: April 11 (2 of 9 episodes, then weekly)Doctor Who (Series 15) — Ncuti Gatwa returns as the Fifteenth Doctor, an incarnation of the alien Time Lord who travels through time and space. (Referred to as “Season 2” in marketing following the acquisition of Doctor Who's international broadcasting rights by Disney+)
Watch on Disney+: April 12 (1 of 8 episodes, then weekly)The Last of Us (Season 2) — Ellie and Joel's bond is tested further as they navigate their fractured, post-apocalyptic world filled with dangerous factions and heartbreaking choices.
Watch on HBO/Max: April 13 (1 of 7 episodes, then weekly)Government Cheese (Season 1) — This historical surrealist comedy-drama follows a man, newly released from prison, whose long-awaited family reunion goes off the rails.
Watch on Apple TV+: April 16 (4 of 10 episodes, then weekly)The Stolen Girl (Limited Series) — Holliday Grainger stars in this suspenseful drama about a woman who realizes her daughter has been kidnapped from a playdate.
Watch on Disney+: April 16 (1 of 5 episodes, then weekly)
Our thoughts on brand new streaming content, and where you can watch.
Your Friends & Neighbors
Keywords: dark comedy, crime drama, morally gray characters
Watch if you like: Breaking Bad, Weeds, Desperate Housewives
Jess’s Rating: B
If you’ve been waiting for Jon Hamm to land a leading TV role that lives up to his post-Mad Men potential, Your Friends & Neighbors makes a strong case. In this new series, he plays Coop—short for Andrew Cooper—a disgraced hedge fund manager turned professional thief, now stealing from the same upper-class neighborhood where he once hosted lavish parties. It’s a character built for Hamm’s specific brand of charisma: equal parts charming, smug, and quietly self-loathing.
The setup is familiar: high-end suburbia, secrets behind closed doors, a regretful anti-hero. It’s slick, sharply written, and pulls from suburban noir and prestige crime dramas to deliver something between Desperate Housewives and Breaking Bad. Hamm’s performance is exactly what you’d expect, without feeling stale, and the supporting cast feels solid—even if most of them haven’t been fully developed yet.
So far, Your Friends & Neighbors works best when it leans into its darker comedic edge. The pilot is punchy and fast-moving, but the series is balancing a lot: social satire, philosophical questions of identity, and family dysfunction. The pilot hints at something larger on the horizon that will turn the series into a full-blown thriller, and it remains to be seen how that will land. Still, across its first two episodes, the show is sleek and entertaining, and even though all the parts aren’t yet in sync, the ambition is there. If the show can tighten its tone and dig deeper into its characters, this could easily become one of Apple TV’s next hits.
— Jess
Length: 50-min runtime, 1 season / 9 episodes (2 episodes available on April 11, then weekly)
Watch on: Apple TV+
Pulse
Keywords: soapy, medical drama, Hallmark-level
Watch if you like: Grey’s Anatomy, New Amsterdam, The Resident
Jenni’s Rating: D+
I know I’m in for a rough watch when a lazy backstory dump hits in the first five minutes of a new show. Set in a level-one trauma center in Miami, Pulse is a soapy medical drama that takes heavy cues from Grey’s Anatomy, but lacks the emotional depth that made that series compelling. In this hospital, rules are routinely ignored, ego reigns supreme, and power dynamics are often overlooked in favor of steamy hookups.
The season opens on the eve of a massive hurricane—an already dramatic setup made messier by the fact that third-year resident Danny Simms (Willa Fitzgerald) has just accused her supervisor, chief resident Xander Phillips (Colin Woodell), of sexual harassment. It’s a weighty storyline that offers a bit of narrative grounding, but poor pacing throws it all out of balance. The first half of the season is bogged down in a drawn-out, flashback-heavy single shift, while the second speeds through consequences and half-resolutions in a rushed blur.
Perhaps the show’s biggest issue, though, is that it’s unmoored from any real sense of medical or emotional authenticity. The stakes in Pulse rarely land, even when lives are on the line, because its characters aren’t given enough depth to make us care. Most of the ensemble reads as stock types rather than fully realized people. Dr. Soriano (Nestor Carbonell) and Dr. Chan (Chelsea Muirhead) are two of a few exceptions—providing grounded performances that offer brief glimpses of what the show could be. But even the most promising elements are left under-explored, lost in the noise of manufactured drama and melodramatic beats.
There are kernels of promise buried in the ensemble and setting, but none of it is enough to overcome the series’ clunky writing and superficial storytelling. If you're just looking for something glossy to binge, Pulse might scratch an itch. But if you want a medical drama with actual substance, stick with The Pitt on Max.
— Jenni
Length: 60-min runtime, 1 season / 10 episodes
Watch on: Netflix
Black Mirror is back with new episodes today. In honor of the drop, we’ve made a list of our favorite episodes from the unsettling anthology series, in no particular order.
Shut Up and Dance (Season 3, Episode 3) — A teen gets blackmailed into a nightmarish series of tasks after being hacked, and trust me, you’ll never look at your webcam the same way again. Easily the most anxiety-inducing episode, it forces you to question who deserves your sympathy.
San Junipero (Season 3, Episode 4) — Two women (Mackenzie Davis and Gugu Mbatha-Raw) meet in a seaside town, leading to one of the most touching and genuinely hopeful love stories in the Black Mirror universe. It’s heart-wrenching, but it’s also a rare warm, nostalgic hug from a show that’s normally set on leaving you deeply uneasy.
Playtest (Season 3, Episode 2) — A thrill-seeking traveler (Wyatt Russell) signs up to test an experimental full-immersion video game that uses the players own memories to fabricate their worst fears.
White Christmas (2014 special) — Two men, played by Jon Hamm and Rafe Spall, sit in a snowed-in remote cabin and share three stories, each darker than the last. But as always with this show, not everything is as it first appears. This super-sized holiday special explores the themes of AI, isolation, and moral consequence.
Nosedive (Season 3, Episode 1) — In this satire where social media bleeds into real life and every interaction impacts your social score, one woman's (Bryce Dallas Howard) carefully curated existence starts to crack with devastating consequences. The script—co-written by Mike Schur and Rashida Jones—is both hilarious and haunting.
The Entire History of You (Season 1, Episode 3) — In a world where memory playback is possible, one man's obsession with the past—and the possibility of infidelity—threatens to unravel his present. Jesse Armstrong (Succession) penned this episode, if that gives you any indication of the melodrama and insecurities to expect.
Fifteen Million Merits (Season 1, Episode 2) — Set in a bleak future where life revolves around cycling endlessly to earn digital currency, this episode follows a man (Daniel Kaluuya) as he rebels against a soul-crushing system. It’s a dark subversion of typical dystopian fare, sharply critiquing reality TV and consumerism.
White Bear (Season 2, Episode 2) — A woman wakes up with no memory, pursued by masked assailants and surrounded by passive spectators filming her every move. The twist is brutal enough to leave a pit in your stomach, and the disturbing exploration of voyeurism and punishment will stick with you long after the credits roll.
Be Right Back (Season 2, Episode 1) — After losing her partner in a sudden accident, a grieving woman (Haley Atwell) tries an AI service that uploads an approximation of her late husband’s personality into a new body. Be prepared to cry if you’re at all susceptible to that kind of thing in the face of incredible performances and tear-jerker plots.
USS Callister (Season 4, Episode 1) — What starts as a colorful homage to classic sci-fi spirals into a dark examination of toxic fandom and power abuse. Jesse Plemons is perfectly unsettling as a geeky programmer living out a sinister fantasy, and it’s equal parts delightful and deeply uncomfortable.
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