📺 What to Watch: Hacks, Outer Range, Bodkin...
plus 'Pretty Little Liars: Summer School' and 6 upcoming shows and movies
Happy Thursday! TV Upfronts are this week, and there’s been lots of buzzy news, including the announcement of a Legally Blonde prequel series and a new basketball comedy series starring Kate Hudson from Mindy Kaling. Also, happy Bridgerton Season 3 premiere to all who celebrate!
In today’s edition:
Weekly Watchlist
Hacks - Season 3 (Max)
Outer Range - Season 2 (Prime Video)
Pretty Little Liars: Summer School (Max)
Bodkin (Netflix)
— Jenni Cullen and Jess Spoll
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Below is a selection of new shows and movies premiering this week. Our full list of May releases, including theatrical releases and streaming debuts, is available here and published monthly for our premium subscribers.
Outer Range (Season 2) — In the latest season of this science fiction neo-Western series, the Abbott family must cope with the disappearance of their daughter-in-law while they struggle to keep hold of their ranch land and deal with a mysterious black void suddenly present in their pasture. Lewis Pullman, Josh Brolin, and Imogen Poots star.
Watch on Prime Video: May 16 (all 7 episodes)Bridgerton (Season 3, Part 1) — In the long-awaited Penelope and Colin installment of this regency-era romance, two old friends will fight feelings and fail spectacularly. With Colin coaching Penelope to find a husband, what could go wrong? The My Fair Lady-esque story will drop in two parts.
Watch on Netflix: May 16 (all 4 episodes)The Big Cigar (Limited Series) — A Black Panther leader, Huey P. Newton teams up with a Hollywood producer to escape to Cuba and elude a nationwide manhunt in this biographical drama thriller. The miniseries is based on the 2012 Playboy article of the same name by Joshuah Bearman.
Watch on Apple TV+: May 17 (2 of 6 episodes, then weekly)The 8 Show (Season 1) — Based on Bae Jin-Soo's webcomics, this Squid Game-esque series features eight individuals trapped in a mysterious 8-story building participating in a tempting but dangerous reality competition show to earn money.
Watch on Netflix: May 17 (all episodes)Dune: Part Two* — The epic sci-fi and box office hit comes to streaming this week, so you can watch Paul Atreides seek revenge against the conspirators who destroyed his family from the comfort of your living room.
Watch on Max: May 21 (*Streaming premiere)Trying (Season 4) — This heartwarming British comedy about an infertile couple who desperately wants to start their family returns. The new season speeds forward six years to see Nikki and Jason as experienced adopters despite their dysfunctional friends, screwball families, and chaotic lives.
Watch on Apple TV+: May 22 (2 of 8 episodes, then weekly)
These popular shows came back with new episodes. Here’s what we thought and where you can watch them.
Hacks - Season 3
Keywords: sharp, comedy drama, showbiz
Watch if you like: Difficult People, Broad City, BoJack Horseman
Jenni’s Rating: A
🚨Mild spoilers for Season 2 ahead🚨
We have been waiting impatiently since spring of 2022 for new episodes of Hacks. Almost a full two years later, Season 3 is finally here, and it is excellent.
As a refresher, this comedy about the comedy scene begins with a begrudging partnership between Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), a waning stand-up legend in Las Vegas, and Ava (Hannah Einbender), the 20-something TV writer Vance hires to help modernize her routine. It’s a partnership of convenience — spun up by their agent (Paul W. Downs) — that neither party is initially thrilled to be part of, but proves to be quite successful, if traumatic. Season 3 picks up a few months after Ava and Deborah have parted ways due to the plethora of personal and professional differences we witness at the end of Season 2.
Though arguably fun to watch since minute one, Hacks is really hitting its stride in these new episodes. The writing and chemistry of the leads has always been sharp and intoxicating, but now, three seasons in, the series has had ample time to mature its relationships and plot arcs — building on layers of already top-notch content to deliver even richer character growth and compelling storylines. Our cynical and sometimes-downright-unlikeable characters have new depth and range, and the show is better for it. Though we still have half of Season 3 to look forward to, I feel I can confidently say that Hacks has never been better.
— Jenni
Length: 30-min runtime, 3 seasons / 27 episodes (4 of 9 in S3 available, new on Thursdays)
Watch on: Max
Outer Range - Season 2
Keywords: sci-fi, western, mystery
Watch if you like: Dark, The Leftovers, Twin Peaks
Jess’s Rating: B+
Outer Range is what you might get if you put Dark and Yellowstone in a blender. Set in the wilderness of Wyoming, the genre-bending series centers around Royal Abbott (Josh Brolin), a rancher fighting to keep his land under his name and his family intact. One day, Royal stumbles upon a large black void on his Western pasture, and things take an odd turn from there. The second season further explores the mystery of the void and tracks the Abbotts as they face off against threats from all sides.
Waiting over two years to unravel the mysteries of Outer Range had dulled my interest, but I was quickly pulled back in. This batch of episodes goes beyond what I expected— it’s quirkier, faster-paced, and more fun to watch. While the first season hinted at the strange phenomena under the surface, this season leans hard into the inexplicable sci-fi oddities. Josh Brolin and Imogen Poots continue to be stand-outs, with Brolin bringing understated emotion to his gruff cowboy exterior and Poots perfectly toeing the line between vindictive and unhinged. Not all of the storylines work, and I find myself wishing there were more episodes in the season, but hopefully we get another season to see things developed further.
Perhaps due to the change in showrunners between seasons, this time around Outer Range is more expansive, the acting choices are bolder, and the direction is sharper. If it continues in this way, this series could join the ranks of the elite when it comes to sci-fi mystery box shows.
— Jess
Length: 2 seasons / 18 episodes (3 of 8 available in S2, new on Thursdays)
Watch on: Prime Video
Pretty Little Liars: Summer School
Keywords: horror, teen drama, reboot
Watch if you like: Pretty Little Liars, Riverdale, Cruel Summer
Jess’s Rating: C
The Pretty Little Liars reboot returned last week, swapping the “Original Sin” subtitle for the thematically appropriate “Summer School”. Fresh off their last near-death encounters with the stalker-killer who goes by “A,” the five girls hope to start anew and have a “hot girl summer” (no joke, they use this phrase innumerable times). Instead, their trauma-induced truancy gets them all sent to summer school. The threat of “A” has been minimized, but those of us who watched the original series know that “A” could be anywhere and anyone and is never really gone.
During the first season, I remarked on my excitement that the series was veering more into horror. With jump scares and gore, it was more along the lines of a Scream movie than the Disney-fied fare of its source material. But as the season went on, the fault-lines appeared. Having more main characters than the original, but less than half of the number of episodes per season caught up to it; the spooky aspects were fun, but the whole thing felt undercooked.
After watching the first few episodes of the second season, I fear they are doomed to make the same mistakes. The creepy factor is there, but the main girls have yet to become compelling characters, and their love interests are as bland and interchangeable as they come. I can handle cringey dialogue (I did watch all 7 seasons of Riverdale, lest we forget), but I can’t cope with a character who adds a movie reference into every single sentence. Campiness can only sustain me to a certain point, I need character depth and actual stakes!
To its detriment, this new Pretty Little Liars seems to have flipped the script on the first: while the former was a teen drama with some light horror elements, its successor is horror with a bit of teen drama. Though the slasher genre works well in short-form, it doesn’t seem to withstand the weight of a drawn out runtime.
— Jess
Length: 60-min runtime, 2 seasons / 18 episodes (3 of 8 available in S2, new on Thursdays)
Watch on: Max
Our thoughts on brand new streaming content, and where you can watch.
Bodkin
Keywords: dark comedy, thriller, kooky
Watch if you like: Bad Sisters, Only Murders in the Building, Broadchurch, Obituary
Jenni’s Rating: B-
Helmed by Will Forte, Bodkin follows Gilbert Power (Forte), a one-hit-wonder American podcaster who is hoping to strike gold again by pivoting to the the true-crime genre. With the help of his eager protégée, Emmy (Robyn Cara), he aims to capitalize on the draw of darkness within quaint, picturesque communities by investigating the decades-old disappearance of a trio from a small Irish town. But Power is unprepared for how much he will unearth — especially when Dove (Siobhán Cullen), an investigative reporter on unofficial suspension, joins the team.
With commendable performances and a mystery that maintains just enough credibility to keep viewers hooked, this show is extremely easy to get swept up in. The steady infusion of wry humor only adds to its engaging qualities, smoothing out the edges to make Bodkin a rather cozy, “low-key” thriller. But there is also a lot going on in this seven-part series that could’ve been more finely honed. That said, the choices that make Bodkin less sharp and well-crafted than a show like, say, Bad Sisters, also make it an enjoyably mindless binge.
Despite multiple overlapping plot lines and backstories, the series manages to move just quickly enough to avoid feeling too messy or bloated. And the interplay of chatter and local color from various townsfolk, as well as the lovely setting of small-town Ireland itself, only contributes to the show’s odd charm.
Even with its many moving parts, the series avoids the temptation to spin too far out of control, and strikes a strange and delicate balance between dark comedy and disturbing mystery. The result is a mostly cohesive and satisfying viewing experience.
— Jenni
Length: 50-min runtime, 1 season / 7 episodes
Watch on: Netflix
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Just caught up with last week’s podcast episode and gotta say, once again y’all’s take (double take?) on these shows is exactly why I pretty much wait for your approval before jumping into anything. I appreciate the work you do. Jenni and Jess watch so the rest of us can run 😆