📺 The White Lotus returns, plus a buzzy new scam docudrama
Reviews of Apple Cider Vinegar (Netflix), School Spirits S2 (Paramount+), and Watson (CBS/Paramount+); also, The White Lotus (HBO / Max) returns.
Happy Thursday. Hope everyone has had a fantastic week so far—it’s only getting better. Not only do new episodes of Severance and The Traitors drop tonight, but Yellowjackets returns tomorrow and then The White Lotus’s new season premieres on Sunday.
In today’s edition:
Weekly Watchlist
The White Lotus (HBO / Max)
School Spirits S2 (Netflix / Paramount+)
Apple Cider Vinegar (Netflix)
Watson (CBS / Paramount+)
— 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 February releases is available here for premium subscribers.
Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy (Movie) — The sequel to Bridget Jones’s Baby and the fourth installment in the Bridget Jones film series sees Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, and Emma Thompson reprise their roles.
Watch on Peacock: February 13The Gorge (Movie) — Two elite snipers (Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy) are assigned to guard a mysterious and impenetrable gorge without knowing what lies beneath them in this sci-fi horror action movie.
Watch on Apple TV+: February 14Flow* (Movie) — This Oscar-nominated animated movie is a fantasy adventure following a courageous cat after his home is devastated by a great flood.
Watch on Max: February 14 (*Streaming Premiere)Yellowjackets (Season 3) — The hit psychological thriller returns as the survivors of the fateful plane crash face even darker secrets in the wilderness—and the aftermath in the present day.
Watch on Paramount+ with Showtime: February 14 (2 of 10 episodes, then weekly)The White Lotus (Season 3) — Mike White’s award-winning satirical anthology series returns, this time reportedly darker in tone and set at a lavish resort in Thailand.
Watch on HBO/Max: February 16 (1 of 8 episodes, then weekly)Zero Day (Season 1) — In this political conspiracy thriller starring Robert De Niro and Lizzy Caplan, a former U.S. President is called out of retirement to find the source of a deadly cyberattack, only to discover a vast web of lies and conspiracies.
Watch on Netflix: February 20 (all 6 episodes)Reacher (Season 3) — Based on Lee Child's novel Persuader, Jack Reacher faces brutal foes and confronts unfinished business from his past.
Watch on Prime Video: February 20 (3 of 8 episodes, then weekly)
These popular shows came back with new episodes. Here’s what we thought and where you can watch them.
The White Lotus - Season 3
Keywords: satire, drama, dark comedy
Watch if you like: Succession, Big Little Lies, The Resort
Over two years since we last heard its glorious theme song play fully through the opening credits (”skip intro” is a cardinal sin in my house for a show this good), The White Lotus is finally back for a third season. This time, we’re going to Thailand.
The HBO hit returns this Sunday, and if you haven’t yet indulged in its first two installments, there’s still time to catch up. Not that you strictly need to—this series is an anthology, with the occasional returning character and titular White Lotus luxury resort chain bridging the otherwise standalone storylines. And while each season does kick off with the discovery of a dead body, the real connective tissue is the biting satire of the privileged class throughout the series. As Jess mentioned in her first review of Season 2, the show might masquerade as a whodunnit (or howdunnit of sorts), but that’s never really the point.
Another reason to watch—as if you needed more reasons—is that each season assembles a star-studded ensemble to play the wealthy, often insufferable vacationers and the accommodating resort staff who serve them. This year’s cast includes Leslie Bibb, Walton Goggins, Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzenegger, and Aimee Lou Wood, to name a few.
Director and showrunner Mike White (of Survivor fame) has crafted a near-perfect series in The White Lotus—with layered, nuanced writing, striking cinematography, and a score that ratchets up the tension in every scene. Simply put, it’s appointment television, and for the next eight Sundays, I wouldn’t dream of missing it.
— Jenni
Length: 60-min runtime, 3 seasons / 21 episodes (First episode of S3 comes out this Sunday, then weekly)
Watch on: HBO / Max
School Spirits - Season 2
Keywords: murder mystery, teens, supernatural
Watch if you like: Riverdale, Vampire Diaries, Veronica Mars
Jess’s Rating: C-
🚨🚨🚨 SPOILERS FOR SEASON 1 OF SCHOOL SPIRITS AHEAD 🚨🚨🚨
The teen supernatural mystery series School Spirits is back for a second season, and even though I didn’t love the first, I thought I’d give it another chance.
Picking up where Season 1 left off, Maddie (Peyton List) is still caught between life and death, only now there’s an added complication—her body is walking around, but she’s not the one in it. Janet, the ghost haunting the school’s boiler room, has taken over, leaving Maddie’s friends scrambling to figure out what’s going on. Meanwhile, Maddie’s spirit is stuck with the other high school ghosts as they investigate their shady teacher, Mr. Martin.
Like I said in my review of the first season, this show would fit perfectly into The CW’s 2010s lineup, and not just because every “teen” looks well past the legal drinking age. The performances lean into melodrama, the dialogue spells everything out, the world-building remains questionable, and the show relentlessly piles on twists and subplots. But what makes Season 2 even more disappointing is that the murder mystery—the one thing keeping me invested—turned out to not even be a murder mystery. Now, we’re left with questions of who Janet is and what Mr. Martin is hiding, but neither is very compelling.
“Why keep watching?”, you might be asking yourself. Well, I did love a CW drama back in my day, and the cliffhangers make it easy to binge. If you enjoyed Season 1, you’ll probably find enough here to keep watching. If you were hoping for a more refined, well-paced sophomore season, then you’ll find that your hopes, like mine, were misplaced.
— Jess
Length: 45-min runtime, 2 seasons / 4 of 8 episodes available in S2, new on Thursdays
Watch on: Netflix (S1), Paramount+ (S1 and S2)
Our thoughts on brand new streaming content, and where you can watch.
Apple Cider Vinegar
Keywords: scammer, biographical drama, Australian
Watch if you like: Scamanda, Inventing Anna, The Dropout
Jess’s Rating: B
Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar is a juicy, fast-paced retelling of one of the most unbelievable scams of the social media era. It tells the true story of Belle Gibson (Kaitlyn Dever), the Australian wellness influencer who built a multi-million-dollar empire on curing her terminal brain cancer through clean eating and a “natural lifestyle”. The scam? She never had cancer.
Starring an Australian-accented Kaitlyn Dever as Belle, Apple Cider Vinegar is glossy and full of style. The show mirrors the colorful, filtered world Belle sold to her followers through bright and flashy editing including pop-up emojis, choreographed dance numbers, and fourth-wall breaking asides. Dever nails not only the Australian accent but Belle’s faux wide-eyed charm, making it easy to see how she manipulated so many people.
But for all its flair, Apple Cider Vinegar doesn’t dig as deep as it could. Its nonlinear structure, jumping between Belle’s 2015 media implosion and her rise to fame, feels more like a prestige TV imitation than a meaningful narrative device. And while the show includes key figures who suffered due to Belle’s deception—including a wellness influencer who actually has cancer and a patient who follows Belle’s harmful guidance—their stories feel sidelined in favor of Belle’s grift.
That’s where Apple Cider Vinegar falters. It warns of the dangers of trusting influencers over medical professionals, but in giving Belle the scam-queen treatment, it benefits from the same glamorization it’s critiquing. The show acknowledges its own contradictions with winks at its artistic liberties, but that self-awareness remains surface level. Still, thanks to Dever’s star performance and the show’s warnings about influencer culture, Apple Cider Vinegar is a solid watch. It may not fully interrogate the system that enabled Belle Gibson, but it certainly captures why so many people got caught up in it.
— Jess
Length: 60-min runtime, Limited Series / 6 episodes
Watch on: Netflix
Watson
Keywords: medical drama, detective, procedural
Watch if you like: House, Elementary, NCIS
Jenni’s Rating: D+
Pittsburgh is having a moment. The latest TV show to be set in the western Pennsylvania city is Watson—a contemporary reimagining of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes universe, but this time as a medical drama. The series follows Dr. John Watson (Morris Chestnut) as he attempts to solve mystery maladies at his new clinic for rare disorders a mere six months after the traumatic death of Holmes at the hands of arch nemesis Moriarty. But is he really dead?
If that premise gave you whiplash, let me ground you for a second by reminding you that Watson takes place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for—you guessed it—no reason at all. It’s but one example of the show’s tendency to pile on ideas without fully justifying them. It feels like it’s suffering from one too many “yes, and” moments in the writer’s room. If you took House, seasoned it with the ensemble flavor of NCIS or Bones, and then shoehorned it into Sherlock lore, you’d get Watson. The result is a show that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be—or who it’s for.
Beyond its convoluted premise, Watson suffers from predictability—the twists and medical “eureka” moments are telegraphed well in advance. While Chestnut brings some charisma to the role, the show’s jumbled pilot and heavy-handed references make for an altogether unsteady start. There’s potential for Watson to settle into something more cohesive, but it might have been stronger as a straightforward medical mystery drama rather than a misguided attempt to expand the Sherlock canon.
— Jenni
Length: 50-min runtime, 1 season / 13 episodes; one available, new on Sundays
Watch on: CBS / Paramount+
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