interviews
allison picurro
writer
United States
my thing was all bangers all the time. yeah? all bangers all the time // bylines at tv guide, decider, and indiewire // owner and operator of Boy Movies (boymovies.substack.com)
United States
my thing was all bangers all the time. yeah? all bangers all the time // bylines at tv guide, decider, and indiewire // owner and operator of Boy Movies (boymovies.substack.com)
interviews
"You can't just hide who you are under a heavy lead blanket and hope that it never rears its head… The only way forward is some kind of synthesis."
"What's interesting was when we had the video camera on Ken's close up on one side of the stage, it felt like a very typical product launch, but when we switched it to the other side, it suddenly felt incredibly fascist. I can't explain why. It just added some extra feeling to it. It was very dark, very haunting. He was brilliant, but it was almost terrifying to watch. That corporate excitement was almost terrifying."
Fittingly, my interview with John Wilson was plagued with difficulties. The inside of the Brooklyn coffee shop we planned to meet at to discuss the series finale of his eponymous How to With John Wilson was too quiet, the outdoor seating area too noisy, and the park we eventually settled in full of distractions, from the constant parade of passing dogs to the confusion brought on by a lone man on all fours in the grass a few feet away. (We eventually deduced that he seemed to be doing yoga.)
"The nature of the show is that it seems that Sam is so burdened with her kids and her mom, and she chooses them over and over."
"I think he was looking over there and saying, 'The pain for all of them is quite palpable.' That's true, regardless of who they are, in the rest of their lives."
Barry continues to be one of TV's best character studies as it grapples with the conclusion its hero believed he came to in last season's finale about whether or not people are capable of change, and with what it means to want forgiveness, and how doing so can infect every corner of a person's life.
TV Guide caught up with Moayed to get his thoughts on where Stewy and Kendall's friendship stands, and Stewy's position as the final season of Succession pushes forward.
"With female chefs, a lot of what we talked about, about trying to make your workplace equitable, trying to find humanity in an industry that can have a lot of history of cruelty and ego and abuse, and the hardships of that and of feeling like you're trying to make that change all by yourself, a lot of that really stuck true to me."
"What I love about the character of Nacho is when you first meet him, he saves the lives of three people, Saul Goodman and the two skaters. And then when we last meet him, he saves the life of one more, his father, and impacts the relationships in the future with Jesse and Mike. Mike at some point in Breaking Bad says, 'I had a guy. You're not that guy.' And you can only imagine he must speaking about Nacho."
"He's letting them know that he's in it for the long haul, and that they may have won this battle, but he is going to make it his point to be alive and let everybody know exactly who they are. You want to talk about reputational damage? Howard's gonna get you… except he doesn't. But that's because the consequences of their actions are then literally laid at their feet."
The melancholic feeling that's been hanging over Succession's third season is as pervasive as ever in this hour. Watching Ruck's performance, there's a foreboding sense that Connor, perpetually treated as a joke by his father and siblings, is not far from hitting his breaking point. (Or, as Ruck puts it, "Let's just say that he's not going to remain the family punching bag forever.")
For Esposito, directing Saul was a long time coming, and not something he took lightly. He talked to TV Guide about the complexities of adapting his own visual style, turning Lalo Salamanca into a horror movie villain, and how an iconic Breaking Bad scene influenced his approach to this turning point in Kim's story.
The HBO drama was Guadagnino's first foray into television, but as any fan of his films, which include Call Me by Your Name, Suspiria, and I Am Love, knows, he always prefers not to tell the audience everything. "I like people to think of how they feel," he explained while discussing crafting the show's finale.
Smith spoke to TV Guide about Chester and Sam's confrontation, his feelings on straight actors playing queer roles, and the significance of the Britney Spears classic "Lucky" to his character.
reviews + recaps
If Masters of the Air has a take on war that isn't quite as fresh as its predecessors', it at least does a solid job treading familiar territory.
Ripley, Netflix's television adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, starring Andrew Scott, never lives up to its stunning aesthetics.
It doesn't really matter what you do when you're alive, The Great suggests. All that matters is how those who grieve you carry on your memory. Catherine will carry on Peter's how she sees fit on any given day. There's freedom to that, especially coming from a show that has always approached its historical inaccuracies with such shameless mirth.
Barry uses its final season to focus on what comes after the ending. In doing so, it pulls off some pretty impossible feats, ratcheting up the stakes in truly unpredictable ways as it careens toward a spectacular, satisfying, and bleak final bow.
In Season 4's stunning third episode, the series makes its strongest statement yet about the Roy family's trauma.
While the generational divide between the kids and the adults was once one of the things Sex Education did best, now there is no difference between the way the younger and older characters speak. It's that brand of internet-approved, emptily progressive language that the show was always better for avoiding. What conflict can be found within a show where everyone is always saying the "right" thing? What lessons are left to teach? Not many, it turns out.
So much has changed since Logan's 80th birthday party, and now the show's past stares down its present in the mirror, but the reflection has gone warped and wonky. The cyclical nature of humanity, one of Succession's main points alongside the corrosion of the soul caused by insatiable greed, doesn't mean that things don't change. It means that history always repeats itself, and that Succession has done a great job finding the humanity within these wretched people.
Maybe the show's observations on class and the service industry aren't as astute as they once were, but it stays shrewd with its explorations of aging and unfulfillment. If Party Down's first two seasons were about the fear that life will someday pass you by, its third act is all about how to go on living when you realize it has.
This new Interview with the Vampire stands as a monument to Rice's work that fits into our present. It's overwrought, maximalist camp, bolstered by wholly committed performances from Jacob Anderson, Eric Bogosian, Sam Reid, and the rest of the ensemble. It's the crazy, sexy, queer adaptation Rice's crazy, sexy, queer story always deserved.
The challenge with any runaway hit is always figuring out what comes next, and while The White Lotus very much continues to succeed at being The White Lotus, its second season lacks some of the thrilling luster that turned the first into appointment viewing.
Whiplash settles in as the series vacillates in tone, trying all at once to be a crime thriller, a raunchy sex comedy, a critique of the media, and a reflection on a very famous woman's inner turmoil.
American Gigolo is as much about the cyclical nature of abuse as it is about the cyclical nature of humanity. Can you ever outrun your past, or is it better to coexist with it? The series meanders around that question for two and a half episodes before really beginning to delve into it with a haunting sequence at the end of the third, in which Julian begins to dip a toe back into the riptide of his old life.
essays + features
AMC's Anne Rice adaptation is a monster hit. The team behind this spring's most anticipated show previews its showstopping second season.
The ending of the series finale, "With Open Eyes," is at once a thunderous surprise and a foregone conclusion, the satisfying product of a season that took its time gradually breaking down its trio of siblings into jagged pieces until there was nothing left of any of them. Coming into contact with Logan Roy, who built a haunted house and called it an empire, will kill you. Dead people can't rule over anything.
The most antisocial show of all time has been a guiding light in a very strange era.
Pamela Adlon's comedy is a celebration of family.