dramas - page 9

This week, Pachinko rewinds to Solomon’s upbringing, the birth of a false hope, and the dying days of a wayward daughter. The Apple TV+ series brings out some big guns to connect the trauma of the past and present. And as usual, the cast, crew and writers are up to the task.

The developments this week are soapy and tug on your heartstrings as everyone does their best to make this material stick in your mind week to week. When you’re building a story out of little moments of heartache, it’s tough to keep them all equal. But this crew has done an amazing job with this material.

Slough House’s Slow Horses are on the run in this week’s installment of the Apple TV+ dark comedy about rogue failed spies working at the bottom of the British intelligence circus.

Slough House chief Jackson Lamb makes a Faustian bargain with Standish. River can’t help but check on Sid. Min’s crush on Louisa deepens. Struan gets picked up. Ho is in the wind. And everyone’s afraid of Taverner.

It’s another cracking potboiler of an episode this week as the noose tightens around everyone.

WeWork is finally going public in this week’s installment of Apple TV+ series WeCrashed. But is it too late for the company? Is it too late to save Adam and Rebekah’s marriage? And are any of these truly pertinent questions in a show about the waste of millions of dollars, aired during an economic crisis?

The show goes long on the emotional connection and dreams of these characters at a time when interest in them — after six episodes of watching them behave like spoiled children — is at an all-time low.

Apple TV+’s newest series is Roar, an anthology series based on the short story collection by Cecelia Ahern. Shepherded by Glow showrunners and playwrights Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, the show is a collection of vignettes shot and presented in roughly the same style.

Each takes on a different facet of womanhood. And each contains some element of magical realism. The first season, which debuts Friday, seems like a mixed bag, to put it delicately. But the high points of these “feminist fables” prove high indeed.

Mossad hacker-agent Tamar remains undercover in Iran in Tehran season two. But this time she has Glenn Close to help. But is she really there to help?

Watch the trailer for the upcoming season for more hints of what’s to come. And the wait won’t be long — new episodes of the spy-vs-spy thriller premier May 6 on Apple TV+.

Slow Horses enters the thick of its spy games this week in an excellent third episode. Jackson Lamb is in Dutch with M15 chief Diana Taverner just as she screws up an important operation — and implicates him and his whole team at Slough House, the reject pile of the British intelligence service.

As a result, they enter into a sleazy bargain to clean up the mess together. Of course, nothing’s ever as easy as it seems when your business is underhanded espionage. The pace and the tension ratchet up for a marvelous little installment of this new spy show on Apple TV+.

Pachinko, the new Apple TV+ series based on the book by Min Jin Lee, arrives in Japan and returns to Korea in this week’s episode.

Solomon and Sunja become amateur detectives in search of a lost woman and a missing grave site. Houses become homes, and countries swallow each other up in the search for identity. No one’s exactly happy, but the characters muddle their way toward something like peace with the worlds they’ve left behind.

All along the way, this epic show continues to impress.

WeCrashed, the Apple TV+ show about overhyped co-working startup WeWork, starts to bring the walls down around founder Adam Neumann this week. As his wife, Rebekah, demands more and more of the pie for herself, Adam keeps screwing up important meetings and losing his standing among his investors and cheerleaders.

The wheels are about to come off — and the only one who can’t see it is Adam. Now, if only any of this were remotely as compelling as the directors and writers deemed it, it would be a lot more exciting to tune into the fifth episode of a show about how supposedly terrible investment banking is that nevertheless revels in all the resulting excess.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, the Apple TV+ series based on the book by Walter Mosley, winds down with a somber closing chapter. Ptolemy has one last score to settle before his memory leaves him for good and Robyn is once more on her own.

The only thing left for him to do in this breathtaking finale is leave the world a better place than he found it.

Ptolemy Grey has been an odd six hours of TV: part science fiction parable, part brutal historical memoir, part comment on race relations and changing mores, and part beautiful family/relationship drama. It perhaps had a little trouble keeping every single element in even proportions. But for every little misstep or fumble, there are dramatic beats, performance notes, shots, cuts and scenes that are worth twice a regular TV show’s whole season.

Severance draws its excellent first season to a close this week with an episode that makes excellent use of every second of its pulse-pounding airtime.

The perfectly curated frames give way to woozy chaos as Lumon Industries workers Irving, Mark and Helly experience the outside world for the “first” time.

Revelations await them. And they’re going to have be savvy if they want to get away with this illegal operation to bring down Lumon. Everyone’s in fine form as usual, and the show makes a great case for a second season. (Which Apple just made official, BTW.)

WeCrashed, the Apple TV+ drama about real-life startup WeWork, goes big, goes crazy and gets bitter this week.

As WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann starts trying to expand his co-working company, he decides he’s got to tear down the competition, too. Meanwhile, his wife Rebekah is having her own crisis of confidence — and it may end with her having burned every last bridge she has.

Though cheaply entertaining a few times an episode, this show suffers from an insurmountable problem: It never picked an identity. It has to believe enough in Neumann’s prowess as an entrepreneur to find his tactics interesting, while also tacitly admitting he was wrong and crazy and a huckster.

But you can’t sort of admit your hero is a bad guy, not when you keep charting his rise to success without giving you any kind of window into who he was.

Ptolemy starts tying up loose ends in this week’s episode of The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, the Apple TV+ series based on the book of the same name by Walter Mosley.

We see reconciliation and revelations for almost everyone this week, in a finely acted and carefully directed hour of television. Ptolemy’s memories are fading, but before they do, he remembers his days as a boy. And he realizes he wants his nephews to feel protected the way he used to.

Pachinko, the epic, time-hopping Apple TV+ series about a Korean family’s struggles, hits its stride in a truly unbelievable fourth episode.

The show started strong enough, but it reaches pantheon level in this incredible installment, which sees Solomon renouncing his capitalist training, Sunja saying goodbye in the past and hello in the future, and a climactic singalong uniting people, eras and cultures.

This is the kind of thing you’re lucky to get out of serialized TV.

The plan is set on this week’s episode of Apple TV+’s dark comedy thriller Severance. But will our heroes make it out of Lumon Industries? Will anyone believe Mark, Helly and Irving when they wake up from their regular lives and emerge their work selves?

This week’s magnificently tense episode, directed by series executive producer Ben Stiller, is a real nail-biter. It’s wonderfully edited and excellently performed.

Severance has abandoned its early crux — the depressing lives of office drones who literally have no souls because they’ve been surgically stripped of them — for a more fast-paced approach to the show’s thriller aspects.

It’s no longer a show about the drudgery of both lives lived by lost people. It’s about the race to get back some measure of its characters’ personhood.

Slow Horses, based on the first book in the Slough House series by author Mick Herron, is the newest addition to the Apple TV+ roster of thrillers.

In the series, which premieres Friday, Gary Oldman plays Jackson Lamb, the leader of a group of misfit spies who work cases in secret while MI5 looks down its nose at the scrubs.

Directed by James Hawes and created by Will Smith (no, not that Will Smith), the first two episodes of this oddball spy show prove reasonably diverting.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey takes a tour through the past this week and finds clues to its central mysteries. The Apple TV+ show, based on Walter Mosley’s book of the same name, continues to be one of the best shows on television, with actors Samuel L. Jackson and Dominique Fishback leading it to greatness.

The Last Days might be the best investment in a TV show Apple TV+ has yet made. All the right people will be talking about this series for years to come.

Apple TV+ show WeCrashed tightens up at long last for a reasonably entertaining fourth episode that nevertheless lays bare the essential flaw in its calculus. It’s still asking us to watch and care about the vacuous psychos at the heart of the story of co-working startup WeWork — and it has not made them any more interesting.

Actor Jared Leto’s portrayal of Adam Neumann, the CEO and founder of WeWork, remains unwatchable. And the show keeps hitting Anne Hathaway’s character, Rebekah Neumann, with more and more embarrassment to overcome. But at least there’s the occasional joke.

In epic new Apple TV+ series Pachinko, three generations of a Korean family — caught between Japan, America and their homeland — eke out a living as times change and fortune fails to provide for them.

Series creator Soo Hugh and director Kogonada based the show on the bestselling book by Min Jin Lee of the same name. Frequently gorgeous, this show provides necessary context for modern Korean sociopolitics, while also delivering healthy doses of gripping melodrama.

The series, which debuts Friday on Apple TV+, also boasts what might be the best opening credits sequence of all time.

Irish actress, writer and producer Sharon Horgan is known for some darkly funny stuff. Shows like Catastrophe and Pulling. If you like those, you’ll be glad to hear the Emmy Award nominee and BAFTA Award winner is bringing a new dark-comedy-thriller called Bad Sisters to Apple TV+.

The streaming service offered a first-look photo and cast list on Wednesday. The show’s acting ensemble includes Horgan, of course, but also an interesting lineup of collaborators.

Taking the top film prize at Saturday’s Producers Guild of America (PGA) Awards puts Apple TV+ drama CODA in good stead to win the Best Picture prize at the upcoming Academy Awards. The prize the movie took has been a major predictor of Best Picture winners for decades.

Along with CODA’s win at the PGA Awards, the hit Apple TV+ comedy series Ted Lasso took home a prize.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, the Apple TV+ series based on the book of the same name by Walter Mosley, unwinds more of its central mysteries this week.

Ptolemy (played by the excellent Samuel L. Jackson) learns a little more about the deal he’s made with the doctors to get his memory back — and what it will cost him in the long run. However, he’s got too much to do with the extra capacity the operation gave him to stop now. If he can’t solve the many problems and questions swirling around him before he loses his memory, it will be too late. He’ll die not even realizing how close he came to peace.

Don’t tell Lumon Industries I’m saying this — and later I may not even remember writing it — but Apple Books may be about to blow the lid off this whole “severance” thing.

On Friday it plans to release a “tell-all” book about the sinister company at the center of the chilling drama series Severance on Apple TV+.

For some reason, Apple TV+ paid actual money for WeCrashed, the deeply inessential story of WeWork founder Adam Neumann and his wife Rebekah.

The tale’s already been told as a documentary, a podcast and a series of investigative pieces for various publications. But as we all know, the idea isn’t totally wrung dry until a couple of Oscar winners have their say.

So here’s Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway as the Neumanns in a terrible Apple TV+ mini-series directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. Maybe now we can tell another story.

Apple TV+ made an incredibly smart move picking up The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, based on the book of the same name by legendary writer Walter Mosley.

Directed by Ramin Bahrani, adapted by Mosley himself, and starring a searing Samuel L. Jackson, this is one of the best things to air on Apple TV+ so far. This sensitive and painful look at a man losing his memory at the end of a hard life is everything it ought to be.

A Benjamin Franklin biopic is headed for Apple TV+, with legendary actor Michael Douglas taking on the title role.

Just as importantly, the limited series is being written by Kirk Ellis. He also wrote HBO’s John Adams, which was showered with awards.