Entertainment

The high stress of executing the “oner” needs to mirror the tone of the scenes — or the complete films and episodes — themselves, so the one-take formula is typically used to exaggerate tense circumstances. That’s not to say all are like that, but increasingly, this is the one formal trick that makes any scene more stressful than it ought to be, with the audience distracted and left wondering if the show can really pull it off. In Adolescence, the four-episode limited series created by His Dark Materials’s Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (who also stars), 13-year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper) is accused of murdering one of his classmates, and each episode was filmed in a single take — a process explored in this Twitter thread — from a scene as straightforward as two characters speaking in a row to some complicated aerial drone magic. Graham, who plays Jamie’s father, was quite familiar with this format, having starred in Boiling Point, a feature-length one-shot film about a chef, as well as its spinoff TV series (made in a few shots but not many). While Boiling Point might have pushed the possibilities for just how manic a single take could be, Adolescence opts to use the technique for a greater range of emotional realities. Rather than each episode being filled with heart-pounding action, the series establishes itself with a frantic, stressful raid on Jamie’s house and his subsequent arrest, then dissolves into a crime show that’s much more meticulous and robust beyond the thrills at the top.

The only thing that I find even a little upsetting about this Goggins confluence is the sudden realization that it has been a possibility all along, this idea of filling up our HBO Sunday night with shows that feature Walton Goggins in some way. Think of what he could have done with a season of recurring guest spots on The Sopranos and Entourage in the incredibly weird handful of years when those two shows aired back-to-back. Or Westworld and Veep. Or Succession and Barry. I could keep putting hypothetical Goggins characters into HBO Sunday night shows for hours. Game of Thrones is probably my favorite, but only on the condition he kept his Southern accent and it was never addressed; I thought about this for two seconds and immediately heard him say, “Well now, Daenerys, it appears you got yourself some dragons.” Now you’re hearing it, too. This is the power of Goggins.

What you hope you never, ever, ever have to worry about is the subject of Netflix’s new series, Adolescence. The four-part British crime drama tells the (fictional) story of Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old suburban boy who’s ripped from bed in the morning, accused of murdering a classmate. Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham — who also plays Jamie’s dad, Eddie — the show is an emotional gut punch, aided by the fact that each episode is shot in real time in one take.

“He’s just a very polite, properly raised, I was going to say kid,” Paltrow tells VF before correcting herself. “He’s a man who takes his work really seriously and is a fun partner.” That’ll get them through Hot Ones Versus.

There’s a lot going wrong here: A lack of any real sexual chemistry between Grant and the ladytestants; Grant saying “I love you” completely unprompted; production giving Zoe the absolute worst date. But for me, what is such an absolute bummer is Grant continuing to objectify the women. Now, he’s not objectifying them by talking about their bodies or how sexy they are; and maybe a little bit of that would be helpful, even, to show us chemistry between Grant and the top three. No, I mean that he keeps referring to them as “a wife” or “a mother,” reducing them to the role they’ll play in his life. Where is “partner”? Or “girlfriend”? Or “Sugarlips”? The most egregious instance is when he says, “When I saw Zoe with her friends and family, I saw a wife.” Zoe was transported to another plane of existence, and she became A Wife. Grant has not said anything meaningful or specific about any of the women except where they rank on the A Wife scale.

“Appreciate my MSG family for taking such good care of me and I need to shout out the crew that had to clean that up. Appreciate you!” Morgan added in his post. “More importantly, the Knicks are now 1-0 when I throw up on the court so maybe I’ll have to break it out again in the playoffs 😅”

The trailer introduces an original Japanese Breakfast song … and Johnson as Lucy, a matchmaker who is willing to stop random guys on the street to see if they’re potential customers. Some of her clients have very specific criteria (“nothing over 20 BMI,” “more grown” but still young), while others are a little more open (“I’m trying to settle”). A friend and a celebratory cake inform us that Lucy is responsible for nine marriages — which is shy of Love Is Blind’s record but still pretty good. According to an official synopsis, she’s “torn between the perfect match and her imperfect ex.” It’s pretty easy to tell who’s who: Pascal’s character meets her at an event where Evans’s character is a waiter who already knows her drink order. One man sleeps with her in a $12 million apartment, while the other man lives with roommates but has a rich past with her. She’s entertaining both connections, but her overall stance on relationships seems to be getting more complicated. “I don’t think I’m very good at my job, anymore,” she says at one point, later musing that people get married “because they’re lonely, and because they’re hopeful.”

The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick premiered earlier this month at South by Southwest, ushering in what could be a big year for Ohs and Harris. Ohs had edited the documentary Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play., and Harris was attracted to his fluid Mike Leigh–ish filmmaking process, which he’d also employed on the similarly microbudget indies Jethica and Everything Beautiful Is Far Away (the latter starring Julia Garner). So they decided to make one themselves. What resulted is a chamber piece about a dispirited urbanite named Yvonne (Chao) who retreats to a country house where her friend (Hernandez) is residing with a couple (Harris and Cusati-Moyer) who rattle off crunchy platitudes about mugwort, organic produce, and the restorative power of a sunrise.

Not directly. Jamie’s story itself is not based on a specific person or event, but per Birmingham Live, Graham noted that real reports of knife crime did give him the idea for what the series would be about. “I’d read an article in the paper about a young boy stabbing a young girl, and it made me feel a bit cold,” he said. “Then about three of four months later, there was a piece on the news about a young boy who’d stabbed a young girl.”

Gossip and confrontation are the pillars of good reality television writ large, but what makes a great season of Below Deck is more specific and somewhat counter-intuitive. It helps the show when the crew is tight — we saw this last season after the Devil (Luke) and his fork (Laura) left. One of the joys of watching the crew work together is to commiserate with them about the general loathsomeness of entitled rich guests. By the time they get a couple of days off, we almost feel as if we, too, have earned the break. Watching a good Below Deck cast is like having a really cold beer after a really long day; or like sending your best friend a three-minute voice memo about all the shit that happened at work that day. It’s soothing because it’s a way to exorcize the demons that have been lodged into your soul by a job. At its strongest, Below Deck speaks directly to that instinct. When that appeal starts fizzling out like Bri and Harry’s lukewarm relationship, our engagement also begins to drag.