Summer 2022

POP CULTURE

‘LITTLE DEMON’ Mother (Aubrey Plaza) and daughter (Lucy DeVito) just

‘WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS’ Season 3 of FX’s hilarious vampire mockumentary ended with several characters encoffined on a boat bound for London, Dracula-style. But early reports on Season 4 indicate that the vampires, their familiar, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), and the newly arrived baby Colin will quickly be reunited at their Staten Island mansion for more farcical and oddly touching adventures. (FX, July 12) ‘UNCOUPLED’ Darren Star (“And Just Like That …”) and Jeffrey Richman (“Modern Family”) created this comedy starring Neil Patrick Harris as a New Yorker who finds himself back on the scene after his husband of 17 years walks out on him. (The creators’ older, possibly more relevant credits are “Sex and the City” and “Frasier,” respectively.) (Netflix, July 29) ‘RESERVATION DOGS’ Sterlin Harjo, working with Taika four Indigenous teenagers (Devery Jacobs, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Paulina Alexis and Lane Factor) who think they want to leave their small-town Oklahoma lives and carry on a low-key crime wave to finance their escape. (Hulu, Aug. 3) ‘HOUSE OF THE DRAGON’ presumably more dragons, as HBO unveils its prequel series to “Game of Thrones,” linear TV’s last monster hit. Set 200 years before the original and focusing on House Targaryen, it will greatly increase the incidence of the letter “y” in popular media: King Viserys (Paddy Considine), Princess Rhaenrya (Emma D’Arcy), Lord Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) and Rhys Ifans (as Ser Otto Hightower, the Hand of the King). (HBO, Aug. 21) Waititi, presents a second season of his bittersweet, deeply felt FX comedy about More Hands, more Sers and

‘ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING’ The first

want to live normal lives in Delaware, but father, who happens to be Satan (Lucy DeVito’s father, Danny), won’t leave them alone. Dan Harmon (“Rick and Morty”) is an executive producer of this animated comedy. (FXX, Aug. 25)

season of this shaggy-dog comic murder mystery, starring Selena Gomez, Steve Martin and Martin Short as an odd trio of true-crime podcasters, hit big with people looking for something soothing during the pandemic. In Season 2, the amateur detectives will investigate the murder of the disagreeable board president of their Upper West Side co-op. (Hulu, June 28) ‘AMERICA OUTDOORS WITH BARATUNDE THURSTON’ and ‘THE GREAT MUSLIM and-culture series with presenters from outside the travel-host mainstream. The Black writer and comedian Baratunde Thurston visits people living their best outdoor lives in places like Death Valley, Idaho and Appalachia, while the Muslim rapper Mona Haydar and her husband, Sebastian Robins, take a three-episode drive along Route 66. (PBS, July 5) AMERICAN ROAD TRIP’ PBS offers a pair of travel-

‘THE PATIENT’ Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, the creators of “The Americans,”

team up again for an FX mini-series about a killer (Domhnall Gleeson) who kidnaps his therapist (Steve Carell) and demands to be cured. (Hulu, Aug. 30) ‘LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER’ Nearly five years after it reputedly the most expensive TV show ever made finally comes to the screen. It’s drawn from J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices to “The Lord of the Rings” and set centuries before the action in that book and “The Hobbit,” but the stories of elves, orcs, humans and hobbits (represented by the ancestral Harfoots) will feel familiar. The challenge: butting up against the memories of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films, a far higher standard, from an artistic standpoint, than “House of the Dragon” has to meet. (Amazon Prime Video, Sept. 2) ‘THE GOOD FIGHT’ The rich get richer, casting-wise, as Andre was announced, the series that is Braugher and John Slattery join Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald in the sixth and final season of this unabashedly political legal drama. Including the predecessor series, “The Good Wife,” the story will have had a 13-season run; some performers who, like Baranski, date back to the original show, including Carrie Preston and Alan Cumming, will return for this final go-round. (Paramount+, Sept. 8)

‘BLACK BIRD’ Dennis Lehane developed this fact-based mini- series about a

convict, James Keene (Taron Egerton), who agrees to befriend a suspected serial killer in prison and get him to confess before he is released on appeal. The target is played by Paul Walter Hauser, the star of “Richard Jewell”; Keene’s ex-cop father is played, in one of his last appearances, by Ray Liotta. (Apple TV+, July 8) ‘BETTER CALL SAUL’

The extremely antiheroic saga

of the louche lawyer Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) enters its final six episodes. (AMC, July 11)

Content extracted from New York Times

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EC Magazines | Summer Edition 2022

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