May the Force be with you.
In the ongoing 2024, Akhil Arora’s TV series reviews have been to the skies of World War II, post-apocalyptic America, and pre-independence Lahore.
Agatha All Along
“It’s nowhere near as engaging or adept at delivering the thrills, spills, and scares on the equivalent level of WandaVision. Most of all, it doesn’t push itself in ways that truly excite you. [Jac] Schaeffer did wonderfully with “sitcom as a coping mechanism for grief” but this is a whole new ballgame. And she can’t catch lightning in a bottle again.”
The Penguin
“The Penguin is so good when it’s good that it will make you want to engage with the world it inhabits. Part psychological introspection and character study, married to a twisted childhood and a dysfunctional family past, the DC superhero series—the best of its kind since Watchmen—is fully deserving of its home. It’s not TV, it’s HBO.”
Call Me Bae
“Watching Call Me Bae, you get the feeling that it was haphazardly and lazily put together as if those involved couldn’t really be bothered. […] There is zero critical energy or thinking here. It pounds the audience with its stupidity until it’s pulled you down to its level. […] Vapid, humourless and an absurd fantasy, you can tell Call Me Bae is written by people whose engagement with journalism starts with Instagram and ends with TV news.”
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Season 2
“Even when The Lord of the Rings series makes room for a vulnerable conversation, the writing is so dispassionate and unhuman that it’s hard to feel and relate to the character’s struggles. […] Most scenes are unable to make you connect or draw you into the hearts and minds of those who inhabit this version of Middle-earth. The Rings of Power season 2 … is riddled with bad dialogue. And that frequently ends up dooming it.”
Pachinko: Season 2
“[No] matter what seismic historical event is ongoing, Pachinko season 2 never loses sight of who or what it’s about. Its lens is forever rooted in the characters it follows. To paraphrase what a grown-up teenage Noa (Tae Ju Kang) says about a different universe, with the show slyly commenting on itself, it ‘depicts a world where the people struggle to endure.’”
Shekhar Home
“The direction—[co-creator Srijit] Mukherji handles the first four episodes and Rohan Sippy takes over for the final two—is the biggest hurdle. Despite having actors like Kay Kay Menon, Ranvir Shorey and Rasika Dugal, sometimes in the same scene, Shekhar Home is unable to hold your attention and deliver a worthwhile dish out of its ingredients.”
House of the Dragon: Season 2
“On a foundational level, it was very different from the first season. While that one ran through time with big time jumps between episodes, House of the Dragon season 2 … switched it up and became a lot more serialised. At times, episodes picked up right where the previous one had left off. There was an immediacy to the season, as if every day and week was important in how the war was unfolding.”
Time Bandits
“[Simply] doesn’t have enough content to fill 10 episodes. It’s heavily padded and would’ve been better off as a shorter adventure, maybe five episodes or so. With episodes between 32 and 47 minutes, that would essentially mean it would be the length of a feature film. And that’s the central issue. Apple TV+’s Time Bandits remake is another one of those titles that can’t justify its existence as a long-form project.”
Mirzapur: Season 3
“With a combined runtime of 500 minutes, Mirzapur season 3 suffers from extreme levels of padding. Worse, it feels listless. Like it’s simply going through the motions—imitating what Mirzapur ought to be rather than having the courage to push the Prime Video series, or the genre, in new directions. In ways that would surprise or be unexpected. What we get, on the other hand, is an overlong mess.”
Kota Factory: Season 3
“The third season wants to do better. The introduction of a new character, who has no love for Kota, seems poised for such a thing. They go from wanting to leave to choosing to stay but it’s unclear why that happens beyond a narrative requirement. It doesn’t help that they are barely in the show or end up contributing to rudimentary lines like ‘Kota is a factory’. Surely, you’ve more to say.”
The Boys: Season 4
“Its desire to commentate on the American culture wars—that have spun ridiculously out of control and encompass a spectrum that’s impossible to cover—feels like trying to make a dozen different dishes with the same base sauce. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, sorry. Pick a battle. In its current maddening state, watching The Boys is like being forever online. It is Elon Musk’s Twitter feed … come to life.”
Star Wars: The Acolyte
“The Star Wars series fares infinitely better in the action department. The heavy use of martial arts—a mix of kung fu, kenjutsu, kali/arnis, and kickboxing—sets The Acolyte apart from what Star Wars has given us in the past. […] It helps too that the action is handled very well, from a direction, editing, and sound design standpoint. But The Acolyte cannot coast on that alone. It’s found lacking elsewhere.”
Dark Matter
“With two very different characters paired up, we’re put on a wild journey that makes them question everything they know. If you take away what we do, the people who surround us, and the world we inhabit, where does that leave us? […] Who are we, underneath it all? But for all its big questions, it’s also uneven, overlong, and doesn’t find its footing soon enough. If only we could look up all the other versions of Dark Matter out in the multiverse.”
Heeramandi
“[Sanjay Leela] Bhansali can never seem to decide where he stands on his female protagonists. Does he view them as women who sell their bodies and souls to survive? Or does he see them as diamonds, women who defied the odds and struggled amidst pressure to emerge as shiny objects that everyone covets? Bhansali thinks he’s spinning a women empowerment tale … but the reality is far from it.”
The Veil
“At its core, The Veil is about two women with a traumatic past who possess the ability to assume new identities and blend into their surroundings. Despite being on opposite sides, these shapeshifters have a lot in common with one another. In a way, it feels inspired by the Phoebe Waller-Bridge-created spy thriller series Killing Eve, with the target and her handler another version of the assassin and the woman trying to catch her.”
Fallout
“Fallout can be quite ugly and self-serious … but it’s got a penchant for the goofy and eccentric, too. There’s a lot of blood, gore, and violence. Limbs are blown off, heads are chopped off, and dogs munch on giant roaches. On the flip side, the series balances it out by sewing replacement fingers (convenient) and scoring its violence at times to old-timey songs. Additionally, we have funny robots that won’t shut up, action movie tropes flipped on their head, and two hammered dudes running an organ-harvesting clinic.”
Sugar
“Forget riffing on classic film noirs, Sugar outright invokes them. And I’m not talking mentions. The Apple TV+ series goes further and slips in shots and dialogue from said films into its scenes. Like plonk them right in the middle. […] It’s obvious that creator Mark Protosevich … has a deep reverence for all things film noir. The era, the history, and the pop culture.”
Shōgun
“[Prefers] a statelier, proper tone in keeping with the Japanese culture of deference and politeness. There is a lot of talk of honour, loyalty, and seppuku—the ritualistic suicide practised by samurai in feudal Japan. And while it’s more contemplative on the whole, there are times when it cuts underneath that sheen. What I’m trying to say is that it has the capacity to be ugly and violent.”
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
“The show’s pacing and tone … are the most interesting things about it, as it rejects the notions you have of what makes a modern-day high-intensity espionage thriller. It’s sometimes more of a hangout show, with people existing and talking. Mr. & Mrs. Smith is in no artificial rush. It’s not constructed to make you feel the thrills—instead, it’s designed to explore the characters and the moments in between.”
Masters of the Air
“You don’t really see your enemy, as they are either zipping past you at jet speeds or firing anti-aircraft rounds from below (flak, as it was called then). There’s an eerie quiet between the two, and Masters of the Air perfectly captures that feeling. The respite from the constant flak bombardment turns into a sense of dread as the bombers scan for the German jets that are about to come and pick them off one by one.”
Killer Soup
“As with … cooking, [filmmaking is] a delicate arrangement of several ingredients in the correct order, the perfect amount, and just enough time. But the new Netflix series gets it wrong—and when you screw up the mix of camp and dark comedy, you threaten to turn into a farce. It’s an unappetising dish that’s crying for someone to hold back the salt. Sadly, the plate has already reached the table.”
Echo
“[Originally] developed and shot as an eight-episode miniseries, but … Kevin Feige reportedly deemed it ‘unreleasable’. [It] was ‘so bad’ that they ended up reshooting much of it. We’re left with five episodes … which have five screenwriters and eight story scribes […] It’s a sign of how often Echo has been rewritten, over and over. It’s also been reedited multiple times […] This is committee filmmaking to the nth degree.”