Well, that sure was a month, was it not? If November 2024 has left you feeling some kind of way, then at least TV has appropriate options for just about any mood. In search of insight into our chaotic present? Try The Madness. A lighthearted take on the health-care crisis? St. Denis Medical is the show for you. New ways of understanding political violence? Say Nothing and The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth present two very different perspectives. And if you just want to escape to a distant time and place, full of romance and melodrama and food porn? Hey, guess what, HBO adapted Like Water for Chocolate.
Like Water for Chocolate (HBO)
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Like Water for Chocolate is a melodrama in the best possible sense of the word—a larger-than-life historical epic of love and lust, birth and death, duty and destiny. Six years in the making, HBO’s version justifies its existence, three decades after the release of an excellent big-screen adaptation that became one of the highest-grossing foreign-language films in U.S. history, by embracing that melodrama, with all the intensity and sensuality it brings. Head writer Francisco Javier Royo Fernández and showrunner Jerry Rodríguez (part of a team of executive producers that includes Salma Hayek Pinault) also make the inspired and smartly executed decision to expand the story’s engagement with the political upheavals of its time. [Read the full review.]
The Madness (Netflix)
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Muncie Daniels is just trying to make his voice heard over the cacophony that passes for public discourse. An ambitious CNN commentator, the protagonist of the action-packed Netflix conspiracy thriller The Madness has been neglecting his disordered personal life and losing sight of his progressive values. But all that bland, commercially palatable careerism can’t prevent Muncie, played by the versatile Emmy winner Colman Domingo, from getting dragged into a war between the far right and the radical left, edgelord billionaires and misfits living communally at society’s fringes. In fact, that war threatens to annihilate everything he’s achieved.
It’s a timely premise, following a presidential election that empowered one extreme, alienated the other, and left the U.S. with an even noisier, more chaotic public square than we had before. Creator Stephen Belber (Tommy) and his co-showrunner, VJ Boyd (Justified), channel our collective exhaustion with the discourse into a ‘70s-style paranoid thriller grounded in the hyperpartisan polarization of today. [Read the full review.]
Say Nothing (FX)
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In 1972, at the bloody height of the Troubles, home invaders abducted a widowed mother of 10 named Jean McConville from her Belfast apartment. Her children never saw her alive again. The family spent decades demanding answers from the Irish Republican Army, which was known to have “disappeared” fellow Catholics at the time, as to what had become of McConville and why—a quest that propels Patrick Radden Keefe’s acclaimed 2018 book, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. Now the best seller has been adapted into an exceptional nine-episode FX miniseries, also titled Say Nothing, that resonates not only as a gripping true-crime drama, but also as an urgently timely work of political art. [Read the full review.]
St. Denis Medical (NBC)
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There are way too many medical shows on TV right now—without doctors, lawyers, and cops, broadcast prime-time would basically be sports and singing competitions—but this one feels unique among them, and not just because it’s a comedy. A mockumentary in the tradition of Abbott Elementary and Parks and Recreation, set within a beleaguered public institution populated (mostly) by committed employees, it also has the sly political insight of co-creator Justin Spitzer’s big-box store sitcom Superstore. And it’s promising enough to earn those comparisons. If the rest of the season is as strong as the six episodes I was able to screen, St. Denis could be the best network comedy since Abbott. [Read the full review.]
The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth (Nat Geo)
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For half a century now, the Stanford Prison Experiment has had pop-psychology buffs convinced of the so-called “power of the situation” to turn apparently good people into tyrants. After transforming the basement of a university building into an ersatz prison, Prof. Philip Zimbardo assigned white, male students to be either inmates or guards, ostensibly to see what happened when they stopped being polite and started getting carceral. Six days into what was supposed to be a two-week study, the cruelty guards were inflicting on prisoners caused him to shut it down. Zimbardo spent the rest of his career promoting his theory that humans are helpless against the evil that lies in wait within us to be triggered by circumstance. He even went so far as to defend American soldiers photographed torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib.
Yet over the years, colleagues have criticized and debunked the experiment, citing Zimbardo’s interventions and crucial details left out of his portrayal of what happened. In this invaluable three-part documentary, featuring interviews with subjects who hadn’t discussed the study for decades, Juliette Eisner begins with the story as most laypeople know it. Then, she complicates it with persuasive dissenting accounts from participants and critics. In its final installment, built around an interview with Zimbardo and a reunion of the inmates and guards, the series attempts to synthesize their divergent perspectives. The structure allows Eisner to build an effective case for the moral agency of individuals regardless of the systemic pressures they must shoulder.
Read more about Unlocking the Truth and what the Stanford Prison Experiment really means.
