“Beef”
There was something mildly schematic about the first season of Netflix’s dark comedy “Beef” that, for all the show’s virtues, undercut its central tension. Season Two, unfolding as all-out war against the backdrop of a tony country club, gives the series a sharper, more focused target. Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan play a wealthy, resentful couple trapped in a dead marriage, while Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton play employees who decide to weaponize that awfulness for their own social mobility. “Beef” is still a show that runs on barbed displays of cruelty, where the laughs are meant to draw blood, but the satirical attack feels cleaner this time around. Series creator Lee Sung Jin and Jake Schreier bring disarming control to the direction, while Youn Yuh-jung and Song Kang-ho add tremendous supporting turns. Three years after its first season, “Beef” remains a bruising comedy of resentment, class, performance, and mutually assured self-destruction. – NL [read our review]
“Margo’s Got Money Troubles”
Given the premise, “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” could have gone wrong in about a dozen different ways. A broke college dropout gets pregnant by her writing professor, has the baby, starts an OnlyFans account to stay afloat, and finds unexpected guidance from her estranged, ex-wrestler father. In lesser hands, that setup could have become a smug internet-age satire, a queasy morality tale, or a look-how-wild-this-is dramedy. Instead, David E. Kelley’s Apple TV adaptation of Rufi Thorpe’s 2024 novel keeps finding its way back to something more generous: the brutal, humiliating, often funny reality of trying to survive when the world has already decided what kind of person you are. Elle Fanning is terrific as a young mother who is overwhelmed, embarrassed, resourceful, and stubbornly alive to her own possibilities. The show never scolds her or turns her choices into a neat empowerment slogan; it treats sex work as labor, performance, compromise, and survival. Nick Offerman and Michelle Pfeiffer help round out the messy family orbit, but the show’s real subject is dignity: who gets to keep it, who gets stripped of it, and how someone claws some of it back anyway. – Rodrigo Perez [read our review]
“Widow’s Bay”
“Widow’s Bay” arrives with a premise that sounds almost too tidy: a quirky New England island town, an old local curse, creeping fog, and enough supernatural weirdness to make fans of “Twin Peaks,” “Eerie, Indiana,” and “Northern Exposure” perk up. But Katie Dippold’s Apple TV horror-comedy has a special alchemy all its own, understanding how much fun there is in letting small-town eccentricity rub up against genuine unease. Matthew Rhys anchors the series beautifully as a widowed mayor trying to keep the town’s tourist-friendly image intact while slowly realizing that its legends may not be nonsense. Stephen Root is predictably terrific as the local weirdo who might also be the only person willing to say the obvious out loud, while Kate O’Flynn gives the show a sharp, off-kilter emotional charge. What makes “Widow’s Bay” such a welcome surprise is its restraint. It has monsters, folklore, comedy, and dread, but never lets any one element overwhelm the others. – RP [read our review]
“Cape Fear”
The challenge with returning to “Cape Fear” is that the story has already been told well twice: first as J. Lee Thompson’s blunt 1962 thriller, then as Martin Scorsese’s sweaty, lurid, psychosexual 1991 remake. But Nick Antosca’s Apple TV miniseries finds a sharper contemporary reason to exist, transforming the Max Cady revenge nightmare into a story about true-crime addiction, parental panic, and the brutal ways misogyny and male violence seep into the culture around young men. Javier Bardem plays Cady as both a monster and a media object, an exonerated convict turned brooding, seductive figure onto whom others project their own needs. Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson are just as crucial, grounding the family-under-siege material in guilt, terror, and self-protection. It is sprawling by design, but that sprawl gives the menace a cultural charge. Cady is not just a boogeyman at the door; he is the awful thing the world keeps rewarding, watching, sexualizing, and turning into content. – RP [read our review]
“Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed”
For a show built around cam work, custody warfare, online intimacy, blackmail, and a woman who may or may not have witnessed a violent attack over video chat, “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” is less lurid than it sounds. Created by David J. Rosen, Apple TV’s dark comedy thriller understands that Paula, played with live-wire brilliance by Tatiana Maslany, is not defined by the worst or strangest thing she has done. Recently divorced and scrambling to keep her life together, Paula is lonely, horny, frightened, capable, ashamed, and far more resourceful than anyone around her seems willing to believe. The series could have treated her virtual relationship with a younger man as a cheap gotcha, but it never shames her for seeking companionship or release in a life that keeps tightening around her. When the mystery takes over, “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” becomes a tense survival story, but its best asset remains its generosity toward its protagonist. Jake Johnson, Brandon Flynn, Dolly de Leon, Murray Bartlett, Kiarra Hamagami, and Charlie Hall give the show welcome texture, but this is Maslany’s vehicle through and through. – RP [read our review]
