What I'm Watching: Heartstopper, Rye Lane, How To Become A Cult Leader, and More

Joe Locke, Kit Connor, Heartstopper, Netflix

Here’s the rundown of everything I watched, read, and wrote about this week:

The shows:

• Netflix’s much-loved coming-of-age romance show Heartstopper is back for its second season this week, and it’s pretty dang lovely. Its teen relationship plots play out with an almost fantasy-like tenderness, which means its world can border on overly quaint (for me) at times, but two talented leads and emotionally nuanced writing keep the whole thing just on the right side of the cute/cutesy dichotomy.
• I’m still making my way through a bunch of docuseries for a project, and this week I watched some borderline-sleazy ones. Dark Side of the 2000s (a show that’s only available to me on something called Philo) positions itself as a more nuanced version of those trashy E! Channel series looking back at celebrity meltdowns, and it is to an extent. But it still can’t quite escape the legacy of talking head retrospectives that are mostly just glorified rubbernecking. I learned a lot about Jon and Kate Plus 8, though!
• The new Netflix docuseries How To Become A Cult Leader wasn’t much better. It’s a somewhat glib overview of six infamous cults narrated by Peter Dinklage, and while it has some great, creative visuals and interviews with cult survivors, it’s more focused on making quippy observations than actually diving deep into the topics at hand.

[Note for new subscribers: every third post of my Substack is for paid subscribers only, so you’re getting paywalled here, but next week you’ll get the full shebang, I promise!]