What I'm Watching: Interview With the Vampire, Baby Reindeer, Bridgerton, and More

Also: The final season of Evil, some planets of some apes, a podcast about the best-worst reality show of the aughts, and more.

Here’s a (sort of) quick rundown of everything I’ve watched, read, and written about lately. Please read to the end for a note on the future of the newsletter!

The shows:

• I finally caught up with Baby Reindeer, the propulsive, horrifying Netflix drama that’s garnered countless headlines since it debuted in April. I think the show is incredible in its brutal honesty; it’s based on a true story, and the painstakingly introspective scripts often frame protagonist Donny (Richard Gadd, the writer, creator, and guy all of this really happened to) as nearly as unlikeable as his own violent stalker (played impeccably by Jessica Gunning). Still, this is at its core a complicated story about sexual assault, and I’m deeply disturbed by some of the confident victim-blaming surrounding the show. I won’t get into that here, but anyone who hasn’t seen Baby Reindeer yet should know that it’s dark, upsetting, taboo-shattering, and riveting.
• If you prefer your horrors purely fictional, it doesn’t get much better than the decadent and dramatic second season of Interview with the Vampire. The lofty, gorgeous adaptation of Anne Rice’s bonkers novel series takes its action to Paris this season, where mopey vamp Louis (an underrated Jacob Anderson, giving a master class in acting) and his child-like charge, Claudia (Delainey Hayles, seamlessly taking over for Bailey Bass) encounter a vampiric acting troupe led by enigmatic Armand (Assad Zaman). The show finds deliciously dark ways to utilize Lestat actor Sam Reid despite the drama king’s absence, and also introduces a few clever, meta wrinkles into the frame narrative that’s being shaped by grumpy human reporter Daniel (Eric Bogosian). I’m actually only an episode or two ahead of y’all right now – I have screeners, but I’m trying to savor this perfect slice of camp, horror, and deeply messed-up romance. The show’s on AMC, but if you don’t have cable, you can also catch it on Amazon Prime Video, Hoopla, and The Roku Channel.

• It’s a great month for scares on TV, as the batshit comedic horror series Evil is back for its final season on Paramount+. It’s pretty impossible to describe the deeply surreal paranormal/religious investigation show Evil to anyone who hasn’t seen it, but I will say that I don’t think any other series on television has a keener sense of the nonsensical times we’re living in. It has Tiktok possessions, workers at an Amazon-like company turning into zombies, and – in the new season – racist robot dogs. After a more esoteric, purposely ambiguous third season, I also find the clear-headedness of the latest story arc refreshing: you can read my full review on Dread Central.
• I’m sorry to say, the latest season of Bridgerton just isn’t doing it for me. The soapy Netflix drama seems to have lost focus in its third outing, reinventing itself as an ensemble drama with several uninteresting main characters when it could easily succeed by just letting star Nicola Coughlan shine. It’s great to see her fan favorite character in the spotlight, but neither (spoilers for the premiere here) the ton’s stubborn rejection of Penelope nor Colin’s weird ladies’ man makeover feel particularly believable. Things heat up a bit toward the end of the four-episode first installment, but for a show that’s meant to be like Jane Austen meets Gossip Girl, Bridgerton is not giving us nearly enough drama. Let’s hope the back half of the season is better.

The movies:

• I had a good time watching Carl Franklin’s tightly controlled 1995 neo-noir Devil in a Blue Dress this week. Noir films typically leave me pretty cold on an emotional level, and this one was no exception, but the movie feels fresh thanks to its strong visuals and focus on the ways in which the noir movie world functions differently for a Black antihero. Denzel Washington gives a great, understated performance as Easy Rawlins, a morally flexible man whose attempt to pay his L.A. mortgage leads him into the seedy world of corrupt politicians, racist cops, and a secretive femme fatale. Jennifer Beals and Don Cheadle are also aces. If you’re a fan of the recently axed Perry Mason reboot, this film will be your cup of tea.
• I’ve been saying “apes together strong!” about ten times a day lately, which can only mean that I’ve finally gotten into the new Planet of the Apes series. I’ve caught just two of the movies so far, but am hoping to round out my watch-through with the other two next week. While the second film, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, featured stunning CGI and some great worldbuilding, I actually find myself thinking most about the last third of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the janky introductory film from 2011. For most of its runtime, Rise seems like a sort of bad movie, but eventually James Franco leaves for a few scenes and it becomes obvious that he was the problem all along. The film’s primate revolution climax is straight-up fantastic, and it confidently sets up a future for the franchise in which viewers are firmly and forever on the side of the apes. Say it with me this time: apes together strong!

The reads:

• This article from Futurism about an AI company that’s allegedly provided nonsensical writing for outlets ranging from The Los Angeles Times to People to Good Housekeeping – often without said companies apparently realizing it was AI – is the wildest thing I’ve read all year. It’s explosive, rife with bizarre, stupider-than-fiction twists and turns, and it feels like it could mark a turning point for companies that clearly need to take AI restrictions into their own hands as legislation fails to catch up to technology. This piece has also got the quality of true muckraking about it, as reporters uncovered a link between the company and their own site’s parent company while investigating. WILD!
• It’s been a good month for celebrity profiles. I really like both The LA Times’ talk with Jonathan Bailey, and The New York Times’ sit-down with Anya Taylor-Joy. The latter is an especially insightful and troubling look at an actress attempting in real time to sort through what was clearly a tough experience on the set of Furiosa. I admire her choice to sit with whatever she went through a bit longer before trying to talk publicly about it.
• On the books front, I recently finished up Angie Kim’s courtroom drama Miracle Creek and found it both outlandish and incredibly interesting. I loved Kim’s most recent novel, Happiness Falls, so I decided to seek out her earlier bestseller – an uncomfortable, Rashomon-style perspective-shifter about the aftermath of an oxygenated "autism treatment" chamber explosion. Kim is great at dropping readers squarely in the minds of deeply flawed characters, and she weaves an impressively tricky web of a mystery here, but I still found myself less-than-satisfied with the book’s twist-stuffed conclusion. 
• I’m finally done reading an assortment of works by French playwright Molière, who I’ve decided was sexist, obnoxious, neurotic, daring, and very funny. I think I mentioned Tartuffe a few weeks back, and I've since checked out The Misanthrope (which is fun and full of middle school-level dramatic antics), The School For Wives (which is scandalous and silly, with Shakespeare-level misunderstandings a great ending), and The Learned Ladies (which is sort of a mess, but includes a level of arch satire that reminds me of The Great). I’m not chomping at the bit to recommend Molière’s works to friends, but I enjoyed doing the deep dive as part of my mission to read more classics.

Odds and ends:

• I spoke to past and current showrunner Russell T. Davies about the new run of Doctor Who for IGN, and had a blast. So much of our in-depth conversation did not make it into this feature, but it was great to hear him speak openly about the aspects of making TV that showrunners sometimes pretend don’t exist, like marketing, budgets, and getting feedback from the network. If you want more on Who thoughts from me, here’s a piece I wrote about Susan Foreman and another about that ambitious 'historical' cameo in “The Devil’s Chord.”
• Here’s that Luca Guadagnino movie ranking I teased a while back!
• Slashfilm has been really into the title formulation “The Only [insert actor name here] Movie That Has A Perfect Score on Rotten Tomatoes” lately, and I’m using it as an opportunity to dust off the reference books and dig into the real story behind films' critical response – the one that Rotten Tomatoes percentages often fail to tell. For example: I found out Marilyn Monroe’s most critically adored movie on RT was actually fairly widely panned when it came out, to the point that the criticism solidified her lifelong problems with the press. More on that here.
• I’m frankly losing it over the existence of the new CBC podcast Split Screen: Kid Nation, which tells a story I’ve wanted to hear for more than half my life. The pod re-examines the unbelievable U.S. reality show that (not kidding!) once dropped 40 kids into the desert and told them to make their own society in 2007. I was still a kid myself when the show came out, and was both an unabashed fan of it and blissfully unaware of the controversies that roiled around its edges since before it even aired. Most retrospectives on Kid Nation frame it as an obviously horrible, dangerous idea, but Split Screen gets into the nitty-gritty of how the show worked – and didn’t – with extensive interviews with castmates, producers, and others. Like all great reality TV reporting, it also couches the series in the weird, specific cultural and political context in which it was made.
• A quick apology: I was effusive about Hearts of Darkness a few weeks back, and while I still think it’s a great documentary, I only recently learned about Frances Ford Coppola’s financial ties to convicted pedophile Victor Salva. A new report also came out alleging that Coppola was inappropriate with actors during filming for Megalopolis. I love his movies, but I won’t mince words here: that sucks! Fuck that guy! I don’t expect famous people to be moral simply because they’re good at making art, but I wanted to acknowledge this and apologize to anyone who may have been put off by my fairly warm characterization of him before.

You may have noticed, but I’ve been experimenting with something new this month: dropping newsletters every other week instead of every week. This is something I want to try out for a few reasons. Aside from it sometimes working better for my schedule, it also allows me to deliver a more robust newsletter even in cases when embargoes prevent me from writing about half the stuff I’m watching. That being said, I don’t want to end up delivering newsletters that are so long as to be unwieldy (this one is an example of that, sorry), so it’s a delicate balance. 

After reaching out to every paid subscriber for feedback on a bi-weekly model, I’ve decided to try a sort of hybrid model this summer to see what feels right. If it’s a lean week, I’ll do the every-other-week model, but if I’ve got tons to tell you about, the newsletter will remain weekly. This will hopefully cut down on what I like to call “publication date drift” on my end as well, so newsletters should appear in your inbox via a more predictable Monday-ish drop. Paid subscribers will still receive exclusive access to every third post (like this one!). Of course, if you eagerly await the newsletter each week and desperately want it to stay that way, please let me know – your opinion makes a difference here!

I’ll share this news with free subscribers next week, but in the meantime, thanks for your support and insight. As always, you can also drop me a line in the comments or elsewhere and let me know what you’ve been watching, reading, listening to, loving, or hating lately.