Valerie Ettenhofer

No one captures the world quite like John Wilson. For three seasons now, the filmmaker has begun his HBO documentary series “How To With John Wilson” with the greeting “Hey, New Yorkers!” But as the show reaches its natural endpoint with the latest…

There has never been a TV character like Devi Vishwakumar. Lang Fisher and Mindy Kaling’s snappy and sweet teen comedy “Never Have I Ever” has long since felt like an example of the power of highly specific points of view in storytelling, and in its…

Brooke Shields was pretty, even as a baby. Everyone knew it at the time, from her mother and manager, Teri Shields, to the grown men who were eager to get her nude in front of a camera from the age of ten to the legions of fans who felt a sense of…

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Joe Goldberg wants to change. At the outset of the fourth season of Netflix’s show “You,” the stalker and serial killer protagonist, played by Penn Badgley, has once again absconded from his past life, leaving…

Think about the worst guy you know. What about the second-worst guy? Keep this up for a while longer, then combine them all, and you might start to get a mental picture of the world-class jerk at the center of “Bad Sisters.” The new Apple TV+ series…

“Five Days at Memorial” is about as bleak as television gets. The series is meant to be that way; based on a non-fiction book by Sheri Fink, it’s set in a hospital during the direct aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As a medical thriller, it’s…

Anyone who has so much as turned on a television this year can tell you there is too much true crime. The genre has reached a saturation point: the stories are becoming thinner and are being repeated in different forms until they feel threadbare. A…

The world of “Angelyne” is hot pink. It’s a pink that can’t be described in terms of bubble gum or cotton candy because no one in the world would ever invent something pink enough to make this pink’s namesake. Except, maybe, Angelyne (here played by…

Sally Rooney’s stories of deconstructed yearnings and anxious young adulthoods have been the talk of the literary scene since 2017, when the author’s debut, “Conversations With Friends,” was published to acclaim. Her second novel, “Normal People,”…

Candy Montgomery (Jessica Biel) packs her colorful circular Tupperware with breaded meats and whipped cream Jell-o monstrosities. She brings a picnic patterned tablecloth to the run-down hotel where she’s meeting her friend’s husband, Alan (Pablo…

The Byrde family wants out of the money laundering business once and for all. Viewers of Netflix’s “Ozark” have heard this before, as it’s an oft-repeated refrain that’s carried cutthroat married couple Wendy (Laura Linney) and Marty (Jason Bateman)…

The new women-centric Apple TV+ anthology series “Roar” is extremely literal. Across its eight episodes, a trophy wife lives on a shelf, an ignored woman disappears, and a frustrated wife returns her husband to a big box store. Its short fables are…

Toni Collette’s back-catalog of memorable mothers continues to grow. She’s played maternal figures who are tender (“The Sixth Sense”), terrifying (“Hereditary”), and complicated (“The United States of Tara”). Now, in Netflix’s new series “Pieces of…

It’s not as easy to bring a conspiracy to life on screen as it once was. Gone are the days of seedy thrillers and neo-noirs operating on the now-laughable premise that corruption is invisible to the average person’s naked eye. Closer on the horizon,…