When is a ghost not a ghost? How much awesome? —Matt Brennan, Created by: Adam Lee Stars: Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Louisa Harland, Nicola Coughlan, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, Dylan Llewellyn Original Network: Channel 4, The lovely, silly, funny and emotional Derry Girls has returned to Netflix for Season Two. It’s cerebral and emotional.
Between her confident translation of Martin’s original characters, the natural-but-goofy cinematic language brought to the table by Lucia Aniello and a raft of other (mostly female) directors, plus the endless charm of the series’ young core cast, this newest adaptation is a dream. Fergus encourages his teammates to move out farther and pass more, something we’ve seen Spanish players in just the last decade take to an exceptional art form. When is a horror story not a horror story? And yes, those looking for Outlander levels of long-haired, musclebound shirtlessness will find what they seek. I watched it with my husband and didn’t even let him know there was a secret and he still guessed it within minutes of the show’s opening. —Nick Marino, Created by: Raphael Bob-Waksberg Stars: Will Arnett, Aaron Paul, Amy Sedaris, Paul F. Tompkins Original Network: Netflix, BoJack Horseman is one of the most underrated comedies ever made, and it almost pains me that it doesn’t earn more praise. Bookmark this page and come back as more series are added to Netflix (and some may be taken away) each month. —Garrett Martin, Created by: Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski Stars: Sterling K. Brown, Cuba Gooding Jr, Sarah Paulson, David Schwimmer, John Travolta / Darren Criss, Edgar Ramirez, Penelope Cruz, Ricky Martin Original Network: FX, Watch People vs OJ Well, maybe “inconsistency” is the wrong word. The Societyisn’t remotely interested in spending a lot of time on the whys or wheres of the teens’ new reality. Why would they give their life for him?”, Waco humanizes the story, making not only Koresh (Taylor Kitsch) but also his followers fully developed characters. The question is never a whodunnit, but instead asks why. Through videogames, coding assignments, nascent ideas tied to the web’s wide reach, Halt and Catch Fire suggests, Joe and Gordon (Scoot McNairy) and Donna (Kerry Bishé) and Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) complete the circuits of affection at the heart of all human endeavor, and so discover life’s “one constant”: “It’s you. The way it curbs our freedom, diminishes our privacy, and subjects us to anonymous attacks can feel like an unforgivable violation. And maybe that was its appeal. For better or worse, the Netflix horror series is as tasty, messy, and fleeting as an ice cream cone on a hot summer’s day. Praise hands emoji. Paul Spector is a stalker, as exacting and methodical as his eventual pursuer. It’s us,” as Donna says in the series’ sublime finale. —Mike Mudano and Allison Keene. In between are beautifully nuanced episodes as Ansari’s Dev Shah tries to navigate his love life and his career.
The creep factor is important (and occasionally actually scary or super gory), but it acts as an almost funny juxtaposition to the otherwise happy-go-lucky look at suburban life. It’s wickedly bawdy—one episode’s end credits roll over an extended description of Andrew’s dad’s testicles—and devilishly funny—another uses a note-perfect Seinfeld send-up to explain the blowjob “head push” and the term “mons pubis”—but as implied by its theme song, Charles Bradley’s “Changes,” the series is sweeter than it appears. Or is it? It’s also a blue collar story that isn’t just about being poor in East Texas, but that desperation informs everything that happens in this wacky yet soulful series. Sometimes it’s messy, but that’s what GLOW is all about. Like its namesake, The Baby-Sitters Club (Netflix edition) is funny, sweet, and emotionally complex. While they learn intricate spells, Quentin and his friends and frenemies Eliot, Margo, Alice, Penny, Josh, Kady, and Julia discover other magical worlds and complicated magical problems that they never knew existed—like baby-stealing fairies. Brotherhood has a sizeable cast of characters all of different nationalities and ideologies, with motivations that often oppose one another—the show manages to use these moving forces to form factions, alliances and foils that flow in multiple directions, paralleling the often messy, always chaotic nature of human relationships during wartime. A big theme on the show is that you can’t magic depression away. In Season One, he’s trapped in a hospital in his head, as if he were stuck in a dream. Away is a 10-episode crowd pleaser. Russian Doll: Natasha Lyonne is a video game developer who relives the same day over and over again. Through the first season’s 12 episodes—and the recent Christmas special follow this assortment of confused and beautiful people as they try to understand this connection, use their newfound abilities to help one another, and engage in not one but two blissfully queer orgies. The Society gives its modern, engaged audience a co-ed spread of hormonal high schoolers, left behind by a fleet of school buses that (returning from an aborted end-of-year camping trip) drop them off in the middle of the night in an empty, uncanny double of their idyllic New England hometown.