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Not all TV shows need to run for years to tell their story right. For anybody looking to watch a one-and-done season, The Atlantic’s writers and editors answer the question: What is your favorite miniseries?
The Night Of (streaming on HBO Max)
Americans can’t seem to get enough of murder mysteries, and Hollywood can’t seem to stop making them. But few, if any, can hold their own against The Night Of.
The 2016 miniseries starts with—what else?—a murder. Nasir Khan, a scrawny Pakistani American college student living with his parents in Queens, sneaks out and drives his dad’s taxi to a party in Manhattan. When he forgets to turn off the on duty light, a chatty woman named Andrea flags him down, and they end up back at her place for a night of drugs and sex. Nasir wakes up to find Andrea stabbed to death and has no memory of what happened. When forensic evidence puts Nasir at the scene, he’s locked up and charged with murder. But did he really kill her?
The Night Of unravels the yarn with lurid details and lots of plot twists. The characters are well developed and unpredictable—perhaps none more so than John Stone, Nasir’s gruff public-defense attorney. Played by John Turturro, he spends almost as much time trying to free Nasir from prison as he does kvetching about his eczema. But the real genius of The Night Of is how it inverts the whodunit: The question of who killed Andrea is secondary to the devastating toll the murder leaves on everyone else.
— Saahil Desai, senior editor
***
Unorthodox (streaming on Netflix)
Unorthodox premiered in March 2020: kind of the perfect time for a show about breaking out of confinement. Based on a memoir of the same name, it begins with an escape. Esty Shapiro, a 19-year-old woman from a Hasidic Jewish sect in Brooklyn, pockets a secret wad of cash, picks up a passport, and hops on a plane to Berlin, all set to the tense soundtrack of a thriller. Through flashbacks, we see how she’s come to feel stifled in her old life—by an arranged marriage in which she has little power, by the constant surveillance from her neighbors, by the hard limits set on her future. And we’re with her as she explores the world anew: putting on lipstick in a club bathroom, letting her wig float off in the ocean, falling in love.
The series doesn’t vilify ultra-Orthodox Judaism; it makes a point to humanize those Esty left behind (especially the two people, including her husband, who try to track her down in Germany). Unorthodox is compelling, in fact, because it captures a near-universal tension—between the deep roots of community and the dream of a different life, even if it demands risk and sacrifice and hurting the ones you love. Esty’s choice is never presented as an easy one. But deep in pandemic isolation, I loved watching her pursue freedom.
— Faith Hill, staff writer
***
The English Game (streaming on Netflix)
Sports fans and Downton Abbey connoisseurs may sound like an unusual pairing, but this six-part series about an underdog British team is sure to satisfy both. The English Game (developed by Downton’s creator, Julian Fellowes) is a charming yet provocative look at the origins of soccer—or, more aptly, football—in 19th-century England.
The show reveals the dramatics of the posh upper-class (back then, football was a sport for the wealthy) and follows how a working-class team makes its way to the Football Association finals, only to come up against an aristocratic club that has long held the champion title. It’s a story about social hierarchies, tradition, and how one game can reflect the values of a changing era.
— Grace Buono, assistant editor
***
Normal People (streaming on Hulu)
Plenty of people enjoy Normal People, a 12-episode romantic drama, for the will-they-won’t-they of it all. Bookish, awkward Marianne falls in love with the much more popular Connell at school in small-town Ireland. She doesn’t know how to behave around him, and he’s a little embarrassed to be seen with her. When they both end up at university in Dublin, their roles reverse: Marianne runs with the cool, intellectual crowd, while Connell struggles to fit in.
But I love the show because it makes me feel a little sad. As with every project associated with Sally Rooney, whose 2018 novel the show is based on, Normal People is a moody tapestry of yearning and feelings left maddeningly unsaid. It isn’t comforting, exactly, but it is comfortably melancholy, like a rainy day spent wrapped in a blanket.
In my favorite episode, several characters gather in Italy for a weekend getaway. The scene is idyllic, but the characters are suffering—from jealousy and longing and an overall failure to communicate. A dinner in the garden soon devolves into pretentious sniping and, ultimately, an altercation that leaves a wine glass and a relationship in ruins. Beautiful, devastating, delicious.
— Elaine Godfrey, staff writer
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The Perfect Couple (streaming on Netflix)
The show opens on the eve of Amelia’s marriage into the über-wealthy Winbury family at their Nantucket estate. But like all good soapy murders, a body—the maid of honor’s—soon (literally) washes up, plunging the entire wedding party into delightful whodunit mayhem. Based on the Elin Hilderbrand book of the same name, the series has it all: drugs, sex, gilded voyeurism into the world of one-percenters, characters named Tag Winbury and Shooter Dival, and, of course, Nicole Kidman—offering the sort of performance (all moody vibes and subtle facial shadows) that made me love her in Big Little Lies and The Undoing.
But here is the series’ true secret: It is a little campy, a little rollicking, utterly bingeable, and utterly ephemeral. Or, to put it another way, The Perfect Couple is a bit like cotton candy—delicious and then gone. It doesn’t sit heavy or make you contemplate anything existential (even as I write this, I can barely remember who killed whom, or why). What has stayed with me, however, is the flash-mob dance scene during the opening credits, in which the entire cast—including Dakota Fanning, Kidman, and Liev Schreiber—struts and shakes on the sand in their Nantucket cocktail finest to Meghan Trainor’s “Criminals.” Now, months after I first watched the miniseries in a single sitting, I still smile whenever I catch those lyrics: “Anything that feels this good, well, it must be illegal.”
— Ashley Parker, staff writer
***
Death By Lightning (streaming on Netflix)
A recent miniseries, Death By Lightning, had me fixated on what was a bit of unfamiliar history. The four-episode show is about the 1881 assassination of President James Garfield (played by Michael Shannon) by a mentally ill con man, Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen). The sumptuous beards alone are worth the watch. This is ultimately a story about America and the kinds of dreamers the country produces: Garfield was an idealist, and Shannon portrays him with earnestness and purpose—a man devoted to his family but also to moral causes, including keeping Reconstruction from falling apart. Guiteau, in his way, is also depicted as a dreamer. A uniquely American character, he is always scheming, always planning to turn things around and sure that he will—up until a noose is placed around his neck (a diametrically worse fate, I should add, than what happened to Macfadyen’s Succession character).
History doesn’t always lend itself well to television, and these figures don’t exactly have the name recognition of Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth. But the show is smartly paced and structured as a collision course between two protagonists and what they represent: a serious man who wants to fight corruption and speak to our better angels, and a chronic loser who nevertheless believes in his own value, if only the world would just recognize it.
— Gal Beckerman, staff writer
Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
- American milk has changed.
- Russell Shaw: Let your kids fail.
- You’ve never seen Super Bowl betting like this before.
The Week Ahead
- Wuthering Heights, an adaptation (starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie) of the 1847 novel by Emily Brontë (in theaters Friday)
- The Laws of Thought, a book by the cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths on the history and future of using mathematics to understand how humans formalize thought (out Tuesday)
- Season 2 of Like Water for Chocolate, a six-episode conclusion to the adaptation of Laura Esquivel’s novel about a forbidden romance during the Mexican Revolution (out Sunday on HBO Max)
Essay
The Man Who Broke Physics
By Sally Jenkins
One of the pleasures of watching Ilia Malinin, apart from his indifference to gravity, is to witness him becoming. Becoming a world champion, as opposed to a juvenile with a skate-park mentality and a face like a Disney prince. Becoming a master of quadruple jumps that no one else can land, rising with all the ease of a young Michael Jordan—before landing on a pair of butcher knives, on ice.
Sometimes there are evolutionary leaps in sport, the arrival of athletes so physically dynamic, they widen the eyes with incredulity: the gymnast Simone Biles thundering in the air, the swimmer Michael Phelps coursing through the water with a wake like an attack boat’s. Malinin is one of these. In December, while refining his routine for his first Olympic Games, in Milan, the 21-year-old figure skater landed seven quadruple jumps in competition, spinning like a weather vane in a windstorm. No other competitor landed more than four.
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Catch Up on The Atlantic
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Photo Album
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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