It’s miserable outside. Good thing there’s so much great new television to watch—more than enough to tide you over until spring.
You may have already binged Netflix’s The End of the F***ing World, whose eight 20-minute episodes are a brisk, caustic treat. The British show bills itself as a dark comedy, but turns out to be something else: a poignant study of the trauma of adolescence, depicted in the form of a crime spree by two sad—but very winning—teens (Jessica Barden and Alex Lawther). That it gets so many of its melancholy notes just right without succumbing to agonizing bleakness is a minor miracle. (And shouts to poor Frodo—let’s hope he has better luck in season two.)
The other must-see streaming show is Amazon’s Electric Dreams, a 10-episode anthology series based on the stories of science fiction master Philip K. Dick. Like Black Mirror, each self-contained episode is hit or miss (and frankly, it’s baffling that Amazon chose to drop Electric Dreams immediately after we got Black Mirror’s fourth season), but when one of these stories works, it’s like nothing else on TV… not even Black Mirror.
Out of the six episodes of Electric Dreams I’ve watched, the best is probably “The Commuter,” starring the always fantastic Timothy Spall as a railroad worker who discovers a stop on his train line that isn’t on any of the timetables. The story tantalizes at first, and then confuses, but gradually reveals a painful emotionality, as evidenced by Spall’s haunted, heartrending expression.