Tag: Apple TV

TV Room: ‘Extrapolations’

On By chrisbarsantiIn streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

My review of the Apple TV+ series Extrapolations ran on PopMatters:

One difference between The Day After Tomorrow and the release of Scott Z. Burns’ eight-episode Apple TV+ climate change anthology series Extrapolations in 2023 is that now the human causes of environmental disaster can be openly discussed in a big-budget science-fiction production. The issue has become less contentious as the potential for catastrophe looms. A broader swath of the public now understands that human activity is heating the planet. Even some diehard denialists have started to acknowledge the fact of sinking coastlines and scorching summers. While such half-hearted converts are often still resolutely opposed to conservation, preferring techno-solutions (cloud seeding, fusion reactors) or reality-detached boosterism (warming temperatures mean farming in Greenland!), this mind-shift is still progress…

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: ‘Slow Horses’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Books, streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

The new Apple TV series Slow Horses is an adaptation of the first entry in Mick Herron’s superbly semicomic spy novels. It stars Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas and premieres this Friday.

My review is at Slant:

The six-episode series at times recalls The Americans, with which it shares an executive producer, Graham Yost, and an appreciation for the workaday realities of spies’ tradecraft, as well as a tendency to resort to sudden bloodletting. Slow Horses similarly breathes life into a somewhat moribund genre due to its grumpy antihero, Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), and the nontraditional gaggle of spies whom he has to rely on to save the day…

Here’s the trailer: