Widow's Bay
My favorite TV show that’s on right now. It balances comedy and horror so well and Matthew Rhys gets to fire on all cylinders.
Stephen Colbert Hosts “Only In Monroe”
One day after his CBS finale, Stephen Colbert released a one-hour YouTube episode of “Only in Monroe.” I hope he continues doing these for as long as he can. It has that shaggy, smart, and impulsive energy of mid-90s Conan, Letterman, and Talk Soup. Colbert finally feels like he’s back in his element.
The Agency
The Agency is high-level competency porn, and I mean that as praise. It trusts you to keep up. The show doesn’t underline every revelation or explain every shift in the room. You’re usually one step behind the characters, which makes catching up feel like a reward. The dialogue is crisp, cutting, and kinetic. It’s the buttoned-up government version of Succession: people weaponizing process, hierarchy, and institutional fluency because that’s the language they all speak. Fassbender is, unsurprisingly, very good. But John Magaro quietly steals the show as a desk agent putting his neck out in the field. The whole thing is tense, smart, and allergic to spoon-feeding. Exactly my kind of spy show.
Mr. Inbetween
Mr. Inbetween wrecked me because it never asks you to solve Ray. Scott Ryan gives a performance that feels completely lived-in and still impossible to fully read. Ray is funny, calm, terrifying, gentle, exhausted, loyal, and capable of ruining someone’s life before lunch. The show moves from crime drama to black comedy to something painfully heartfelt without ever losing control of its tone. Even the violence isn’t flashy. It’s treated with the same mundaneness as his home life, which somehow makes it hit harder when the show decides it should. That split is what makes it stick. Ray can be a good man to his family and a bad man to the world, and the show never lets one truth erase the other. His relationship with his daughter is special because it isn’t there to redeem him. It’s just love: plain, funny, protective, flawed love. I can’t stop thinking about him.
