Daniel Daddario: Last News

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The story of Kim Philby is perhaps too good to make up. The British spy, a double agent for Moscow, operated at the highest levels of the intelligence community; his ability to disseminate information to the Soviet Union, to which he eventually defected, is proof, perhaps, of the power of personal charm and erudition to cover over what’s lying in plain sight. That’s the powerfully told story of “A Spy Among Friends,” which streamed on ITVX in the United Kingdom last year and which now arrives on nascent streamer MGM+. Guy Pearce plays Philby, who has at the series’ outset been a valued Soviet source for many years; likely his closest friend in tradecraft, Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis), must get a confession from him. We see the pair’s relationship over time in layered flashbacks, adding context and understanding to Elliott’s failure to nail down Philby.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic As a performer, Kerry Washington is particularly adept at conveying uptightness — her crispness of bearing and her rat-a-tat delivery suggest a certain passion for organization, for rigor. This was the ingredient that helped elevate “Scandal,” and the emotionally chaotic but professionally fastidious character of Olivia Pope. (And, incidentally, it’s the aspect that made Washington’s work as a free-spirited artist in “Little Fires Everywhere” ring somewhat false.) Now, on the Hulu sitcom “UnPrisoned,” Washington’s back to the angle that suits her best — and at the heart of a sweetly intended show of disarming quality. Here, Washington plays Paige, a relationship therapist whom viewers may not be shocked to learn hasn’t quite got herself figured out. Her tendency to dispense advice about fixing romantic partnerships (both to her patients and, we see, on social media) rubs up against the fact that she makes poor choices. We learn, gradually, about the role model she’s emulating in her own way: Her father, Edwin, newly released from prison, is at once astoundingly charismatic (no surprise, given that he’s played by Delroy Lindo) and someone with an entangled personal life. He moves in with her and her teenage son (​​Faly Rakotohavana), kicking off what will be a major reckoning for both parties. Soon enough, Paige’s desire for order — her need to project a sense of having it all together, even as that’s not quite true — becomes an impossibility.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic As is well known by anyone who’s ever had the common nightmare of a last-minute test for which one hasn’t studied, being stuck in high school forever would be horrible. But that’s exactly what seems to be happening to Maddie Nears (Peyton List), who, after having been killed on the grounds of her school, joins a group of ghosts who haunt the premises. Coming from different eras, the spirits whose number Maddie joins share little, except for a jaded sense of resignation to their fate; they coach Maddie through the early days of her afterlife, in which she can see what unfolds around her but, at least at first, cannot make herself known to the friends she left behind on Earth.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic There’s a thrilling moment a little before the halfway point of Amazon’s new limited series “Daisy Jones & the Six” in which two stars collide. The ethereal vocalist Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) has been invited to perform her collaboration with a rising rock band (no points for guessing their moniker), but crashes the stage a bit early and then refuses to leave after her one song has been performed. Daisy and the Six’s lead singer Billy (Sam Claflin) share the microphone for a while, if “share” is the word for what one does in a battle for territory; faces close together, they’re competing for real estate, competing for a claim on the song they sing, competing to be heard.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Vinnie Hacker, a 20-year-old TikTok star who appeared in Netflix docu-series “Hype House,” has signed for representation with CAA. Hacker is a “Gen Z powerhouse,” per CAA, with more than 25 million followers across platforms including more than 15 million on TikTok and 5.7 million on Instagram. Building on his popularity on social media, he has expanded his endeavors into other areas including gaming, modeling, television and his own clothing line. In 2021, Hacker joined L.A.-based social-media collective The Hype House and subsequently starred in last year’s Netflix original series “Hype House.” (Variety‘s Daniel D’Addario, in his review of the show, said it “tells a depressing story of TikTok fameseeking.”)

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Give the team behind “The Consultant” this much — they managed to find just the right lead. Christoph Waltz, whose glower and verbosity have won him two Academy Awards, surfaces now on Amazon Prime Video as a malign expert in business and in manipulation. After a tragedy involving the founder of the app gaming outfit CompWare (the name may give a sense of how carefully the script is written), Waltz’s Regus Patoff enters to right the ship. His claim on the company is unclear to its employees, but soon enough, he’s occupying close to all of their mental real estate, calling them at all hours and asking invasive personal questions that some force of charisma or of mind control makes them feel compelled to answer.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic After six seasons, Milo Ventimiglia — a star who began his career as Stars Hollow’s resident hellion on “Gilmore Girls” — is freed up from playing the benevolent patriarch on “This Is Us.” And, at least in theory, his new series brings together the two halves of his TV career. On ABC’s “The Company You Keep,” based on the Korean series “My Fellow Citizens,” Ventimiglia plays a con artist, but one who’s utterly committed to his parents (William Fichtner and Polly Draper) and adult sister (Sarah Wayne Callies). The conflict between obligations to loved ones and the desire to get out of the game creates tension and interest in the show’s first two episodes, as does genuine chemistry with co-star Catherine Haena Kim.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Before entering an ostrich enclosure, Frank, an animal control officer, sneaks something into his partner’s back pocket. It’s a stick of jerky, and within moments, Frank is openly guffawing as the flightless birds are chasing his hapless colleague. That’s the general vibe of “Animal Control,” a new sitcom on Fox. Here, “Community” alumnus Joel McHale plays Frank, a former cop who got fired after trying to root out corruption. (This is a neat trick in sidestepping the ongoing national conversation about policing — our complicated protagonist got removed from the force for being too virtuous.) His partner, a Fred who goes by Shred (Michael Rowland), arrived on this particular force through an unconventional path as well; he’s a former pro snowboarder whose laid-back affect suggests that, inside, he never really left the slopes.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Last year, Apple TV+ had a zeitgeist hit with “Severance,” a show that leveraged a high-polish gleam and an eerily out-of-time aesthetic to tell a story of people who were ultimately strangers to themselves. The streamer could be said to be attempting the same feat twice with “Hello Tomorrow!,” set in a 1950s idea of the future and centering an affably empty salesman played by Billy Crudup. Here, though, the ideas are unrewarding enough that the worked-over look of the show grows tiresome, as though it’s covering for a lack in the series’ writing. Created by Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, “Hello Tomorrow!” features Crudup in something like the mode for which he won an Emmy as “The Morning Show’s” devious executive. Here, he plays Jack, a wheel-spinning operator who is selling timeshares on the moon. His customers are people who, as in our collective memory of our nation’s midcentury past, have a fixation on the possibilities space offers but who, unlike ‘50s Americans,— see getting there as feasible. Joey, the young man Jack takes under his wing (Nicholas Podany), is an ungifted salesman at first. But he makes an emotional impression upon Jack, who is concealing that he is Joey’s father.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic As it’s gone on, Ryan Murphy’s Netflix deal has revealed how many topics fascinate him — and how rigidly fixed in the past are his manners of addressing them. Has he been able to get beyond the franchises he started on FX? Consider, for instance, his recent smash “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story”; the surfeit of punctuation in the title seems to suggest a sublimated desire to call it what it is, another installment of the true-life “American Crime Story” in all but name. “Halston’s” gilded retelling of recent-ish celebrity culture recalled “Feud,” with the adversaries, perhaps, being the designer and his own ego. And now, with his new series “The Watcher,” Murphy has reverse-engineered an “American Horror Story,” taking a true story and finding within or beyond its nuances some Murder House melodramatics.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic In late summer 2020, “The Vow” emerged as a creepily potent hit docuseries, which grew virally as it rolled out. Plunging deep within little-understood “self-help group”-turned-cult NXIVM to examine the hold leader Keith Raniere had over his acolytes, the documentary series excelled when depicted sympathetic people in situations the average viewer likely could not imagine. How had these women allowed things to get so out of control that they’d agreed to be branded, or to starve themselves, or to voluntarily hand over compromising materials for potential blackmail? “The Vow” had no hard answers, but it was exacting and thorough in posing the questions. Almost too thorough, perhaps: Its new follow-up, “The Vow, Part Two,” is three episodes shorter, and has a tighter focus that benefits its storytelling. Having established NXIVM’s methods of exerting control over women in the first go-round, director Jehane Noujaim (without Karin Amer this time) examines the legal repercussions for Raniere, who was charged with crimes including sex trafficking and conspiracy in a 2019 trial. The process of trying Raniere brings new revelations about NXIVM methods to light, and spurs testimony to Noujaim’s camera from sources including co-founder Nancy Salzman and various ardent Raniere defenders. As storytelling, this is crisper and cleaner than “The Vow’s” first iteration; as psychological portrait, little in the nonfiction space of late matches its acuity.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic “Bombay felt exhilaratingly free, a place where everyone started new.” That’s Lin Ford, played by Charlie Hunnam, speaking to us in voice-over about the city where he hopes to begin again. Today known as Mumbai, the Indian metropolis is many things; on “Shantaram,” it’s the staging ground for a white fugitive to lose and find himself. It’s that dynamic that tends to frustrate over the course of a long season. Based on the novel by Gregory David Roberts and executive produced by Steve Lightfoot, “Shantaram” is set in the 1980s, in the wake of Lin’s prison break. Making his way out of an Australian penal institution in the pilot episode, Lin, a recovering heroin addict, seeks to disappear into a city of millions before, potentially, moving on, but is perpetually drawn toward an intriguing, possibly amoral woman named Karla (Antonia Desplat). Rooted in place by this sense of nascent romance and by a growing affection for the place and its people, Lin begins establishing a life, even while repeatedly telling us that he’s aware that his past — his identity as a wanted man and his knowledge that he’s being urgently sought by the authorities — makes all of this a holiday from reality.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Mike Flanagan has, of late, distinguished himself as one of Netflix’s signature creators and as a generational figure in the horror genre; though his past series for the streamer, including “Midnight Mass” and “The Haunting of Hill House,” have been of various quality overall and from episode to episode, they’re consistently interesting. His willingness to engage ideas with his scares sets him apart, perhaps more than it should. So it is with “The Midnight Club,” which Flanagan and Leah Fong co-created based on the work of YA novelist Christopher Pike. Here, Iman Benson plays Ilonka, a college-bound high school salutatorian who receives a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Ilonka is both a star student and an idealist; she researches Brightcliffe, a facility to which her foster father can take her to be placed into hospice, and holds in reserve a secret hope that there will, there, be a miracle cure for her. What she finds, first, is a circle of ill teens who gather when the clock strikes twelve to share scary stories; it’s a mordant nihilism they share, and a sense of indulgent pleasure in the knowledge that things could be worse: They could be fighting against cosmic forces of evil.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Once again, the great cycle of culture has come back around to vampires. This year, TV has seen a new season of FX’s “What We Do in the Shadows” as well as the debuts of AMC’s “Interview With the Vampire,” Peacock’s “Vampire Academy,” and Netflix’s “First Kill” — all of which were based on existing intellectual property. It follows, then, that the latest entry into the genre would be drawn from a story that was big during the last great vampire craze. “Let the Right One In,” a 2004 Swedish novel that became a Swedish film in 2008, just in time for “Twilight”-mania — and followed by an American adaptation called “Let Me In” in 2010 — now inspires a Showtime series executive produced by Andrew Hinderaker of “Away” and “Penny Dreadful.” In its early going, the show is intriguing: Its central story, of the tremulous, growing bond between a young vampire (Madison Taylor Baez) and her socially isolated peer (Ian Foreman) is sweetly drawn. But the show falters in illustrating the world around its characters. Though the kids are at the heart of the show, their interactions tend to lack stakes.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic It’s been said that former President Donald Trump corrupts all who enter his orbit — that it’s impossible to deal directly with him without taking on his amorality and crassness. “The Lincoln Project,” a new documentary series on Showtime, depicts that process among his political opposition. Here, people devoted to ousting Trump mirror his rhetorical style and his self-regard. And it’s in subtly making this case that the documentary succeeds, even as it grows punishing to watch. The Lincoln Project, a circle of former high-level Republican strategists who made viral anti-Trump ads, seemed throughout the 2020 presidential election to be, Trumpishly, more focused on brand promotion than political work. “No one’s ever fucked with a candidate like we’ve fucked with a candidate,” Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson says early in the doc; those schemes include a Times Square billboard, attention-getting for attention’s sake.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Tom McCarthy’s “Spotlight” is the single best film about journalism of our era. So while it comes as no surprise that the writer-director’s take on life at a daily paper for ABC is substantially better than the average 2020s network drama, it’s certainly good news. On the McCarthy-created “Alaska Daily,” Hilary Swank plays Eileen Fitzgerald, a high-powered newspaper reporter whose reporting comes into question in the pilot’s early going; her losing her job is as much about the claims against her work as it is about the fact that her sudden vulnerability opens up a conversation about her habit of talking down to colleagues. Suddenly, she’s spinning her wheels, endlessly reporting a book that may never see daylight; the conditions are perfect for her to accept the offer of a former mentor (“Scandal’s” Jeff Perry, excellent) to take a job in Anchorage.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The first two seasons of “The Mole” came at a remarkable moment for the genre of reality TV. Premiering in 2001, the series was made during that brief and delicate time when competitors on mainstream broadcast unscripted series hadn’t yet figured out how to slip into the roles with which we’re familiar. Tasked with determining who among their number was sabotaging group challenges, the show’s cast members allowed themselves to be, well, themselves — ragged and un-telegenic and embarrassingly earnest and real. Eventually retooled into an all-celebrities format, the show lost what made it special and went away, but fans remember both the intrigue of the show’s gameplay and the rawness of its players.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic “East New York” fits neatly into CBS’ battery of dramas about law enforcement, from “The Equalizer” to the “CSI” revival. But credit it with this much: In its roundabout way, it has more on its mind than one might expect at first blush. Set in a Brooklyn neighborhood where the beginnings of gentrification rub up uncomfortably against families who’ve lived there for generations, “East New York” is relatively careful in its presentation of cops and policing as flawed tools in need of rethinking, and boasts a charismatic lead who can make you believe, for an hour of primetime, that such change might be possible. We meet Regina Haywood (Amanda Warren of “The Leftovers” and “Dickinson”) as she’s getting a manicure; the robbery of a dollar van outside gets her attention, and draws her out to the street. She’s very early in her tenure as precinct chief, and this comes as a wake-up call of sorts; Regina is, soon enough, working to reduce quotas for arrests on petty crime and chicanery in the interrogation room, all with a single-minded focus on addressing major crime’s root causes. Her long-term goal is for the cops she oversees to live in the neighborhood they defend; she’s willing to start with placing an eager underling, Officer Brandy Quinlan (Olivia Luccardi), in an apartment procured by city housing.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic “Reasonable Doubt” has a healthy amount of “Scandal” in its DNA. The series was created by former “Scandal” writer and producer Raamla Mohamed; Kerry Washington directs the first episode. And the swirling intrigue around a self-styled do-gooder protagonist — who’s unconventional in her methods, and irresistibly drawn to drama — will recall Olivia Pope, the character Washington played on the ABC drama. Back then, Olivia unwound with a glass of red wine; as if to flex the looser, loucher possibilities of streaming, Emayatzy Corinealdi’s Jax Stewart ends her day with a cigarette. That seems an apt distillation of a series that’s charged with a nervy energy; “Reasonable Doubt” places Corinealdi’s very flawed protagonist at its center and watches as she generates smoke, and steam. Jax is a former public defender who now works in high-profile criminal defense in Los Angeles; her attention is divided between her caseload and her attraction to a man she once defended, incarcerated for many, years but still a vivid part of her life.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The rescue, in summer 2018, of a youth soccer team and their coach from a flooded cave system in Thailand remains one of the most outright inspiring stories of recent years. Amidst intense interest and scrutiny, an international team came up with a plan to anesthetize the boys and maneuver them out of the flooded caves before monsoon rains intensified. It’s a tense story, and one with an outcome that isn’t just upbeat but is genuinely astounding. Little wonder that it’s lent itself to repeated retellings, including last year’s documentary “The Cave” and this year’s quietly released Ron Howard drama “Thirteen Lives,” starring Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell as the heroic British cave divers.

Amber Dowling The Emmy Awards dominated Variety’s Trending TV chart for the week of Sept. 12 – 18, pulling in more than 18 million engagements — less than the Oscars (33 million engagements) and Grammys (57 million engagements), but more than the SAG Awards (4 million), which were all tracked for a shorter length of time. “Succession,” “Ted Lasso” and “The White Lotus” took home the top prizes during the Sept. 12 ceremony on NBC. Historic wins from Sheryl Lee Ralph, Quinta Brunson, Zendaya and Lee Jung-jae, as well as memorable moments from winners Jennifer Coolidge and Lizzo ruled Twitter chatter. Sheryl Lee Ralph blew the roof off the #emmys with this speech! pic.twitter.com/MFJzIqxBWC This year’s Emmys marked the return to a full-scale production for the first time since 2019, but as Variety chief TV critic Daniel D’Addario noted in his review, “much of the production seemed strangely stuck in a hazy past.” Meanwhile, the broadcast, hosted by Kenan Thompson, earned all-time low ratings with an average of 5.92 million viewers.