Daniel Daddario: Last News

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticGet ready to check back into “The White Lotus.”HBO’s anthology series about life among the wealthy and dissatisfied at a chain of upscale resorts will premiere its second installment in October, Variety can exclusively reveal.The Mike White-created series is shifting the action to Sicily, where new hotel staffers and new guests will face off; Jennifer Coolidge, this week’s Variety cover star, is the only series regular to be returning, as she reprises her role as spiritually seeking socialite Tanya McQuoid. Above, check out Coolidge in Euro-glam mode in the exclusive first image released of the new season.In its initial, Hawaii-set season, which aired in the summer of 2021, “The White Lotus” was a sensation, immediately pulling in 1.9 million viewers across linear and digital platforms for its finale, a number that only grew from there.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticSay this much about “Keep Breathing”: It’s admirably immune to streaming-era bloat.Could its story, of a woman confronting the pain of her past while trying to stay alive after a plane crash, have been told in a ninety-minute film? Well, sure. But in six episodes that hew pretty close to the half-hour mark, the series makes its points, underlines them a couple of times, and then moves on.Here, Melissa Barrera plays Liv, who is clinging to life (get it?).

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticDarren Star has, in recent years, had a Netflix success with “Emily in Paris” — a show that, depending on your vantage point, is either a death knell for TV comedy or a sunnily surface-level jaunt whose idle pleasures are just that. Star, the creator of “Sex and the City” and “Melrose Place,” has a gift for skating the viewer across smoothly luxurious settings.Which may be the problem, or one of them, with his latest series for Netflix, which he created with Jeffrey Richman.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic“Surface” is just good enough for a sympathetic viewer to want it to be better.Like Apple’s most recent glossy drama about a woman in danger, “Shining Girls,” “Surface” effectively evokes the confusion of not knowing who or where one really is; here, Gugu Mbatha-Raw stars as Sophie, a woman who suffered a brain injury in an apparent suicide attempt, and now has no sense of who she is. And as on “Shining Girls,” a crystalline depiction of inner turmoil coexists alongside absurdity that grows a bit tough to take.For conspiracy swirls around Sophie.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticDeep into “The Last Movie Stars” — a six-episode HBO Max documentary series directed by Ethan Hawke — Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward appear on the cover of a 1980 issue of McCall’s magazine. In the headline, his name comes first, then hers, then a reference to “their very private marriage.”This may come as a surprise, even as the order of names, and Newman’s face forcing Woodward’s to the cover’s bottom half, make perfect sense.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticTaron Egerton is at the center of Apple’s new drama “Black Bird,” a show that asks him, foremost, to be a reactive force. Tangled in the prison system after his plan to plead out for a short narcotics-charge sentence blows up, Egerton’s Jimmy Keene is offered the opportunity to get out.

J. Kim Murphy Amazon Prime Video has canceled “Night Sky,” its science-fiction series starring Sissy Spacek and J.K.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIt can feel at times as though the logical endpoint of the streaming revolution is a restaging of the TV landscape of, say, 1990, just atomized across vastly more players. It’s inevitable: With so much content, certain traditional, and perhaps little-missed, forms can’t help returning.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticSPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not watched Episodes 8 and 9 of “Stranger Things 4,” now streaming on Netflix.Writing about the first seven episodes of the current, fourth season of “Stranger Things,” I noted that its ambition was both laudable and detrimental, gesturing back to a more exciting era of Netflix while also freighting each episode with more than it could bear.The final two episodes of the fourth season, which launched July 1, prove that doubly true. The moments that sing — including, once again, in the cadences of Kate Bush, this season’s musical patron sorceress — really are on a different level than just about anything the streamer has done lately.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIn his new Amazon series “The Terminal List,” actor Chris Pratt is built like a brick wall, and has about half as much charisma. His character, James Reece, is on a Charles Bronson-esque mission of revenge against the forces that ambushed his Navy SEAL platoon in the field and, back home, irrevocably altered his family life (with his wife played, mainly in flashback, by a wildly overqualified Riley Keough, and his daughter by Arlo Mertz).

Selome Hailu After four weeks in the No. 1 position of Netflix’s Top 10 chart, Season 4 of “Stranger Things” has finally slipped from the top. Season 3 of “The Umbrella Academy” took that position during the June 20-26 viewing window, having premiered on June 22.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic“Only Murders in the Building” was a surprising triumph last year — a comedy whose amiable, low-key wit built in power as its first season ran on. With fine work by Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez at the center, it added up to a portrait of disaffected and alienated people.In its second outing, “Only Murders” no longer has its element of surprise: We know what it can do.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIn the new season of “Westworld,” Evan Rachel Wood’s character describes the concept of the NPC — in video game parlance, the “non-player-characters,” the electronic background figures who exist to serve the person in control. Going by Dolores, Wood’s character once lived such a fate herself, as a sentient “host” at a theme park; having long since freed her mind, she’s now known as Christina, living in an American city, working at a video game company where she’s the one telling stories.Well, stories on the margins, at least.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticWhen “The Umbrella Academy” last aired new episodes, in July 2020, its star occupied a different place in the culture, under a different name.Elliot Page, the Academy Award-nominated performer, is by far the highest-profile member of the show’s cast — all playing a family of superheroes perennially trying to thwart apocalypse. And his public disclosure that he is a trans man in late 2020 presented the series with a conundrum as it looked ahead to a third season.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticMaybe in part because the present looks so bleak, it’s lately been a boom time for shows about looking back on childhood. “The Wonder Years,” on ABC, is an update of the 1980s classic, now narrated by Don Cheadle as he reflects on the Montgomery of the 1960s.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticA partnership with Melissa McCarthy — one of the defining comic talents of the past 10-plus years — might seem like the sort of thing a streamer would want to spotlight and celebrate. So it’s surprising that “God’s Favorite Idiot,” a new comedy series on Netflix, dropped without ever been having made available to critics in advance.Surprising, that is, to those without familiarity with the breadth of McCarthy’s oeuvre.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticJeff Bridges, in his new series “The Old Man,” is playing the kind of spy they don’t make anymore.His Dan Chase is, even at an advanced age, a master tactician; he repeatedly bests men many years younger than he is in hand-to-hand combat. He’s also winningly persuasive, so much so that the FBI counterintelligence chief tasked with finding him (John Lithgow) can’t resist giving him a head start.Indeed, the aptly named Chase seems perpetually one step ahead in evading pursuit, and the show is similarly ahead of us at home: We find out just what has made Chase, and what makes the chase, as we go.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticEarly in the first episode of AMC’s new series “Dark Winds,” Zahn McClarnon’s Joe Leaphorn advises Kiowa Gordon’s Jim Chee about a way to get ahead when investigating crimes on a Navajo reservation. Leaphorn’s been doing this for a while, and isn’t impressed by his new deputy’s credentials, or his naked ambition; sometimes, pragmatic approaches are best, so Leaphorn advises Chee to keep a carton of cigarettes around.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticThe very first thing one sees in each episode of the new reboot of “Queer as Folk” — before the action even starts — is the handwritten name of the streamer on which it appears, with an underline jauntily appearing beneath the last four letters of “Peacock.” It’s an elbow to the ribs, or to regions further south, that comes on strong from the earliest moments of the series; do you get it? Do you?This show, about the lives of queer and trans people in New Orleans, centers that one syllable, and a few similar terms: Like the early-2000s Showtime series that preceded it (itself based on a British drama by Russell T. Davies), “Queer as Folk” 2022 is relentless in its pursuit of pleasure.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticThere may be few ways of living more disconcerting than to be a one-season reality-TV star. The forced adjustment happens twice: First, suddenly, you’re thrust into the line of sight of the nation or the world, made into a symbol of something greater than yourself and flattened out into someone less than you know yourself to be.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic“Deep down, you are an outlaw yourself,” a director tells his leading lady. “It’s what we share.” His star thanks him, taking the remark as a compliment, but insists she’s nowhere as daring as the character she’s tasked with playing.This moment, in the first episode of HBO’s new series “Irma Vep,” is tossed-off and casual; the actors playing auteur and actress, Vincent Macaigne and Alicia Vikander, are believably weary, film-industry warriors just trying to get through the conversation, and the day.