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There are roughly 47,000—oh, wait, a new Netflix Original just dropped; make that 47,001—TV shows and movies coming out each week. At Obsessed, we consider it our social duty to help you see the best and skip the rest.
We’ve already got a variety of in-depth, exclusive coverage on all of your streaming favorites and new releases, but sometimes what you’re looking for is a simple Do or Don’t. That’s why we created See/Skip, to tell you exactly what our writers think you should See and what you can Skip from the past week’s crowded entertainment landscape.
See: Mean Girls
Mean Girls might be an underbaked, toothless, and largely recycled musical remake of its iconic predecessor, but some solid toe-tappers and a decent amount of winks toward sweet nostalgia at least make this version a decent night out with your two-faced besties.
Here’s Coleman Spilde’s take:
“Remaking Mean Girls is basically like remaking Citizen Kane: The one shot you have of doing it successfully is if you make Charles Foster Kane a beautiful bisexual who sings a bunch of songs. And if it were judged by that metric alone, Mean Girls (in theaters Jan. 12), the musical revamp of the revolutionary teen flick—and adapted from Tina Fey’s successful Broadway version—would be a triumph.
But remaking a worldwide cultural phenomenon with an everlasting legacy should involve more than just the same, high-functioning parts, souped-up for a new generation. The Mean Girls movie-musical barely differentiates itself from its predecessor. Watching the remake is often akin to throwing on the original movie and turning your head to see your friends quote every line by heart. Most of it is a word-for-word duplicate, one that has had its sharp bite shaved down to avoid the kind of thorny provocation that made the first film an instant classic.”
Skip: True Detective: Night Country
True Detective: Night Country is a return to form for the anthology’s long-awaited fourth season, but the Jodie Foster-starring, semi-supernatural mystery struggles to juggle its tangled plotlines, ultimately biting off more than it can chew.
Here’s Nick Schager’s take:
“True Detective may never recapture the original highs that turned it into a zeitgeisty phenomenon with the power to rejuvenate the career of a bona fide A-lister à la the McConaissance. Still, over its subsequent seasons (including its unfairly derided sophomore run), HBO’s crime series has continued to tap an appealingly anguished vein, using homicide investigations as vehicles for exploring an existential brand of loneliness, fury, and great inconsolable despair. No matter its stories’ nominal focuses, it’s an anthology swathed in a noir-ish shroud of misery and malevolence, and at its finest, it plumbs the bleakest recesses of the soul, as well as the terrifying ancient evils that refuse to die and endlessly corrupt us.
Five years after its underrated third go-round starring Mahershala Ali, the show returns with True Detective: Night Country on Jan. 14, a six-episode iteration most notable for being spearheaded not by creator Nic Pizzolatto but, instead, by Tigers Are Not Afraid director Issa López—and, also, for setting aside its trademark brooding machismo to fixate on a pair of female cops played by Jodie Foster and Kali Reis. Despite those twists, however, this new saga is in various ways an extension of its predecessors, in particular its sensational maiden season, including with regards to the baffling and horrific crime at its epicenter. Trying to bite off more than it can chew to the detriment of its own strengths, this multifaceted descent into a chilly abyss doesn’t completely come together. Even so, it never completely unravels, courtesy of the unshakeable pain and desolation that wraps around its every character like a noose.”
Skip: Hazbin Hotel
Hazbin Hotel wastes its devilishly silly premise—about the princess of Hell trying to save its demons—on a barrage of trite humor and high-school-grade innuendos. Such an immature approach hampers all of the charming animation, sending the show back to the fiery pits.
Here’s Allegra Frank’s take:
“There are two kinds of ‘adult’ television: the kind that uses mature themes like violence and nudity to titillate, and the kind that uses them to tell more complex stories. Hazbin Hotel, Prime Video’s new animated musical-comedy series (premiering Jan. 19), fits into the former camp. Priding itself on its massive amounts of innuendo and profane language, the series often obscures its legitimate charms with its see-through attempts at subversion. While there’s some fun to be had with its song-and-dance mode, it’s impossible to ignore how closely Hazbin’s concepts of mature themes and comedy match up with those of a 15-year-old boy.
Hazbin Hotel got its start on YouTube in 2019, when twenty-something artist Vivienne Medrano uploaded a half-hour pilot that she wrote, directed, and animated herself. She’d first gained a following there with her animated, unofficial music videos, with her own characters lip-syncing to popular songs; the pilot capitalized on that gimmick while adding in a story, dialogue, and original music. The impressively crafted short eventually attracted nearly 100 million views, and Medrano’s spinoff shorts featuring the characters singing new songs further grew the fanbase. Eventually, Medrano landed a production and distribution deal with A24, and fans have waited with bated breath for the full-fledged series ever since.”
See: The Trust
The Trust is a diabolical, psychological Squid Game that pits 11 people against each other for a chance at a quarter of a million dollars. Players must covertly chop their fellow contestants or stay together and split it all. Greed is king, and this absurd show is Netflix reality royalty.
Here’s Laura Bradley’s take:
“What happens when you bring 11 people to a plush, beachside mansion and offer them the opportunity to split a quarter of a million dollars, no strings attached? In its new reality show The Trust: A Game of Greed, Netflix bets on drama—and that wager does not disappoint, at least for a while.
The premise of this new reality competition show is simple: Will the group stick together and share the money over a series of weeks as they learn more about one another and make increasingly difficult decisions? Or will selfishness and suspicions win out and cause them to cut the group down? Most of us can probably guess the answer before anyone casts their first vote of the game. A quirky business coach named Lindsey calls it from the jump. ‘A quarter of a million dollars is a lot of money to me, yes,’ she says. ‘However, when you divide that by 11, that is not a lot of money to me.’ Let the cutthroat elimination votes begin!”
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