Apple TV+

The fact that Las Vegas is nicknamed “Sin City” should probably be a clue that hosting anything important there is a bad idea, especially if that important thing needs a lot of egoists to sell it.

If we're being frank, Your Friends & Neighbors hasn't been an especially contemplative show, which is perhaps why Episode 6 is such a standout installment.

It has taken Your Friends & Neighbors five weeks to circle back to the brutal crime scene it began with, but Episode 5 finally gets us there with a little more context.

The Studio is a show about Hollywood that clearly enjoys an impressive amount of access to its stars and executives, but it has rarely felt quite as insider-y as it does in Episode 8, aptly titled “The Golden Globes”.

Is the Kool-Aid Man a Black dude? This is the question at the core of The Studio Episode 7, and it's a funny one to ask, since it raises the impossibly circuitous minefield of contemporary identity politics.

All good criminals need a partner in crime, and it looks like Coop has found his in Episode 4 of Your Friends and Neighbors. But having an accomplice doesn’t seem to be doing him any favours.

I didn’t like Episode 6 of The Studio as much as I’ve liked some of the others.

If you can’t eat the rich, you might as well steal from them. This is the point that Your Friends & Neighbors is making, more or less.

With every episode of The Studio, it finds a new way to impress. In the two-part premiere it was a very funny ensemble piece and then a tight, isolated riff on the microcosmic art of the oner.

The White Lotus has only just wrapped up its third season, and yet it’s back in all but name on Apple TV+ in the form of Your Friends & Neighbors, Episode 1 & 2 of which debuted together to give a good sense of all the key ingredients.

Surface has had a very strange trajectory in Season 2, hasn’t it? It started out feeling very inert, then it gradually whipped up some steam...

There's simply no reason for The Studio to be this good. If it were just a satire on the movie industry, it'd be funny and fine, and nobody would be upset about that.

Finally! Just like that, a meandering Season 2 of Surface starts to feel a lot more like a proper thriller with Episode 7, and it’s about time.

I was a little mixed on the two-part premiere of The Studio. You can’t blame me, though. Those were two very different episodes, with the first feeling scatty and overstuffed and the second feeling a bit too insular.

Surface Season 2 has been very strange, but with the way Episode 6 plays out, you can sort of see what it was all building towards.

As strongly implied in the last episode, MQ is undergoing corporate changes that are creating significant stress for David. This situation shows no signs of...

At one point in Episode 1 of Apple TV+’s Seth Rogen-helmed Hollywood satire The Studio, the former head of Continental Studios, Patty (Catherine O’Hara), gives the protégé who inherited her job a pep talk about how Hollywood will trample his dreams, stress him out, and possibly even ruin his life.

The word of the day is languishing. That’s the one that keeps springing to mind during Surface Season 2, anyway. In Episode 5, “Daybreak”, we continue to take the most circuitous route possible to conclusions that we just know aren’t going to be worth the aggro when we get there.