Sophie has been steeped in British TV since her parents let her watch the Jeremy Brett adaptation of Sherlock Holmes. She loves mysteries, espionage thrillers, documentaries, and costume dramas. You can find her on all the platforms as @sophiebiblio.
PBS
Mirrors! Lights! Camera! Action! It’s time for another spin through the lookbooks of Wolf Hall's second season, The Mirror and The Light, in search of the most remarkable costumes. This week's column will cover Episodes 2 through 4 ("Obedience," "Defiance," and
HBO & HBO Max
Even though The White Lotus is created and written by the very American multi-hyphenate Mike White, who also acts, directs, and was in a season of The Amazing Race, its international yet predominantly English-speaking acting ensembles have made me think of it as a British series. The brief seasons, dry
PBS
From the start, the second season of Marie Antoinette holds a smattering of small victories and an overabundance of significant-to-catastrophic losses, but everyone sure looks gorgeous through it all. We could publish daily close-reads of nearly every scene’s visual riches, and if there were considerably less TV to cover,
Feature
Our long international literary adaptation nightmare is over. Mark Rylance, Damian Lewis, and Kate Phillips are back on our screens for the next six weeks, and while a great many things are not remotely all right with either the worlds of Tudor England or the present day, at least we
Exclusive
We haven’t even reached the Spring Equinox yet, and David Mitchell is already having a great 2025, with one brand-new murder mystery series set to debut as he’s shooting episodes for another new series, an as-yet-untitled sketch comedy show with his longtime collaborator Robert Webb. Ludwig will arrive
PBS
Funny Woman Season 2, we hardly knew ye! I wish we’d gotten at least two more episodes of the life and times of Sophie Straw, but it’s been a fun, brisk quartet of episodes. I both enjoy and admire how the season’s many significant plots and character
PBS
Funny Woman’s second season is burning through plot like a bunch of raked-up autumnal leaves. A four-episode season means that where we’d be at the midpoint of a season with six episodes, we’re already in penultimate episode territory, often where the big turning points of the season
PBS
Have you seen Almost Famous? It’s Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical film about the experiences of "William," a teenage music journalist writing for Rolling Stone in the early 1970s. At one point, William has gotten himself in a terrible bind: he’s been on the road with the
PBS
Vienna Blood is (probably) dead; long live Vienna Blood. The pre-Great War murder mystery series featuring the highly effective odd couple of young British Freudian Dr. Max Liebermann and veteran Viennese homicide detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt’s fourth season wrapped up on PBS at the end of January, and though
PBS
Sophie Straw (née Barbara Parker and played by Gemma Arterton) just wants to exercise her judgment in both professional and personal matters. Why is that so hard? That’s rhetorical; I know why it’s hard: there would be no TV show without this central conflict and journey, and it
Exclusive
Before the season premiere for Vienna Blood’s fourth and likely final season, lead actors Matthew Beard (Dr. Max Liebermann) and Juergen Maurer (Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt) spent about an hour thoughtfully answering press questions about their characters’ arcs, the series' distressingly timely historical resonances, and the joy it brings
PBS
Welcome back, possibly for the last time, to Vienna Blood. If this season finale pulls double-duty as a series finale, it will complete a nice little set of bookends for our favorite intercultural, pre-Great War crime-fighting odd couple (while leaving the door tantalizingly open for several more chapters of The