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.
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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.
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
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
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
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
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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
PBS
This week on Vienna Blood, we get many illustrative examples that just because someone is paranoid doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Poor Oskar; it’s not enough that Max will be damn lucky to survive surgery following last week’s shooting. Nor is it enough for Oskar to torture
MGM+
Rogue Heroes*, Stephen Knight’s latest series – at least until A Thousand Blows arrives next month – is back for a second season! In the US, Season 1 can be streamed via Prime Video, and Season 2 is on MGM+. While it’s a bummer to have such a solid, well-
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“A fully-developed bromance” flourishing as they face “trying to solve a major crime at the end of the Austrian Empire.” That’s how Vienna Blood star Juergen Maurer describes the relationship between his character, Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt, and Dr. Max Liebermann as the pre-Great War mystery series’s
PBS
Longtime Vienna Blood viewers will recall that PBS tends to split each season’s feature-length episodes, giving the show a longer run. This time around, those breaks – which have in the past tended strongly towards the clunky – work pretty well. The break between “Mephisto Waltz” and “A Winning Hand”