Ahead of the premiere of season two, which drops on November 13 on Apple TV, here’s your chance to catch up on the first season of one of, if not the best, season of television from 2022: Bad Sisters.

I haven’t mentioned it until now because I just assume everyone already knows about it and loves it as much as I do, but I realize that may be a little narcissistic, so I now take the opportunity to reach those of you who have not yet discovered this true gem of a show.

Bad Sisters is a dark comedy set in Ireland about five adult sisters who were orphaned at a young age and have grown up extraordinarily bonded. Because of this bond, they are perhaps a bit more protective of each other than they should be, so much so that they feel the need to protect one of their own from an abusive husband, even if it means killing him. Well, maybe not killing him. Well, maybe it does. Or maybe it doesn’t. Well, you’ll just have to watch.

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I really don’t know why I’ve slept on Danny McBride for so long. As a baseball lover, everyone has told me I should watch McBride’s first series, Eastbound and Down, which ran on HBO for four seasons, from 2009 to 2013, developing a huge cult following. And, as an even bigger fan of Walton Goggins, I should have already been on board for McBride’s second HBO series, Vice Principals, which ran for 2 seasons in 2016 and 2017, which starred McBride and Goggins as two high school vice principals competing for the top job. But no, for some reason I instead let both of those series pass me by without any interest at all. There was just something about McBride that didn’t appeal to me–his comedy just wasn’t my cup of tea. Or so I thought.

Just shows you how much I know.

It took Walton Goggins, John Goodman AND three years of overwhelming buzz for me to finally give McBride’s current series a chance, and it has become the most enjoyable binge we’ve had since six seasons of Schitt’s Creek got us through the early days of lockdown.

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I know I totally need to catch up on Insecure, the HBO series that made a star of Issa Rae. But there are 44 episodes over five seasons of that show, whereas there are just 8 episodes of the first season of How to Die Alone, a new show that just premiered on Hulu, starring an Insecure alum, Natasha Rothwell, so I admit I chose the smaller bite. But if Insecure is anywhere near as enjoyable, easy to watch and satisfying as How to Die Alone is, those five seasons will just fly by.

Don’t be put off by the title. How to Die Alone is not a show about the best way to kill yourself. Nor is it a sequel to 127 Hours. Instead, it is a sitcom-like show about a single woman, played by Rothwell, who works at JFK airport in New York and struggles with finding meaning and love in her life. She works in an airport but has never been on a plane. She recently broke up with a man she really liked because she was afraid to fall in love. She had a near-death experience, and her emergency contact was herself. These are all things that she is forced to confront in very neurotic and hilarious ways and leading the charge is Rothwell, an exceedingly charismatic performer who deserves her own show and makes the most of it.

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There have been two recent dramatizations of the 2019 bombshell Prince Andrew interview that ended up sending unintended shockwaves through the English monarchy, but one is so much better than the other, which is why I’m highly recommending, if you are interested in either, choosing A Very Royal Scandal on Prime Video instead of Scoop on Netflix.

There had been rumors for years about Prince Andrew, Queen Elizabeth’s second (and supposedly favorite) son’s friendship with convicted child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, but nobody had ever really pursued the story until 2019, when BBC’s Newsnight anchor Emily Maitlis landed a rare interview with the Duke of York, ostensibly arranged as a forum for him to publicly put to rest all the rumors and to apologize specifically to one victim in particular, who claimed the Prince had raped her. But what was hoped, at least by the Palace, to put rumors to bed, only served to fan the flames as Andrew’s disastrous performance in the interview led to his essential banishment from the Royal Family in one of the most scandalous turn of events in the history of the modern English Monarchy.

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I was trying to think of a way to describe the series Bodkin, a seven-episode series which dropped last May on Netflix, and I kept coming back to the same thing over and over again: Only Murders in the Building, but in Ireland. I really tried, but that really captures it perfectly.

If you’ve never seen Only Murders in the Building, it’s a series over on Hulu starring Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez about three residents of a building in Manhattan who love true crime podcasts who decide to host their own podcast when someone in their own building gets murdered. The essence of the show is that these three adorable people are surrounded by other adorable people and they all seem unfazed by people dropping dead all around them, probably because they are adorable people in adorable surroundings. Well, Bodkin is like that, but it’s Ireland.

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Rashida Jones has long ago shed her nepo baby label and deserves credit for crafting her own fascinating, well-rounded career that I bet nobody saw coming. As the daughter of music legend Quincy Jones and actress/model Peggy Lipton, she probably could have done anything she wanted (especially after graduating from Harvard in 1997), but she decided to follow her mother’s footsteps into acting and soared to fame as the loveable best friend Ann Perkins on the long-running NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation (2009-2015). Since then, she’s made indie films (On the Rocks), adult animation (Duncanville), apocalyptic sci-fi (Silo), another mainstream sitcom (Angie Tribeca) and an offbeat, off-the-radar comedy series (Toast of Tinseltown). In other words, there’s no anticipating her next move and there’s nothing she won’t—or can’t—do.

And Rashida Jones’s latest project, a weirdly original Japanese-flavored drama/comedy/thriller is not only the best thing she’s ever done, it’s another reminder that Apple is continuing to serve up some of the most innovative television in the medium.

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I would consider it a personal failure if I didn’t, at least once a year, remind everyone about a show that is so good, I believe it my personal responsibility, not only as a professional film/TV writer (I have, on occasion, been paid to do this, amazing enough) but as a human, to make sure everybody watches it. The show is After Life, and can be found on Netflix.

There are three seasons of After Life (18 30-minute episodes), and it was created, produced, directed, written by and stars Ricky Gervais. Now WAIT…..if you don’t like Gervais, and I totally understand it if you don’t, give me a chance to still convince you to watch the show.

After Life is the most emotionally affecting and humanistic show I’ve ever seen. It is laugh out loud hilarious, featuring oddball characters that are insanely weird and typical Gervais humor that is cringe-perfect, insulting and self-effacing. Yes, that’s all true. But what Gervais manages to do, in his genius way, is to blend all that humor, all that cringe, all that weirdness with a deep, abiding and soulful compassion and humanity, creating an experience that will both fill your heart and break it, in all the right ways.

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If you didn’t already believe Martin Freeman could do anything, you need to check out The Responder, a dark and unforgiving BritBox original that has Freeman as far away from Bilbo Baggins as one could possibly imagine.

American audiences probably best know Freeman as the beloved titular hobbit from Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, but he also made quite an impression from his roles in Love, Actually or his stint in the MCU as Everett K. Ross in Captain America: Civil War and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. More hip American audiences may recognize Freeman as Watson to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes in four seasons of Sherlock, but Martin’s best American work was in the stellar first season of Noah Hawley’s masterpiece series Fargo, which continues to be one of the best shows to have ever existed.

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Somehow, I missed this show when it first aired back in 2013 to 2016. The Fall is a drama starring Gillian Anderson as a British policewoman who becomes obsessed with catching a Northern Irish serial killer, played by Jamie Dornan. Played out over three seasons of six episodes each, The Fall is a gripping, often thrilling but extremely disturbing series that gives you all you want from a drama like this, with the added benefit of Anderson and Dornan’s considerable talents.

Dornan plays a serial killer who seems normal, but deep down is as evil as they come, a guy with serious mommy issues who takes out his psychosis on young, pretty women, leaving a trail of murders in Belfast. In comes Anderson’s steely, no-nonsense British investigator, flown in from London to crack the case. But you’re not going to have Anderson and Dornan without giving their characters some deep backstories and lots to play out, so we get to know both characters intimately, and it’s left to the audience to figure out why they feel so drawn to each other.

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In honor of Dexter now being available on Netflix and the recent announcements of both a new sequel AND prequel series, I want to recommend the ORIGINAL series to you, even if you know exactly what it is and have refused to watch it in the 18 years since it debuted in 2006.

I was one of you. I had heard all my friends raving about this show back in the day, everyone telling me how great it was, but I absolutely stood my ground, saying I was NOT INTERESTED in watching something so dark, so violent, so upsetting.

See, Dexter is a VERY dark show about a really messed up guy who feels a compulsion to kill. BUT his policeman father taught him at an early age to channel that need for good, so….Dexter only kills bad guys. That makes it ok! So weird….so upsetting…right?

Well, that’s the thing about Dexter, the series, which stars Michael C. Hall, who you may remember from the brilliant HBO series Six Feet Under. Dexter is nowhere near the dark and depressing journey you think it would be. While the plot is undeniable and there is a lot of blood and really bad people that need disposing of, the rest of the show is as mainstream as it gets. It’s a standard police procedural, with a collection of charming characters who banter and tease each other, and a central character who is so normal by day, most consider him to be a totally boring dork. It’s kind of like Superman, if Clark Kent were a forensic blood spatter analyst by day, and one-man-humanity-cleanser-by-night.

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