Daniel Daddario: Celebs Rumors

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic It’s the spotlight Fran Drescher turned out, unexpectedly, to be born for.  Speaking at a press conference announcing the actors strike Thursday, the SAG-AFTRA president, still known best for her winsome and haphazardly charming protagonist of the sitcom “The Nanny,” looked stricken. Speaking at first deliberately and then with increasing passion, Drescher narrated her union’s attempt, initially, to avoid a strike, and then what she cast as the dawning realization that action was required.  It was a performance with build and emotional heft, culminating in an appeal to labor across the world: “This is a moment of history that is a moment of truth,” she declared — and if that reads a bit awkwardly on the page, well, you should have heard how she delivered it. She continued to excoriate “big business, who care more about Wall Street than you and your family.” On “you,” she gestured out into the audience; on “your family,” she gazed directly into camera, to the unseen viewers out there at home, proletariat and executive alike. 

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic HBO dominating the Emmy nominations is hardly a surprise, given both historical trends and the year they’ve had. But it couldn’t have come at a more crucial time. Amid endless media speculation around the cuts and bad P.R. missteps of Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav, HBO — notionally the jewel in the crown of the newly-formed WBD’s television empire — cleaned up. In the best drama race, HBO picked up a startling four nominations (for “House of the Dragon,” “The Last of Us,” “Succession” and “The White Lotus”). In a happy coincidence, those four nominations, which tie an all-time record, represented the two halves of what HBO has lately done well, between pushing IP-driven storytelling to new heights in the cases of “House of the Dragon” and “The Last of Us” and turning carefully wrought, creator-driven drama into organic zeitgeist hits with “Succession” and “The White Lotus.”

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic In my earliest years, the evening didn’t end until Vanna White said good night. I was in one of the parts of America where “Wheel of Fortune” comes on after “Jeopardy!” (the only proper order — a roughage-filled meal, then dessert). And I’d insist on staying up past the last ad break to hear the chat between White and “Wheel” host Pat Sajak for 45 seconds or so, wrapping on a sincere-sounding sendoff that gave me the all-clear to trundle up the stairs. Why did I have to wait for the last moments with Vanna? Well, part of it was a child’s literalism: she hadn’t said good night, so it wasn’t yet that time. But part, too, was an attempt to wring out every last moment of White’s particular charm from “Wheel’s” half-hour. White — perhaps even more than Sajak, a consummate emcee of the old school — seemed to represent in one person what “Wheel” was all about. A model for an endless array of spectacular gowns and an ornament on a show whose gameplay didn’t strictly require a letter-turner as technology improved, she represented all the glamour and luxurious promise of cash prizes, free vacations and the gilded sunlight of California. And yet presenting in complete earnest, from her glee or sorrow for a contestant who won the game or who bought the wrong vowel to her utter commitment to trading pleasantries with Sajak, she was a fabulous contradiction — a quintessentially middle-American celebrity.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Each episode of the new season of “Project Greenlight” begins with a worthy mission statement. “We’re choosing a woman director,” executive producer Issa Rae tells us, “because ‘Project Greenlight’ has never had one before.” Gina Prince-Bythewood, the director of films including “The Woman King” and also an executive producer here, adds, “It’s about time the world sees how many dope women directors there are just waiting to get their shot.” These are statements that are hard to argue with — “Project Greenlight,” this season, did choose a woman director, the first-time filmmaker Meko Winbush, to pull together a feature film, the sci-fi family drama “Gray Matter,” in just 18 days of shooting. And Winbush, who is Black, is one of many who deserve a chance of the sort the industry doesn’t tend to hand out freely to women of color, something both “Insecure” creator Rae and Prince-Bythewood surely understand well. (They’re two of three putative “mentors” for Winbush on the show, along with actor Kumail Nanjiani, who also co-wrote “The Big Sick.”) And yet the show is purpose-built not to elevate or to celebrate Winbush but to somewhat ruthlessly pull apart the ways in which she might be made to look unready for the job and unsteady on her feet. It’s a shockingly watchable series that evinces that sickly feeling of humiliation from a past, crueler era of reality TV — “The Comeback,” but make it indie.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The current backlash against queer and trans people, led by a vivified cultural right, may have come as a surprise to younger people who assumed their rights and protections wouldn’t backslide. For this potential audience most of all, “Last Call,” a rigorous yet emotionally vivid documentary series on HBO, will come as a startling depiction of all-too-recent history, and a call to stand united in the face of a world’s worth of threats. Produced by, among others, recent Oscar nominee Howard Gertler (“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”) and directed by Anthony Caronna, “Last Call” tells a set of stories that tend to begin at a piano bar. In the early 1990s, a cohort of gay men, often in culturally forced heterosexual marriages and living their true lives only after dark, frequented various drinking establishments in New York City; time and again, one of this set would turn up not merely dead but dismembered, in a sort of brutal testament to antigay feeling. 

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic What’s NBC nowadays? Even before the ongoing writers strike scrambled the network’s fall schedule, its identity — historically quite strong as a place for chewy, grown-up dramas and chic, cerebral sitcoms — had seemed hazy. Promising comedies, the sort that might have grown to fulfill the role recently played by “30 Rock” or “Superstore,” got unceremoniously booted from the air after barely a chance to thrive; new dramas, from “Ordinary Joe” to “The Thing About Pam,” seemed painfully undistinguished.  It’s been a tough few years. And as much as the departure of former NBCUniversal chairman Susan Rovner, a career TV executive previously known for her work at Warner Bros. Television, is just latest bit of media industry consolidation, it’s also a moment to observe that the legacy network and its corporate siblings have struggled to find a way forward. (Rovner’s replacement, Donna Langley, will oversee both film and television for the company.) In the years since Rovner came into the job in 2020, there have been limited bright spots — the “Night Court” revival on NBC, “Poker Face” on streamer Peacock. But there’s been a general tone of a lack of faith in the core of what NBC is and does, one that makes today’s news feel like less of a surprise than it otherwise might.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Perhaps the greatest surprise of Jack Schlossberg’s recent social media rant against the concept of restaurants was that it happened at all.  To this point, Schlossberg — the youngest child of current U.S. Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy, and thus the youngest grandchild of the late President John F. Kennedy — has kept a fairly low profile. Unlike various higher-flying members of his extended family, Schlossberg largely keeps out of the public eye, with his public comment reserved for things like dutifully revealing the Kennedy family’s Profile in Courage Award honorees on “Today.” Which made his direct-to-camera diatribe about how antisocial and unhealthy restaurants are — serving food that we “put inside of our body, which really matters a lot” — a rare thing. And across this writer’s social media feeds, where the video kept burbling up over a slow July 4 weekend, people seemed to be getting a clearer view of where Camelot is now.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic It’s been more than 20 years since “24” first aired on Fox; its real-time conceit, with a relentless ticking clock moving characters toward collision, made it the kind of hit that’s difficult to duplicate. “Hijack,” a new drama on Apple TV+, doesn’t precisely aim for the sort of thrills and chills “24” generated, but it is indeed another real-time drama about a terrorist plot. Unfortunately, the central device doesn’t quite work, and “Hijack” ends up feeling like a flight to nowhere in particular. Here, Idris Elba plays Sam Nelson, a corporate type who finds himself at the center of international drama when his return flight from Dubai to London on the fictional Kingdom Air gets taken over by a group of armed criminals. They eventually gain control of the cockpit through blackmailing the pilot, proving their craftiness and the extent of their preparation; it falls to Sam to play quick-thinking action hero.

William Earl Variety won 13 first-place awards Sunday night at the Los Angeles Press Club’s 65th annual SoCal Journalism Awards, more than twice as many as any other entertainment publication. The lucky 13 awards represented a historic high for Variety at the SoCal Journalism Awards, topping the previous best of 12 first-place prizes the magazine earned in 2018. Variety came into Sunday’s ceremony with a record 96 nominations, representing work published online and in print during the 2022 calendar year. The awards were handed out during a gala dinner attended by hundreds in the historic Crystal Ballroom at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic On the second season of “The Bear,” FX’s breakout restaurant drama, each character gets a moment to shine. But few seize it with quite such abandon as Richie. As played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Richie spent much of the first season at top volume and vein-popping intensity, perennially there to remind Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) of the chaos in the restaurant’s kitchen, and to add to it. Which makes him an unlikely candidate to train, for a period, at a true fine-dining restaurant, but so he does. Much as Marcus (Lionel Boyce) flies to Copenhagen to apprentice as a high-level pastry chef, so too does Richie “stage” in an upscale Chicago this show hadn’t yet shown us, so that he may learn the essentials of service.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic “Sorry to Bother You,” Boots Riley’s 2018 directorial debut, was a cultural event: It announced Riley, who’d already made a career as a politically minded rapper, as a sharp critic of contemporary capitalism who could pair his ideas with grabby, memorable imagery. The cascade of reveals and visual transformations toward the end of that film, too good to spoil for the uninitiated, worked brilliantly as spectacle and made Riley’s case too: Under our current system, we all end up becoming beasts of burden.  Riley returns with a larger canvas and new expressions of familiar concerns with “I’m a Virgo.” Like “Sorry to Bother You,” which addressed the problems of its telemarketer characters, this series merges the prosaic with the surreal. On “I’m a Virgo,” we follow a 13-foot-tall man trying to figure out where he fits into his community and into the ongoing struggle for a fairer future. As played by Jharrel Jerome (of “Moonlight” and an Emmy winner for “When They See Us”), the massive fellow known as Cootie is taciturn, shy — understandably out of place. To work out, he bench-presses an entire car; his aunt and uncle (Mike Epps and Carmen Ejogo), raising him in their Oakland home despite being people of more typical stature, fret over how much food it takes to keep their nephew alive.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic On a standout episode of the new season of “And Just Like That,” Max’s continuation of the “Sex and the City” franchise, Carrie faces a conundrum. She’s been roped into recording the audiobook of her memoir — a retelling of the past year or so of her life as a new widow. A character beloved for her say-everything ethos, from her frank talk with friends to her newspaper columns that we once heard in voiceover, finds herself unable to speak. It’s a moving moment, one that leverages both the deep connection viewers feel with the character, and Sarah Jessica Parker’s somehow still-underrated winsomeness as a performer. And it represents the promise of the ungainly, odd show “And Just Like That” has shaped up to be. On this series, an often-frustrating clunkiness not only coexists with moments of real power, it burnishes them: The strangeness and sublimity of “And Just Like That” lies in how its flaws feel predictable and knowable, like the contours of a friendship.

Selome Hailu Paramount+ has renewed its teen drama “School Spirits” for a second season. The series stars Peyton List as Maddie Nears, a teen girl stuck in the afterlife investigating her own mysterious disappearance. Maddie goes on a crime-solving journey as she adjusts to high school purgatory, but the closer she gets to discovering the truth, the more secrets and lies she uncovers. The cast also includes Kristian Ventura as Simon Elroy, Milo Manheim as Wally Clark, Spencer MacPherson as Xavier Baxter, Kiara Pichardo as Nicole Herrera, Sarah Yarkin as Rhonda, Nick Pugliese as Charley and Rainbow Wedell as Claire Zomer.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The first episode of “Black Mirror’s” new, sixth season features a tableau with which its viewers will likely be intimately familiar: A couple, sitting on their couch, deciding what to stream in the evening. This being “Black Mirror,” their choice of programming will have mind-bending consequences; this being latter-day “Black Mirror,” it’s also a reflexive comment on its medium. In “Joan Is Awful,” a woman (Annie Murphy) watches a series that seems directly cribbed from her life, one in which she’s played by Salma Hayek Pinault and in which every interaction she has is blown up to show her to her worst advantage. Everyone else watches it too: Such is the power of the fictional-but-barely “Streamberry,” a service with Netflix’s aesthetic, reach, and industry-conquering ambition.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Samuel L. Jackson has been perhaps uniquely enriched by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Headliners like Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson may come and go, but, as the indefatigable Avengers ringmaster Nick Fury, he sticks around, bringing both his talent at a certain portent and the star persona that preceded him into the role to bear. His performance is a backbeat across the franchise, but it’s, to this point, never emerged into the spotlight. Which is among the elements that may make “Secret Invasion,” Disney+’s new Marvel series, particularly potent for fans. That Jackson excels when given the chance to lead a project comes as no meaningful surprise: He’s Samuel L. Jackson. But, in the show’s first two episodes, he’s a part of a show that makes a case for itself as, specifically, television, which is a fairly welcome surprise for a brand that’s had mixed results in this arena.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers from the second episode of HBO’s “The Idol,” titled “Double Fantasy,” now streaming on Max. On “The Idol,” Jocelyn just wants to be perfect. If only the show around her had such clarity of vision. As played by Lily-Rose Depp, the pop star Jocelyn spends part of the series’ second episode pushing herself through endless retakes of a music video shoot — long past the point at which the thing seems as good as it’ll ever be — in order to attain the crispness and clarity that lie just out of reach in her mind. Those sequences, with Aronofsky-movie-ready shots of bloody feet and the intriguing chatter among Jocelyn underlings that had been a highlight of the show’s first episode, create, for a time, a sense of Jocelyn’s reality, and what she has at stake.

J. Kim Murphy “I Love That for You” will not move forward with a second season at Showtime. The network has canceled the comedy series executive produced by Vanessa Bayer, Jeremy Beiler and Jessi Klein after one season. “’I Love That for You’ has completed its run on Showtime,” a spokesperson for the network disclosed on Wednesday evening. “We want to thank Vanessa, Jeremy and Jessi, along with the incredible cast and crew for their hard work and wish them the best going forward.” The news comes nearly a year after “I Love That for You” completed its pilot season, airing a finale on June 19, 2022. The first season was composed of eight episodes, which broadcast weekly on Sunday evenings.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The departure of CNN’s Chris Licht, following his turbulent year atop the cable news network, places a pause on one of the great media stories of the decade so far. But even non-media-junkies can appreciate just how strange and how strenuously rocking had been Licht’s time at the network: It played out across screens. The trouble with being the place that invented the 24-hour news cycle is that those hours can come back to bite when you’re the story. There it was in politics, when Donald Trump’s “Town Hall,” with purported rising star Kaitlan Collins, gear-shifted into the first televised rally of the 2024 presidential cycle — with CNN’s air being used to depict an audience of Trump supporters cheering on his jibes. (No less an eminence than Christiane Amanpour, a CNN icon, registered her dissent in public.) There it was on the business pages, with Licht’s overseeing the dismantling of streaming product CNN+, on orders from Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav, setting the tone for his tenure. There it was at the Oscars, when Michelle Yeoh used her best actress acceptance speech to rebuke anchor Don Lemon’s bizarre on-air comments about a woman’s “prime” years. There it was in the gossip pages, after a Variety story about Lemon’s comportment toward his female co-anchors on the network’s flagship morning show, and then his ouster, leaked into the tabloids, and never seemed to be countered by any good news about the network. And, finally, there it was at length, with an all-access profile by the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta revealing Licht’s contempt for predecessor Jeff Zucker and the depths of his disdain for and, frankly, confusion about CNN’s mission.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “With Open Eyes,” the series finale of HBO’s “Succession,” now streaming on Max. What a relief that the only votes being counted in the “Succession” finale were those of Waystar Royco board members. “Succession’s” series finale returned the show’s focus to the Roy family and their moves and countermoves against one another. How refreshing, after a season that was, on the whole and especially in recent weeks, cludgily paced and oddly unfocused. The polish and elegance of the show’s final moments stands in crisp counterpoint to a stretch of episodes that didn’t have the juice: It was as though the confirmation, at last, that the family business really would be changing hands reminded the show what gave it its elemental power.

Ethan Shanfeld Variety garnered a record 96 nominations for the SoCal Journalism awards sponsored by the Los Angeles Press Club, with nods across magazine and entertainment journalism, art and photography, video, audio, online content and social media during the 2022 calendar year. Among the nominations announced Friday were Tim Gray for print journalist of the year and Clayton Davis for online journalist of the year. In addition, Owen Gleiberman, Chris Willman and Daniel D’Addario were nominated as entertainment journalists of the year. “We are extremely proud of our newsroom for a banner year in record-breaking traffic, hard-hitting investigative journalism, profile writing and video. These nominations are a testament to the great work Variety is doing covering the entertainment industry,” said Variety co-editor-in-chiefs Ramin Setoodeh and Cynthia Littleton.

Variety Staff Follow Us on Twitter Alison Herman is Variety’s new TV critic, joining chief TV critic Daniel D’Addario. In the role, Herman will be a key voice in television criticism, writing reviews, commentary, appreciations and cover stories across all of Variety’s platforms. She will work with editor-at-large Kate Aurthur, who oversees the publication’s TV criticism and features. Herman was a staff writer at The Ringer from 2016 to 2023, where she covered television and popular culture. During her tenure, she wrote columns on new shows, profiled performers such as John Mulaney and reported the definitive piece on the aesthetics of “Succession.” “TV criticism is one of the bedrocks of Variety, as the No. 1 brand covering the business of entertainment,” co-Editors-in-Chief Cynthia Littleton and Ramin Setoodeh say. “Alison’s deep knowledge of television and pop culture make her the perfect addition to our team.”

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. Following a bloody and harrowing season finale in March, “The Last of Us” is getting a digital and Blu-ray release, available to pre-order on Amazon today.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The conversation about “nepo babies” has grown tiresome — and not just because “nepo baby” itself is such an unattractive turn of phrase. (Was “nepotism case” too hard to pronounce, somehow?) The general outrage over the idea that children of famous actors find themselves drawn to acting, ginned up by an artfully provocative recent cover story in New York magazine, has tended to elide the simple fact that said children often find themselves acting because they share talents with their parents, who are famous for good reason. So it is with John Owen Lowe, who seems like a slightly altered carbon copy of his father Rob (of “The West Wing” and “Parks and Recreation,” among others), with the smarm ironed out. Together, they’re headlining “Unstable,” a new Netflix comedy that’s infuriatingly better than it needed to be. Lowes père and fils share executive producer credits with Victor Fresco and Marc Buckland, two creatives with long comedy résumés. And what might have been expected to look like a Lowe family vanity project — Rob Lowe has built a sort of performed vanity into his public persona, after all — has ended up as a sharply written comedy with some genuinely great lines.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic It’s an interesting, telling choice that “Up Here,” Hulu’s new musical sitcom starring Mae Whitman and Carlos Valdes, is set in 1999. Not merely is the turn of the century, according to the roughly 20-year nostalgia cycle, currently in vogue, but the particular sort of moment the Y2K era was lends texture and meaning to the story “Up Here” tells. Assaying a time just before the social web allowed loners to find one another, “Up Here” presents a winning and lovely pair of oddballs singing their hearts out, in disbelief at having found one another. Here, Whitman plays Lindsay, who was lectured in childhood to shield her spiky and odd side from peers in order to be liked. “You show people the nice parts, because believe me, that’s all that people want to see,” her mother (Katie Finneran) tells her; grown up, she’s terrified to show vulnerability at all.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Hong Chau — the Oscar-nominated actor, who’s appeared in “The Whale,” “The Menu,” and “Downsizing” — is an interesting element on Netflix’s new series “The Night Agent,” and a revealing one. To cast Chau, a gifted and hardworking performer who’s been elevating projects for years, is to announce a certain ambition. Here, she’s playing the determined White House Chief of Staff, a figure close to the heart of various intrigues on a political thriller with schlock in its DNA. And yet she does it so elegantly, so excellently that she elevates the whole thing. So it is with “The Night Agent,” created by Shawn Ryan of “The Shield,” and based on a novel by Matthew Quirk. Here, Gabriel Basso (who played the future U.S. Senator J.D. Vance in the film “Hillbilly Elegy”) stars as Peter Sutherland, whose employment at the FBI is at such a low level that an offer to stand by and monitor a rarely used emergency hotline on the night shift comes to feel attractive. Wouldn’t you know it — one evening, that phone rings, and the caller is a tech founder who has found herself drawn into a drama she barely understands when her aunt and uncle were killed. Peter and Rose (Luciane Buchanan), his unlucky protectee, must piece together what happened on the fly, as they attempt to keep her safe and, just maybe, redeem Peter’s unfortunate family history of perfidy.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Miss Havisham is one of the most indelible characters in the English-language literary canon. Written by Charles Dickens to be outfitted, each day, in the wedding finery that serves as a decaying reminder that she was spurned at the altar, she’s a bundle of resentments tied together in white lace. And, as played by Olivia Colman, she’s the action of the new “Great Expectations” limited series — so much so that much of the rest of the densely plotty story seems like biding time between her appearances. Written by Steven Knight and co-produced by the BBC and FX, this “Great Expectations” is dimly lit and grimly violent, with the chaos and sudden bursts of enmity of Dickensian England brought to the fore. But only Miss Havisham pops off the screen, making this an adaptation lacking in a certain balance.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Climate change is the defining problem of our time, not merely for the threat it poses to the stability of our civilization but for how sticky and hard to pin down it is, in conversation or in art. By definition, it’s all around us — the climate is what we’re soaking in, no matter where we are. Its pervasiveness makes it somewhat unimaginable: What would it be like for everything to change? The mind reels; the problem gets put away. This is one of the challenges facing “Extrapolations,” a new quasi-anthology series that skips forward in time to tell the story of how we might continue to live on a warming Earth. Very few of the series’ characters appear in more than one episode, and very few have more than a flat and easily described motivation — the show works a bit like a breezy and brisk collection of linked short stories, constantly moving forward, continually showing new consequences of our own inaction. Keeping the characters flat and underserved, though, makes the lavishly depicted world they inhabit feel less like a matter of concern. What does it matter if we’re all going to die, if “we” aren’t first recognizable as rounded, full people?

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The story of Kim Philby is perhaps too good to make up. The British spy, a double agent for Moscow, operated at the highest levels of the intelligence community; his ability to disseminate information to the Soviet Union, to which he eventually defected, is proof, perhaps, of the power of personal charm and erudition to cover over what’s lying in plain sight. That’s the powerfully told story of “A Spy Among Friends,” which streamed on ITVX in the United Kingdom last year and which now arrives on nascent streamer MGM+. Guy Pearce plays Philby, who has at the series’ outset been a valued Soviet source for many years; likely his closest friend in tradecraft, Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis), must get a confession from him. We see the pair’s relationship over time in layered flashbacks, adding context and understanding to Elliott’s failure to nail down Philby.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic As a performer, Kerry Washington is particularly adept at conveying uptightness — her crispness of bearing and her rat-a-tat delivery suggest a certain passion for organization, for rigor. This was the ingredient that helped elevate “Scandal,” and the emotionally chaotic but professionally fastidious character of Olivia Pope. (And, incidentally, it’s the aspect that made Washington’s work as a free-spirited artist in “Little Fires Everywhere” ring somewhat false.) Now, on the Hulu sitcom “UnPrisoned,” Washington’s back to the angle that suits her best — and at the heart of a sweetly intended show of disarming quality. Here, Washington plays Paige, a relationship therapist whom viewers may not be shocked to learn hasn’t quite got herself figured out. Her tendency to dispense advice about fixing romantic partnerships (both to her patients and, we see, on social media) rubs up against the fact that she makes poor choices. We learn, gradually, about the role model she’s emulating in her own way: Her father, Edwin, newly released from prison, is at once astoundingly charismatic (no surprise, given that he’s played by Delroy Lindo) and someone with an entangled personal life. He moves in with her and her teenage son (​​Faly Rakotohavana), kicking off what will be a major reckoning for both parties. Soon enough, Paige’s desire for order — her need to project a sense of having it all together, even as that’s not quite true — becomes an impossibility.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic As is well known by anyone who’s ever had the common nightmare of a last-minute test for which one hasn’t studied, being stuck in high school forever would be horrible. But that’s exactly what seems to be happening to Maddie Nears (Peyton List), who, after having been killed on the grounds of her school, joins a group of ghosts who haunt the premises. Coming from different eras, the spirits whose number Maddie joins share little, except for a jaded sense of resignation to their fate; they coach Maddie through the early days of her afterlife, in which she can see what unfolds around her but, at least at first, cannot make herself known to the friends she left behind on Earth.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic There’s a thrilling moment a little before the halfway point of Amazon’s new limited series “Daisy Jones & the Six” in which two stars collide. The ethereal vocalist Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) has been invited to perform her collaboration with a rising rock band (no points for guessing their moniker), but crashes the stage a bit early and then refuses to leave after her one song has been performed. Daisy and the Six’s lead singer Billy (Sam Claflin) share the microphone for a while, if “share” is the word for what one does in a battle for territory; faces close together, they’re competing for real estate, competing for a claim on the song they sing, competing to be heard.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Vinnie Hacker, a 20-year-old TikTok star who appeared in Netflix docu-series “Hype House,” has signed for representation with CAA. Hacker is a “Gen Z powerhouse,” per CAA, with more than 25 million followers across platforms including more than 15 million on TikTok and 5.7 million on Instagram. Building on his popularity on social media, he has expanded his endeavors into other areas including gaming, modeling, television and his own clothing line. In 2021, Hacker joined L.A.-based social-media collective The Hype House and subsequently starred in last year’s Netflix original series “Hype House.” (Variety‘s Daniel D’Addario, in his review of the show, said it “tells a depressing story of TikTok fameseeking.”)

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Give the team behind “The Consultant” this much — they managed to find just the right lead. Christoph Waltz, whose glower and verbosity have won him two Academy Awards, surfaces now on Amazon Prime Video as a malign expert in business and in manipulation. After a tragedy involving the founder of the app gaming outfit CompWare (the name may give a sense of how carefully the script is written), Waltz’s Regus Patoff enters to right the ship. His claim on the company is unclear to its employees, but soon enough, he’s occupying close to all of their mental real estate, calling them at all hours and asking invasive personal questions that some force of charisma or of mind control makes them feel compelled to answer.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic After six seasons, Milo Ventimiglia — a star who began his career as Stars Hollow’s resident hellion on “Gilmore Girls” — is freed up from playing the benevolent patriarch on “This Is Us.” And, at least in theory, his new series brings together the two halves of his TV career. On ABC’s “The Company You Keep,” based on the Korean series “My Fellow Citizens,” Ventimiglia plays a con artist, but one who’s utterly committed to his parents (William Fichtner and Polly Draper) and adult sister (Sarah Wayne Callies). The conflict between obligations to loved ones and the desire to get out of the game creates tension and interest in the show’s first two episodes, as does genuine chemistry with co-star Catherine Haena Kim.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Before entering an ostrich enclosure, Frank, an animal control officer, sneaks something into his partner’s back pocket. It’s a stick of jerky, and within moments, Frank is openly guffawing as the flightless birds are chasing his hapless colleague. That’s the general vibe of “Animal Control,” a new sitcom on Fox. Here, “Community” alumnus Joel McHale plays Frank, a former cop who got fired after trying to root out corruption. (This is a neat trick in sidestepping the ongoing national conversation about policing — our complicated protagonist got removed from the force for being too virtuous.) His partner, a Fred who goes by Shred (Michael Rowland), arrived on this particular force through an unconventional path as well; he’s a former pro snowboarder whose laid-back affect suggests that, inside, he never really left the slopes.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Last year, Apple TV+ had a zeitgeist hit with “Severance,” a show that leveraged a high-polish gleam and an eerily out-of-time aesthetic to tell a story of people who were ultimately strangers to themselves. The streamer could be said to be attempting the same feat twice with “Hello Tomorrow!,” set in a 1950s idea of the future and centering an affably empty salesman played by Billy Crudup. Here, though, the ideas are unrewarding enough that the worked-over look of the show grows tiresome, as though it’s covering for a lack in the series’ writing. Created by Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, “Hello Tomorrow!” features Crudup in something like the mode for which he won an Emmy as “The Morning Show’s” devious executive. Here, he plays Jack, a wheel-spinning operator who is selling timeshares on the moon. His customers are people who, as in our collective memory of our nation’s midcentury past, have a fixation on the possibilities space offers but who, unlike ‘50s Americans,— see getting there as feasible. Joey, the young man Jack takes under his wing (Nicholas Podany), is an ungifted salesman at first. But he makes an emotional impression upon Jack, who is concealing that he is Joey’s father.