Negotiations: notes on Minx, Ipcress File and Inside Man

As the year starts to wind down, spotlighting three series that brightened my 2022.

Minx has flown under the radar; it’s a comedy about a woman determined not to fly under the radar, so there’s some sort of poetic injustice to that. I heard very few people discussing it while it was airing, and when it was ultimately picked up for a second season by HBO Max, there was hardly a murmur. And now that HBO Max is being absorbed into Discovery Plus, and a lot of its scripted shows — even ones that have been renewed — may fall by the wayside, I still don’t hear anyone talking about it, or fretting about its future. But it’s the best new comedy I saw in 2022: not just a vivid evocation of life in America in the early ‘70s, but a resolutely apt analogy for life in America in 2022.

What Do Critics Want?: notes on American Rust, The Offer and The Time Traveler’s Wife

HBO canceled The Time Traveler’s Wife last week. There goes another show I quite enjoyed. But hell, I’m used to it; at 63, I practically expect networks to discard the series I’m most fond of. What I don’t expect is that those same series will be so thoroughly trashed by critics.