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Follow television stories with episode recaps, finale explanations, character coverage, cast details, and filming locations.
Ivo spends much of The Perfect Lie looking like one of the quieter casualties of the Dinner Club’s collapsing friendships. His marriage to Hanneke has become painfully distant, Evert’s death unsettles him more than he initially admits, and every new revelation seems to leave him carrying guilt he refuses to explain. The final episode, appropriately…
Saskia Noort’s The Dinner Club already had all the ingredients Netflix needed for a glossy psychological thriller: affluent couples, extramarital affairs, financial secrets, a suspicious fire and a friendship group held together by appearances. The Perfect Lie keeps that skeleton, but the seven-part adaptation is far less interested in reproducing the novel scene for scene.…
High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam has the machinery of a military thriller, but its most important scenes are built around people talking, arguing and trying to understand what the intelligence in front of them actually means. Inspired by former CIA analyst John Nixon’s memoir “Debriefing the President,” TNT’s eight-episode limited series begins during…
Joel Kinnaman’s John Nixon enters “High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam” as the sort of intelligence officer who knows far more about Saddam Hussein than his position in Washington allows him to use. The early episodes push him out of that analytical world and into Iraq, setting up the encounter that would ultimately define…
Among the people John Nixon encounters after arriving in Iraq, Captain Samir quickly becomes more than the man assigned to translate his conversations. Played by Dar Salim, Samir understands the country, the danger of moving through Baghdad and the human consequences of Saddam Hussein’s rule in ways Nixon simply cannot from an intelligence report. Their…
“High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam” arrives with the familiar shape of a political thriller, but much of its tension comes from events that were already extraordinary before television writers began adapting them. The series follows CIA analyst John Nixon during the search for Saddam Hussein and the interrogations that followed the former Iraqi…
TNT’s “High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam” revisits the months after the 2003 invasion of Iraq from an unusually intimate angle. Joel Kinnaman plays CIA analyst John Nixon, while Waleed Zuaiter portrays Saddam Hussein, with much of the drama moving between the search for the deposed Iraqi leader and Nixon’s later interrogations of him.…
Charles Darnay enters A Tale of Two Cities as a French emigre whose past is difficult to pin down. He is idealistic enough to fight alongside the Americans at Yorktown, willing to risk returning to France with Lucie Manette, and seemingly determined to build a different life in England. Yet Episode 2 makes it increasingly…
A Tale of Two Cities Episode 2, titled “Malunion,” finally gives Lucie Manette the reunion she has spent most of her life believing was impossible. Her father Alexandre is alive, but nearly two decades inside the Bastille have left him so psychologically damaged that bringing him home proves considerably more difficult than simply finding him.…
Teddy Ward has only a small role in the Vigil Season 3 finale, but his appearance is important because it confirms that the American operation surrounding Shen Jia does not end with Garcia’s arrest. Garcia may be the CIA operative exposed on Svalbard, but Teddy is the character who shows that Washington’s interest in Jia…
Amy Silva spends most of Vigil Season 3 investigating what happened to Professor Vincent Mair and trying to understand why so many governments are interested in Shen Jia. By the finale, however, the case becomes personal and professional in a way Amy cannot avoid. Protecting Jia means directly defying orders from senior officials, and although…
Vigil Season 3 leaves Svalbard behind for its finale, but the conspiracy becomes even more dangerous once Amy Silva and Shen Jia reach Scotland. Episode 6 reveals that the fight over Jia’s biofuel was never simply Britain against China or the West against Russia. British intelligence and the United States have both been working to…
