Netflix’s “Firefly Lane” honors friendship but leans into stereotypes. A television series doesn’t have to tell all the truths about life, so it’s forgivable that Netflix’s Firefly Lane is a bit myopic in its narrative of two women who are lifelong best friends. Firefly Lane gets a lot right. Tully (Katherine Heigl) and Kate (Sarah Chalke) are compassionate, fierce friends who meet in high school in the 1970s and stand by each other (most of the time) through their 20s, 30s, and 40s. Hooray for a series celebrating female friendship. Hooray for story lines about things that happen to women: bad men, inadequate mothers, sexism at work, and the withering rejection only a teenager can deliver. Hooray for LGBTQ characters. And hooray for … Read More
‘Heartland’ is family-friendly but not unbearably cheesy
For all its wholesomeness, “Heartland” is not sickly sweet and doesn’t sidestep the realities of life. Heartland is a family show without corruption or treachery, a cowboy show that focuses on women, and a western show set not in the United States but in Alberta, Canada. It’s also Canada’s longest-running one-hour drama series and was renewed for its 16th season. It is available in the United States via Netflix and UPtv. It’s compellingly addictive television—comforting and homey, simple and true, peopled with handsome men in cowboy hats and competent women who can handle horses, cattle, and business. Adapted from a series of 26 young adult novels by Lauren Brooke, Heartland tells the story of the Bartlett-Fleming family raising horses and cattle … Read More
In ‘Severance,’ a bleak look at soul-stealing office culture
The Apple TV+ series “Severance” sends us back to work in prepandemic corporate America. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, work-life balance was a term corporations used to lure new hires but an evasive concept to operationalize in day-to-day cubicle life. That changed—overnight. COVID-19 lockdowns forced what Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter call the “complete collapse of the work-home boundary” in a March 2022 Scientific American article. Analysts predict the workplace has changed forever: Zoom instead of air travel and commuting. Flexible hours that let parents work after their kids are in bed. Working from home—or anywhere. Heightened awareness that employers should support workers’ mental health. Corporations that promoted work-life balance as long as it didn’t interfere with productivity suddenly scrambled to reinvent themselves—and sublet … Read More
Tennant’s Fogg travels to find himself anew
‘Around the World in 80 Days’ offers an ode to taking chances. A century and a half ago, Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days, and readers began to imagine that the world might be shrinking a wee bit. The new Masterpiece series on PBS, starring the transcendent David Tennant, reimagines and recasts the central characters and chunks of the narrative in a modern retelling of Verne’s adventure story—which has already been retold many times, including in the classic Academy Award–winning 1956 film. A sedentary British bachelor, Phileas Fogg (Tennant) rarely leaves home except for a daily walk to his men’s club, where he eats the same meal each day and eschews anything out of the ordinary. Reading a … Read More
How Molly Burhans is helping the church fight climate change
A young cartographer is helping the church catalog its land holdings so it might address the environment, human migration, and sustainable land stewardship. At first, Molly Burhans thought she’d be a ballet dancer. It had been her dream through middle school, her focus in high school, and her major in college—until a foot injury caused her to drop out and move back home to Buffalo, New York. Although that seemed like a setback, it placed her on a path to becoming possibly the most awarded and well-known Catholic environmentalist in the world at this moment. She is almost certainly the most well-known cartographer. In 2021 the Sierra Club honored the then 32-year-old with its EarthCare Award, previously awarded to the … Read More
‘Ted Lasso’ shows a better way to be a man
Apple TV+’s ‘Ted Lasso’ is a skillfully crafted story about masculinity that is compassionate and supportive. Ted Lasso is teaching boys how to be men and men how to be good people. Right there on television, where the opposite usually happens. The American series—named for its main character and produced in London for Apple TV+—was nominated for 20 Primetime Emmy Awards its first season alone, scooping up Golden Globe, Critics Choice, and other awards along the way. It was just renewed for a third season. The premise will feel slightly familiar to fans of the 1989 film Major League: An owner of a United Kingdom soccer club hires American coach Ted Lasso, hoping he’ll be incompetent and drive the team into the … Read More
True Grit
Some folks just know what they’re supposed to do. He never wanted to be anything else. Sitting at a desk and pushing pencils in an office justwasn’t his style. The nubby grip of a good suede glove, the creak and groan of a broken-in saddle, the strip ofrawhide wrapped around his hand—they felt right from the first time he climbed to the topfence rail to watch his daddy work the quarter horses. His left wrist hasn’t been the same since that last trip to the emergency room in Abilene. Hiswalk has a bowlegged roll that will never go away, even if he takes to wearing wing tips and athree piece suit, which ain’t likely. A little sawdust, a lot of … Read More
Ze Frank’s ‘True Facts’ are full of wit and wonder
Ze Frank makes good stuff that reminds people how good they are too. “True Facts,” little bitty animal movies, are treasures of bug and bird and bat lore. They are laugh-out-loud delightful, thanks to Ze Frank, their witty creator. These 3- or 4- or 10-minute minidocumentaries use gorgeous and remarkable research footage from scientists accompanied by irreverent and clever narration by Frank, a onetime media executive at BuzzFeed Motion Pictures and a longtime internet content creator. There are “True Facts” about ostriches, dragonflies, batfishes, ducks, giraffes, shrimp, octopi, owls, ants, star-nosed moles (gird your loins for that one), and tardigrades. What’s a tardigrade? You probably know it by one of its alternate monikers: the moss piglet or water bear. No? … Read More
In ‘The Hidden Life of Trees,’ forests are family, too
Trees are, as it turns out, social and more than a little like us. Trees have friends. Trees talk to each other and send over resources when a neighbor is in need. Trees nurture their children. Trees sound the alarm about environmental threats. Trees grow stronger and more vigorous when raised in diverse communities, and they struggle in artificially planted, monoculture forests where all of the trees are the same age. Trees are, as it turns out, social and more than a little like us. So says forester and bestselling author Peter Wohlleben, whose book, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from A Secret World (Greystone Books), inspired a feature-length documentary by the same name directed by … Read More
In ‘All Creatures Great and Small,’ humanity steals the show
A new PBS series about a country vet shows the power of human decency. It’s so nice to visit England. It’s even more delightful to time travel back to the years before the Second World War, remembered nostalgically through the eyes of beloved author and veterinarian James Herriot, a pen name used by James Alfred Wight. His bestselling books include All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Things Wise and Wonderful, and The Lord God Made Them All. A classic BBC television series, All Creatures Great and Small, ran for 90 episodes through the late 1970s and 1980s. Now there’s a new adaptation of the same title, and it is glorious. The first six episodes debuted in the United States on PBS Masterpiece in January, … Read More