Kathryn Vanarendonk

New Jersey

TV Staff Writer at Vulture

critic @vulture, child wrangler. kathryn.vanarendonk @ https://t.co/6LbuHJVbFk - i'm hanging out more at bsky lately

Articles

Jerrod Carmichael ‘Don’t Be Gay’ HBO Comedy-Special Review

2 weeks ago | vulture.com | Kathryn Vanarendonk

The most striking thing about Jerrod Carmichael’s new special, Don’t Be Gay, is how much it resembles a familiar, run-of-the-mill comedy special. He has made a standard hourlong special before: His 2014 hour, Love at the Store, a relic from a much earlier place in both his career and his public persona, looks and sounds like the competent, does-the-job Funny or Die production that it is. But since then, Carmichael’s work has been distinguished by his investment in messing with the form.
Overthinking ‘Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ Season Two Drama

2 weeks ago | vulture.com | Kathryn Vanarendonk

Spoilers ahead for the entirety of season two of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, including the finale. Let it never again be said that reality shows need alcohol to be absolutely, unreservedly out of control.
The Emmys Can’t Ignore TV’s Spy Obsession Much Longer

2 weeks ago | vulture.com | Joe Reid |Kathryn Vanarendonk

Keeping pace with Hollywood’s perpetual awards horserace. Sign up for the newsletter here. From left: Lashana Lynch in The Day of the Jackal, Diego Luna in Andor, Keira Knightley in Black Doves. In all the years of the Emmys, only two shows about espionage have ever won the Outstanding Drama Series award: Mission: Impossible in 1967 and 1968 (it was the 1960s) and Homeland in 2012 (we’d just killed Bin Laden).
‘Murderbot’ Apple TV+ Show With Alexander Skarsgård

3 weeks ago | vulture.com | Kathryn Vanarendonk

Murderbot, Apple TV+’s new adaptation of Martha Wells’s science-fiction book series, teeters on the margins of greatness. A story about a security cyborg with violent capabilities that’s learned how to be human by hacking its control chip and binging bad TV, Murderbot the TV series gets more right than it gets wrong. It pokes at all the most interesting questions about its world and its protagonist. How human can Alexander Skarsgård’s Murderbot be, and should it even want to be human?
Tony Gilroy on ‘Andor,’ ‘Rogue One,’ the Star Wars Universe

3 weeks ago | vulture.com | Kathryn Vanarendonk

Andor creator Tony Gilroy reflects on five years inside the Star Wars universe. “I wanted some element of hope. I wanted to have something legitimately positive and forward. My own personal worldview, in the end, is really not that dark.” “I wanted some element of hope. I wanted to have something legitimately positive and forward.
‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ Knows MomTok Is a Lie

3 weeks ago | vulture.com | Kathryn Vanarendonk

Most reality lifestyle shows are stuck with a necessary truth: None of these people would actually be friends, and many would never even know one another if they weren’t all cast on the same series together. On the Housewives series, there’s little defining cohesion to the group beyond “we live in the same region.” They walk into each other’s homes and are astonished by how bad the cheese/wine/décor/layout is.
Netflix Adaptation Is Timeless for Today

4 weeks ago | vulture.com | Kathryn Vanarendonk

The mystique of Judy Blume’s 1975 novel Forever … lies in its frankness. Her depiction of two teens who fall in love and go on ski trips and slowly, gradually work their way from kissing to hand jobs and intercourse and orgasms hits at a precise, paradoxical point of what’s most shocking about teenage life: It is full of taboos, yet all those taboos are being broken all the time.
The Last of Us - TV Episode Recaps & News

1 month ago | vulture.com | Roxana Hadadi |Kathryn Vanarendonk |Joe Reid |Katie Heaney

When The Last of Us came out for the PlayStation 3 in 2013, critics and gamers alike hailed it as a new achievement for video games as a medium, praising not just the gameplay but its complex story that was closer to what you might expect from prestige TV than most games at the time. Now, a decade later, Chernobyl showrunner Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, creator of the game, have closed the loop, turning the game into a series for HBO.
Are You Happy With How You Watch TV?

1 month ago | vulture.com | Joe Adalian |Kathryn Vanarendonk

Last year — more than a decade after Netflix’s first binge-drop series, House of Cards, established a new mode of TV consumption, and with popular weekly release series such as Shōgun and Hacks on our minds — we started to wonder about the preferences that were settling in with modern TV viewers. Had the on-demand appeal of streaming’s binge releases achieved primacy? Was the traditional weekly rollout enjoying a cultural resurgence?
The Baldwins Almost Succeeded

1 month ago | vulture.com | Kathryn Vanarendonk

Sometimes you nearly forget this exercise in crisis management was a wild miscalculation. At the conclusion of the eight-episode season of The Baldwins, the mind turns to contemplate what it just experienced. It is challenging — not because there’s nothing to reflect on, but because watching the full season of The Baldwins feels like entering a Hamptons-themed pinball machine.