Ben Carter

Prague gives Four Hands, Two Sonatas its deadline before the friendship has even started. Kang Pi-o sits at a piano during the International Harmonie Competition, playing through a bleeding finger, while Choi Jeong-yo is being driven away by armed kidnappers. Jeong-yo fights back, escapes the vehicle, gets shot, and disappears into the water. Six months earlier, these two are still teenagers struggling to tolerate each other.

Eleven years is a long time for one murder case to keep changing shape. Dan Markel was shot twice in the head in the driveway of his Tallahassee home in July 2014, yet the story that follows stretches through surveillance footage, cell-phone records, undercover operations, multiple trials, and a family feud poisonous enough to make Thanksgiving seem like an unsafe activity.

The Paper Season 2 understands the strange rule of workplace comedy: the more desperately people try to look professional, the faster everything falls apart. The Toledo Truth Teller staff returns with awards on the wall, confidence in the air, and absolutely no ability to behave like a normal workplace. That combination gives the series a stronger identity than its first season, where every joke carried the invisible weight of being connected to The Office.

Alix Earle can make a 30-second TikTok feel intimate. Give her nearly 40 minutes, and intimacy starts developing an alarming amount of dead air. Netflix's eight-episode Earle Meets World tries to turn the 25-year-old influencer's carefully portioned online persona into a Kardashian-style family docusoap.

Replacing all three presenters at once should make The Grand Tour feel like a hostage exchange. Instead, the stranger thing is how little the programme itself changes. James Engelsman and Thomas Holland arrive from the YouTube channel Throttle House, while Francis Bourgeois joins them after becoming famous for getting extremely excited about trains.

Andrew and Eunice Dang can hold an entire conversation in grunts, yet neither can organize a life that would survive five minutes of adult scrutiny. He cooks, cleans, pays the bills, and occasionally burps his younger sister. She earns money crushing bread with her feet for online subscribers while working unpaid at a wellness company. Their arrangement is ridiculous, oddly functional, and immediately specific.

Ian Ridley keeps an unopened bottle of vodka on the table while he eats alone. Six months sober, 11 years removed from the disappearance of his three-year-old daughter Maggie, he has apparently decided temptation should have a reserved seat at dinner. It tells you plenty about Ian before Last Seen starts dismantling what little stability he has left.

Teagan Tao wins a race while her life is falling apart behind the spectators. It is a wonderfully efficient piece of television engineering. Teagan, played by Miku Martineau, is still powering her single scull toward the finish while her hotelier father David slips away, leaving an apology text before federal agents arrive to expose the financial crimes that funded the family's comfortable Los Angeles existence. The girl crosses the line a champion. By the time she understands what happened on shore, the future she was rowing toward has vanished.

Lamar Kinsey's beat hits the room before the series has fully explained what kind of show it wants to be. He is standing in a trap house, playing music for Artillery, a wounded rapper with bandages across his body and enough street presence to make Lamar's lack of self-preservation look almost impressive. Artillery starts rapping. His friends pick up the words. The track bleeds into Larrance “Rance 1500” Dopson's score, and suddenly The Drop: A Snowfall Saga has found its dramatic grammar.

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