Peacock’s hit mystery-comedy Poker Face ends its first season with its heroine Charlie facing the music. The 20th season of Top Chef heads to London for an all-star competition featuring contestants from 11 international versions. Netflix’s thriller You goes off the rails as it returns to finish its fourth season. The spirits on Ghosts are rattled when Hetty’s no-good husband suddenly returns from hell.
One of 2023’s brightest new shows wraps its first season with a twisty episode written by series creator Rian Johnson (Knives Out), in which Charlie Cale (the irrepressible Natasha Lyonne) is jolted back into the real world when her “Jane Doe” cover is blown. Back in the custody of hit man Cliff Legrand (Benjamin Bratt), she reluctantly endures a road trip en route to Atlantic City, where the crime boss (Ron Perlman) who’s been seeking her all season awaits. What happens next is so outrageous even a human lie-detector like Charlie has trouble getting to the truth. But before you know it, she’s on the run again.
TV’s tastiest cooking competition goes global in its 40th season, when host/judge Padma Lakshmi welcomes 16 contestants to London, all winners or finalists from 11 international versions of the franchise. (There are 29 in all!) A fascinating culture clash, this is the first OG Top Chef season to be filmed entirely overseas (the final will be in Paris), and we soon learn that not all countries’ versions of Top Chef are uniform. Several of the chefs are stunned at the frantic pace of the first quickfire, where they have only three minutes to pick five ingredients for their dish. Even the simplest basic mistake can send someone packing, as the initial elimination challenge makes clear.
If you thought You couldn’t go further off the deep end, you haven’t seen anything yet. The thriller’s final five episodes of Season 4 open with London transplant Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), still pretending to be college professor Jonathan Moore, under the thumb of his sinister nemesis, mayoral candidate and apparent serial killer Rhys Montrose (Star Trek: Picard’s Ed Speleers). As the two grow closer in a bizarre dance of death, with the body count climbing, there are new complications when love interest Kate’s (Charlotte Ritchie) mogul dad (Greg Kinnear) enters the scene, and Joe/Jonathan’s intrepid student Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman) continues snooping, using her knowledge of classic whodunits to fuel her suspicions about her bearded American prof.
We’ve heard of people going to hell and back, but for 19th century dowager ghost Hetty (Rebecca Wisocky), it becomes an unpleasant reality when her despised robber-baron husband Elias Woodstone (Veep’s Matt Walsh) drops in via a literal portal from hell. He’s seeking his wife’s forgiveness, but he might as well be asking for hell to freeze over, until he contrives some special conditions. Elsewhere in the manor, Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) gets “Flowered”—accidentally walking through the eternally stoned hippie ghost (Sheila Carrasco)—and he may need to take another hit when he tries to recreate a recipe he concocted while under the influence for a powerful food critic.
Eileen (Hilary Swank) is itching to get back to the newsroom only days after the harrowing hostage crisis—her young co-worker Gabriel (Pablo Castelblanco), not so much. And while the reporters’ investigation into the unsolved murder of an indigenous woman takes on new momentum, they’re all distracted by rumors of the Daily Alaskan being sold to a company known for gutting local papers. (Sadly, a harsh reality for many journalists.)
“You just killed us all,” Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes) bleakly told his former boss Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) in last week’s cliffhanger. It’s certainly looking bleak for the Titan as it drifts powerlessly through an anomaly, with a deadly changeling saboteur on board. Picard uses the down time to reflect on his past and to try to make amends with Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers), the son he never knew.
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