I think it’s safe to say that, largely because of this newsletter, I have watched more new TV these past six months than I have in years. With that came a lot of boredom (you’ve seen one wan adaptation of an airport novel, you’ve seen a million) but plenty of true entertainment. Mix those exciting debuts in with a few returning series that delivered in milestone seasons, and it’s been a pretty good year on the small screen to date. Here are my highlights. 

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

We certainly don’t need another Game of Thrones show, and House of the Dragon is a lot of wheel-spinning with far less payoff. Thus I approached this third GoT series with heavy skepticism. But creator Ira Parker found a new tack to take when venturing through the well-trod medieval world of Westeros: he went small. This series mostly concerns two characters—an oafish hedge knight and his waifish would-be squire—as they attend a jousting tourney. Of course, other stuff happens, some of it with larger significance to the GoT universe, but for the most part this is a nicely contained series about friendship and loyalty and, yes, some ugly violence. Peter Claffey, a former rugby player relatively new to acting, is a real find, as is young Dexter Sol Ansell as a strange child who, hint hint, may be more than meets the eye. 

Love Story

John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette may have been completely different people from how they are depicted on Connor Hines’s series. But these versions of the doomed lovers and media fixtures (one willing, the other quite reluctant) are compelling and credible. Well, okay, it’s mostly Sarah Pidgeon, as Carolyn, who carries the acting weight, but she does so with such grace and authority that she more than makes up for her co-star’s occasional woodenness. Grace Gummer also makes a strong impression late in the series as Caroline Kennedy, while Constance Zimmer puts on a frumpy wig and some cakey makeup and blows the roof off the joint as Bessette’s mother, fiercely determined that both of her daughters—her eldest, Lauren, died in the infamous plane crash too—are not lost amid the Kennedy curse of it all. Sad but summery and sincerely romantic—all aided by a beautiful Bryce Dessner score—Love Story is tabloid-mining done right. 

Survivor

So here’s the problem. I loved most of this season of Australian Survivor but was really disappointed/frustrated by the endgame. Meanwhile, I was annoyed by a lot of American Survivor season 50—a landmark one that brought old players back—but was quite happy with the ending. I guess that means everything balanced out? Both seasons felt appropriately epic, even if Australian is the only one still doing it right in terms of length—a whopping 46 days, versus the American New Era’s measly 26. Though, honestly, I almost got more hooked on Netflix’s Outlast: The Jungle, a more pared back, sociological version of a survival series that makes at least one pretty salient point: a lot of straight men are real nightmares when left to their own devices. (Or, at least the ones cast for the show are.) I wasn’t sure I’d be into an ersatz Survivor, but Outlast is its own kind of interesting.