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There are roughly 47,000—oh, wait, a new Netflix Original just dropped; make that 47,001—TV shows and movies coming out each week. At Obsessed, we consider it our social duty to help you see the best and skip the rest.
We’ve already got a variety of in-depth, exclusive coverage on all of your streaming favorites and new releases, but sometimes what you’re looking for is a simple Do or Don’t. That’s why we created See/Skip, to tell you exactly what our writers think you should See and what you can Skip from the past week’s crowded entertainment landscape.
See: Sex Lives of College Girls
The Sex Lives of College Girls Season 2 sees our scholastic besties back from fall break for more horny coed shenanigans. Four charming performances, plenty of cringey cackles, and like 350 oiled-up pecs. That’s what television is about!
Here’s Fletcher Peter’ take:
“Watching The Sex Lives of College Girls should make you want to crawl into your TV screen, bust into the world of Essex College, and gossip with a gaggle of university students. How can you not chastise a student who panics and says “Um, cool!” when her professor’s husband suggests the two of them should have sex some time? A stray “Don’t do that!” will come flying out of your mouth at every misstep, followed by bounties of giggles and gasps.
More than anything, watching The Sex Lives of College Girls is heartwarming and easy. It’s so fun to see four women be close friends with each other, rarely, if ever, fighting (perhaps, as college roommates, this is the most unrealistic part of the show, but c’est la vie) or getting into catty arguments. They’re all quite different, but they find common ground to enjoy collegiate life together. Perhaps the two biggest polar opposites are Leighton and Kimberly, the rich-bitch prepster and the outcast Arizona valedictorian—but this makes their kinship even more remarkable, especially when Kimberly is the first person Leighton comes out to.”
See: Bones and All
Bones and All is a love story as beautiful as it is brutal. Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell’s cannibalistic journey through the Midwest will captivate you. Just don’t watch it on an empty stomach… or a full one. Just a light snack. Maybe a finger!
Here’s Marlow Stern’s take:
“For the better part of a decade, Gen Z has been salivating for a YA romance to call their own, gnawing at whatever scraps of Twilight they can find. They may have found it with Bones and All, a tender tale of two impossibly gorgeous teen cannibals who embark on a journey across the American Midwest in search of family and belonging (and warm bodies, of course).
Bones and All hits the occasional speed bump over the course of its 130-minute odyssey where Guadagnino leans too heavily into the gore, as when Lee, needing new wheels, seduces a closeted man at a county fair, or its drawn-out denouement (it still never approaches the level of Raw). And Chalamet’s cannibal fits do border on the absurd, such as a pair of distressed knee-ripped baggy jeans that are more TikTok than technicolor. But its charms far outweigh its foibles, like Michael Stuhlbarg hamming it up as a grimy, overall-sporting backwoods people-eater and the score by the Social Network team of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, casting the proceedings in a cocoon of gloom.”
Skip: Spirited
Spirited might be an original take on A Christmas Carol, but its overly loud, willfully obnoxious musical numbers and years-late gags will eat away at you like salmonella poisoning after too much raw Christmas cookie dough.
Here’s Coleman Spilde’s take:
“One of the year’s newest adaptations of A Christmas Carol (and certainly its most obnoxious) is Spirited, a flashy, big-budget holiday musical that kindly offers a newer take on a story as old as mold. In case you couldn’t tell it was a musical, the film’s stars, Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds, pose on the poster in a way that can only be described as “menacingly Broadway.” Judging by the art alone, the two look like a couple of demented Newsies that were cut from the cast and are stomping their way into your home for a dose of singsong-y revenge. Unfortunately, my friends, Spirited is a fate worse than that.
The film gets some points for acknowledging its own uselessness in the script, referring to itself as “another adaptation nobody asked for.” But the desperation bleeding from every frame of Spirited reeks like old, hardened fruitcake. Somehow, it manages to take an original spin on the single most adapted public domain story and flush it down the toilet, singing a solemn tune the whole way down.”
Skip: Wednesday
Wednesday is a surprising misfire that sees Tim Burton fumbling his macabre bag for a series that barely rises to the occasion of meeting long-set expectations. And it’s not good Thursday-Tuesday either.
Here’s Nick Schager’s take
“The Addams Family gets a drearily formulaic makeover with Wednesday, a new Netflix series, premiering Nov. 23, that wedges the family’s mordant goth daughter into a boarding school drama that’s a pale photocopy of Harry Potter—and its lesser Percy Jackson/The School for Good and Evil/Vampire Academy offspring. Misbegotten on almost every front, it mines its name-brand IP for familiar romance and horror, and proves all the more depressing for being the handiwork of the very artist who decades ago pioneered such macabre teen terrain: Tim Burton.
On a purely aesthetic level, Burton—who executive produces and directs the eight-episode series’ first four installments—cut-and-pastes his greatest hits in Wednesday: a bit of Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands here, a drop of Sleepy Hollow and Frankenweenie there. Charles Addams’ The Addams Family was always an obvious influence on Burton, but the auteur brings nothing new to this reimagined adaptation; he’s already done this sort of thing before, and with considerably more inventiveness and flair.”
