Susan Astorga Kemp

Pop-culture criticism in 2019 comes with a handful of recurring buzzwords: Representation. Intersectionality. Privilege. We use them so often they tend to lose their meaning — that is, until a movie, episode, or song comes around and hits us like a sucker punch. Oh yeah, that’s why we criticize art, our newly awakened self reminds us. Because it’s how we talk about the world and our place in it.
Last year, I wrote about being struck that the young women in Blockers were speaking in my voice. ...

The Pitch: You always know things are going to go to shit for a character when he’s snorting coke one minute into a new season. It’s practically universal cinematic code for, “This bloke thinks he’s having a party, but you just wait and see, dear audience.” Frankie Martino (one of two twin brothers played by James Franco) is no rookie to lighting the candle at both ends, however. He’s back to the Deuce, and this year he’s dipping his toes into amateur porn. Hey, it’s 1985 and tastes are shift...

The Pitch: It’s been a year since Fleabag (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), the endlessly sardonic protagonist of the Amazon series in her name, had the big blowout with her sister Claire (Sian Clifford). It was really quite a mess, if you’ll recall. It’s rough when your sister insinuates that sleeping with your best friend’s boyfriend may have been the very thing that killed her. So it makes sense that Fleabag’s been keeping to herself at the good ol’ guinea-pig-themed cafe.
But the second season brin...

(Editor’s note: The following review covers the first 5 episodes of Fosse/Verdon.)
The Pitch: We know Fosse/Verdon is set to be a tragedy about 13 minutes in when Bob Fosse (Sam Rockwell), in mid-daydream, casually walks off the balcony of his New York City apartment. For a diehard perfectionist, the suicidal ideation makes a certain kind of sense. The director’s last picture, 1969’s Sweet Charity, just tanked at the box office, costing Universal Pictures $20 million. And if the surrealist to...

The Pitch: I don’t know why, maybe it was the title — The Case Against Adnan Syed — but at first I thought that HBO’s new miniseries was going to do what the first season of Serial did not: make the case that Syed did kill his girlfriend Hae Min Lee back in 1999.
Like many listeners, I have strong personal doubts that he did, but what made Serial so compelling — other than being the first of its kind in a lot of ways — was that producer Sarah Koenig let the ambiguity of his innocence hang in ...

The Pitch: In its first phase, the #MeToo movement was all about women finding their collective voice and finally, at least with each other, being given the benefit of the doubt (a novel idea, as history suggests). Some 16 months on, it’s still alive, and its’ often looking backward — reflecting on how wrong we, as a society, got things in the past. Certain names immediately come to mind: Anita Hill. Monica Lewinsky. And now, a new Amazon docuseries takes a look at Lorena Bobbitt, the woman w...

The Pitch: Birthdays are especially good catalysts for midlife crises. On Russian Doll, Netflix’s new eight-episode comedic thrill co-created by Natasha Lyonne, Amy Poehler, and Leslye Headland, our birthday girl is Nadia (Lyonne), a NYC-based game designer with a bit of a hard shell. Nadia’s turning 36, a significant milestone for reasons that will later become obvious. Yes, 36 is a bit early for a midlife crisis; her friends point this out, to which Nadia quips, “I mean I smoke, what, two p...

My first experience with failure, or the one that I can remember, happened in second grade. My teacher, Mrs. Murphy, was a stern older woman who looked somewhat like Barbara Bush—incidentally the first lady at the time. Our classroom had a reading corner, where she would sit in the middle and order her students to wrap around her in a half-circle. But on this fall day, she wasn’t reading. She instead quizzed us on our middle names, which were printed out on a roster in front of her. Around me...

The Pitch: It’s been four years since Kimmy Schmidt (Ellie Kemper) and the other Indiana Mole Women crawled out of a bunker, where they’d been held hostage for 15 years by sociopathic cult leader Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne (Jon Hamm). Buoyed by an addictive theme song (they’re alive, dammit!) and the veteran comedic chops of creators/writers Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has managed to transform a sadistic premise into a pretty reliable conduit for punchy s...

The Pitch: Yas, bitch. The queenz are back — at least for one final season. Abbi (Abbi Jacobson) is still working at Anthropologie, but she’s been promoted to the sales floor. She’s still angling for a way to put her art degree to use, though (ONE DAY SHE WILL DESIGN THAT WINDOW DISPLAY). It’s unclear from the episodes made available for review if Ilana (Ilana Glazer) is actually working this season — what else is new? — but at least she’s back together with New York’s most lovable dentist, L...

Contributed blurbs for Vida, Homecoming, and The Good Place.

There is a moment during ITV/Amazon Prime's new adaptation of Vanity Fair when it seems like we may finally have a good adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1848 social satire on our hands. It's in episode 2 of the seven-part miniseries – premiering for U.S. audiences on Dec. 21 – when Becky Sharp, played by a fully committed Olivia Cooke, has just arrived at Queen’s Crawley, the beautiful country estate of her new boss, Sir Pitt Crawley (Martin Clunes), and is angling at finding a way...

The Pitch: The first scene of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 2 showcases creator-writer-director Amy Sherman-Palladino’s talent at taking the everyday and turning it into something resembling the opening number of a Broadway play. In this case, Midge (Rachel Brosnahan), impeccably dressed in a belted burgundy dress, is in the basement of department store B. Altman taking calls (and answering other operators’ calls while rubbing them on the back as they hyperventilate from the stress of it a...

A friend commented on my Facebook page last week: “I will be impressed if they can pull off Season 6 without the main man.”
But Kevin Spacey’s unceremonious ouster from Netflix’s flagship show elicited nothing more than a shrug from me. Let’s be honest: Frank Underwood’s shock value wore off shortly after reporter Zoe Barnes fell under a subway car. He hasn’t been interesting for years. Claire Underwood (Robin Wright), though…
[Read: Season 6 of House of Cards Hinges on Claire Underwoods’ App...

The Pitch: Matthew Weiner, of Mad Men fame, has put his finger on a something big in the cultural zeitgeist with his new show, The Romanoffs, which is a fictional account imagining how claimed descendants of the Russian royal family live today. It’s the perfect time for such a dissection since DNA tests are becoming ubiquitous — hell, Elizabeth Warren released her DNA results just a few days ago. As our world becomes more globalized, many are looking backwards to understand their identity. So...