Ben Carter

The cruelest joke in Kabul is that paperwork still matters after the government behind the paperwork has effectively disappeared. A visa can say you are approved to leave Afghanistan. A Taliban checkpoint can say otherwise. Guess which document wins.

Joe, Leon, Cathy and Touch can turn a plan to reach Teddy's boat into a street distraction, a lost gun, an accidental smoke discharge, a firefight and a burning vessel. The scene is funny because every competent decision creates room for a fresh mistake. It is tense for the same reason. Average Joe Season 2 builds much of its appeal from that collision: four people who can survive criminal disasters while behaving like they were assembled for a group project ten minutes before the deadline.

Tokyo gets two personalities in the first minutes: neon after dark, restraint by morning. The opening montage spins through nightlife while Ichito Shimotori explains Japan's uneasy relationship with sex, then deposits him back into a culture where even saying what he does for a living can freeze a room.

Coss Marte has one of those biographies documentary filmmakers usually spend an entire feature trying to shape into a clean arc. He ran a multimillion-dollar drug operation in New York while barely out of his teens, went to prison at 23, lost roughly 70 pounds through bodyweight exercises in his cell, started training other inmates, and came home determined to turn that routine into a business. Debra Granik spends five episodes and roughly eight years refusing to make any of this look clean.

Travel television usually depends on a host who can make unfamiliar places feel welcoming. Conan O'Brien Must Go Season 3 takes the opposite route: it sends a 6'4” comedian with a bright red target painted on himself into situations where he is usually the least prepared person in the room. The joke works because Conan O'Brien understands the assignment. He is not there to appear worldly. He is there to look ridiculous while giving everyone around him a chance to shine.

Tobias Wallace can return a child's lost stuffed rabbit, negotiate around airport security, counsel a grieving passenger, hunt through checked luggage for an engagement ring and still find time to ignore his new boss. This is apparently pastoral care at Melbourne Airport. Hugo Weaving plays Tobias as a man whose job description stopped mattering years ago, largely because everyone has learned that calling him tends to get things fixed.

Jim Bergerac talks about grief at an AA meeting while a woman is being murdered elsewhere on Jersey. The editing keeps moving between confession and violence, placing Damien Molony's version of the detective inside a crime before he has officially returned to police work. Then Jim leaves the meeting, reaches for his hip flask and confirms what the scene has been quietly suggesting: recovery is currently something he can describe better than he can practice.

Sixty arrives with a slap, a missing father, and a pot of beans burning through whatever illusion the Murphy family had left about independence. The premiere moves from Leanne's miscounted birthday to John's disappearance with the efficient panic of a sitcom that knows every family emergency begins as someone else's inconvenience. By the time the kitchen catches fire, the jokes have produced a consequence serious enough to reorganize the entire season.

Önem Özülkü is baking with her daughter when police work comes looking for her again, which is about as close to peace as Graveyard lets anyone get. The Special Crimes unit has fractured after Mert killed Seher's murderer. Hasan has withdrawn under the weight of what his son did, Önem has traded case files for time with Sude, and Serdar is left trying to persuade everyone that the Graveyard still has a pulse.

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.