Elizabeth olsen

Monday

The Spectator

This month in culture: September 2024

From our US edition

Slow Horses, season 4 Apple TV+, September 4 Apple TV+’s adaptations of Mick Herron’s excellent espionage novels, led by Gary Oldman on magnificent form as the belching, flatulent, brilliant Jackson Lamb, have quietly become the streaming service’s MVP, and their strong showing in this year’s Emmy nominations has reinforced the company’s continued faith in the unmissable series. This fourth installment, based on Herron’s novel Spook Street, guest stars the ever-excellent Hugo Weaving as a mysterious interloper with a close personal connection to Jack Lowden’s bratty Bond-in-training River Cartwright. Expect the usual mixture of big laughs, shocking twists and high-octane action scenes.

Culture

Wednesday

James Delingpole

Like trying to understand some obscure but fashionable meme: WandaVision reviewed

‘What the world needs now is a black and white pastiche of classic 1950s and 1960s sitcoms reviving two Marvel superhero characters who were last seen getting killed in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame,’ said… well, I was about to say: ‘said no one ever’. But clearly someone did, because this is what we’ve now got on Disney+: a bizarro series called WandaVision. I feel terribly out of the loop for not quite getting it. But possibly I’m not the target audience. For a start, I haven’t seen either of those Avengers movies; nor am I sufficiently familiar with the nuances of the Marvel comics universe to get all the frequent knowing references, such as the pastiche adverts for toasters produced by Stark Industries.