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If you haven’t yet heard the names Dominic McLaughlin, Arabella Stanton or Alastair Stout, then rest assured, in a couple of years they will be entirely inescapable. They are the three actors who have been cast in the new and highly anticipated Harry Potter television series, which is going into production for HBO later this year with a likely broadcast date of late 2026 or 2027. Respectively, they’re playing Harry, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, and they have been picked after a long search that has seen 32,000 children put themselves forward (or, more likely in many cases, been put forward by their ambitious parents) to play the iconic trio in the new adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s wizarding series.

The White Lotus, now back for a third series, could perhaps be best described as Death in Paradise for elegant people. Most obviously, this is because its plots revolve around murders in an idyllic location — only with a far bigger budget, a much starrier cast and several episodes per story. But there’s also the fact that it follows the same pattern every time. So it was that season three began this week, rather like its predecessors, with some lovely scenery, a dead body and a caption reading "One week earlier." After that, we duly watched a bunch of rich, good-looking folks arriving at a luxury White Lotus resort where they were welcomed by the resolutely smiling staff and a nervous manager, before gazing round and marveling at the beauty of it all.

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films represent two of the more remarkable turnarounds in recent Hollywood history. After the failure of David Lynch’s ambitious but deeply, deeply flawed Eighties attempt at filming Frank Herbert’s sprawling sci-fi epic, the project was seen as all but impossible, being both vastly expensive and presumed to be of interest mainly to the kind of young men who prefer to watch films in their parents’ basements rather than at their local theater. It also didn’t help that the first film was released day-and-date with the HBO Max streaming service; the fact that it made more than $400 million at the box office was, under the circumstances, something of a miracle.

Two of the highest-profile show launches of the past month are also two of the least original. If your taste runs to hard-bitten, Sopranos­-accented crime, then you might enjoy the new HBO series The Penguin, with Colin Farrell reprising his role from 2022’s The Batman as Oswald Cobb, the so-called “Penguin,” a Mafioso who is attempting to gain control of Gotham City’s crime underworld following the death of Carmine Falcone. And if you’re more interested in female-driven whimsy, then Marvel’s Agatha All Along, the latest genre-hopping comedy-drama-fantasy-horror on Disney+, will allow Kathryn Hahn ample opportunity to chew the scenery as the witch Agatha Harkness, who forms a new coven after the misadventures of WandaVision.

And so, after twelve seasons and twenty-four years, Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm has finally come to an end. Opinion online has been divided as to the effectiveness of the ending, in which, spoilers, Larry is placed on trial in Atlanta for inadvertently breaking the Electoral Integrity Act by offering a voter a bottle of water in the line; a rare act of kindness he suffers for. It was an intentionally low-key ending that can nonetheless allow for callbacks to early episodes and brief returning cameos from the guest stars who have somehow been maligned, offended or otherwise dismayed by Larry’s antisocial antics in the previous quarter-century.

When you tire of trying to find the humor in The Regime, HBO’s new satire set in an unnamed “middle European” country, you can keep yourself occupied by trying to identify all of the historical references. The series was shot in Austria and the interiors have a dilapidated imperial feel, so perhaps we’re meant to think of one of the Visegrád countries — Czechia, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary — that inherited the heartlands of the Habsburg monarchy. The government, however, is led by a capricious and occasionally brutal authoritarian. Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, often called Europe’s last dictator, immediately comes to mind. Chancellor Elena Vernham, played by Kate Winslet, is said to have studied medicine in Paris.

In 2001, at the age of fourteen, Sam Lipman-Stern dropped out of high school in New Jersey and started working at the now defunct Civic Development Group (CDG) as a telemarketer. He stayed for seven years, calling up citizens to ask for money on behalf of police charities. It turned out to be a massive scam.  More than two decades later, Lipman-Stern, now thirty-six and a seasoned filmmaker, has exposed not only CDG — which underhandedly kept 90 percent of the proceeds it raised — but the entire industry in his frenetic, rip-roaring investigative HBO documentary Telemarketers.  Co-directed by Adam Bhala Lough and produced by the Safdie brothers, the three-part docuseries is a wild ride, largely due to Lipman-Stern’s archival footage.

Is The Idol a stunning piece of trash, or a trashy masterpiece? Whatever the answer, the HBO show, debuting Sunday, is sure to make an impression. It’s set to be 2023’s Spring Breakers; a lurid spectacle of Hollywood by blacklight, as Lily-Rose Depp’s Britney-inspired pop vamp Jocelyn falls for a manipulative cult leader, played by musician The Weeknd. And critics hate it. They cry it’s “toxic,” “grim, gross and vulgar,” “degrading and hollow.” The Idol is the latest show from Euphoria’s Sam Levinson, and fills the prestige 9 p.m. slot previously occupied by the high-brow Murdoch satire Succession. Succession was subtle, witty and emotionally rich, and became a perennial obsession of the writerly class.

The finale of Jesse Armstrong’s show Succession — and it very much is a show where the creator and lead writer is the auteur — has been one of the most anticipated for any series in years. But us aficionados of intelligent long-form television are always primed for disappointment. For every Breaking Bad, which concludes satisfyingly and inspiringly, there is a Game of Thrones, which lazily drops in fan-service tropes and fails to bring any kind of rewarding closure to the show, alienating its audience in the process. So which way did Succession fall? In truth, there were moments in the fourth and final series where I was beginning to feel that the show had jumped the shark.

This post contains Succession season four spoilers. Succession is probably the most realistic of the prestige TV shows. Instead of shows like The Sopranos and Yellowstone that try to raise the emotional stakes by leaving us with a body count every episode, I like how Succession delves deep into one or two complex situations every season, letting them marinate over time, much like how a major business acquisition might play out in the real world. The Sopranos is possibly the best show ever made, but I don’t actually believe that a real-life mob boss has to deal with the number of unique life-or-death situations that Tony Soprano does every week.

I suspected something was wrong when I first heard that HBO would be producing a TV series called White House Plumbers. The network initially said it would be coming in 2023, date unspecified. Then the show was scheduled for March, but as March approached, the network added no specificity regarding the release date. March came and went, a worrisome sign, as did April. The show finally appeared last night, May 1 — a Monday night, not the Sunday night HBO reserves for its best stuff. Upon watching the first of five scheduled episodes, I can see the reason for the delay. I told my wife I planned to watch the show, so she gave the trailer a go. “I could only watch half of it,” she reported back. “It was so bad.