Reality TV Has Better Plot Than Your Prestige Drama

Here is my controversial opinion: reality television is currently better at storytelling than a shocking amount of scripted television. Not because it is deeper. It is because reality TV understands the ancient human ingredients of drama: ambition, betrayal, vanity, and one person named Bob making a terrible decision with total confidence.

Benny's Picks

The Traitors — Peacock. This is not a guilty pleasure. Guilt is for people who put raisins in potato salad. The Traitors is a murder mystery, a social experiment and a workplace comedy about adults lying in evening wear beside a giant Scottish fireplace. The U.S. version is especially delicious because the cast arrives preloaded with egos from other reality shows, then discovers that “being famous” does not make you good at noticing when someone is obviously murdering you.

Severance — Apple TV+. If you have somehow avoided it, congratulations on preserving one of television’s last excellent surprises. The premise is high-concept, but the show’s real genius is how it turns office etiquette into psychological horror. A waffle party has never looked so threatening. It is chilly, strange and occasionally so precise that you may begin suspecting your own workplace has a basement full of goats.

Ripley — Netflix. Andrew Scott plays Tom Ripley as a human fog bank: handsome, polite and radiating the unmistakable energy of a man who has already hidden a body. This is a slow burn, but not the sleepy kind where everyone whispers because the script ran out of verbs. Every shadow, staircase and expensive glass of wine feels like part of the con. Black-and-white cinematography has never made murder look so architectural.

Bottoms — rent digitally or check your streaming listings. This movie is what happens when a teen comedy stops trying to be likable and starts trying to be funny. It is loud, horny, cartoonish and gloriously stupid, with jokes arriving like they were fired from a t-shirt cannon. If you prefer your high-school movies realistic, watch something else. If you want two losers to accidentally start a feminist fight club, press play.

Skip It

“Content” that is just a celebrity documentary with a twelve-minute apology tour. I am exhausted by the modern celebrity profile that spends an hour pretending to reveal a person, only to reveal that they own a candle and have “learned boundaries.” If the most dramatic moment is someone saying, “This journey has been complicated,” send it back to the streaming service.

Sleeper Pick

Jury Duty — Amazon Freevee. It looks like a throwaway prank and turns into one of the warmest comedies in recent memory. The central civilian, Ronald, is surrounded by actors pretending to be fellow jurors, yet the joke never depends on humiliating him. Somehow, beneath all the chaos, it becomes a lovely little argument for being decent when everyone else is behaving like a malfunctioning raccoon.