Game over for bad adaptations / Why "The Last of Us" and "Fallout" finally broke the curse

 

Fallout, an American post-apocalyptic drama television series, was created for Amazon Prime Video by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dwore

Game over for bad adaptations

Why "The Last of Us" and "Fallout" finally broke the curse

23 NOVEMBER 2025, 

ALENA LYSIAKOVA

For decades, video game adaptations had one job: disappoint everyone. Studios would slap a recognizable title on a film (Super Mario Bros. 1993, Prince of Persia 2010, Uncharted 2022) and hope nostalgia alone would cover the plot holes. It didn’t. What they served up wasn’t the thrill of gameplay; it was like being forced to watch your older cousin hog the controller and then narrate his moves badly.

Laughing through the apocalypse / The rise of existential comedy

 

Set in a future, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles devastated by nuclear fallout, Fallout follows citizens forced to live in underground bunkers to survive radiation, mutants, and roaming bandits

Laughing through the apocalypse 

The rise of existential comedy

23 APRIL 2026, 

ALENA LYSIAKOVA

From The White Lotus to Don’t Look Up, Hazbin Hotel, and Fallout, we’re no longer crying about the end: we’re cracking jokes.

Blue Eye Samurai: historian explains what the Netflix series gets right and wrong about real Edo‑period Japan

Ruth StarrPublished: December 5, 2023 4.56pm GMT

Warning: this article includes spoilers for Blue Eye Samurai.

Netflix’s Blue Eye Samurai is an anime series set during the opening decades of Japan’s Edo period(1603–1867), also known as the Tokugawa period. Among other subjects, the series addresses the role of samurai, what life was like for women and people of mixed heritage, and violence in Edo-period Japan – with varying degrees of accuracy.

DAVID CHASE SAYS SOPRANOS WAS BORN FROM FAMILY PAIN

MARRY WILLIAMS

Creator opens up about trauma behind iconic series and new film

David Chase Reflects on Personal Inspiration

March 28, 2026 – David Chase is shedding new light on the deeply personal origins of The Sopranos, revealing that the groundbreaking series was, in part, a way to process painful experiences with his mother.

 

Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette and Paul Anthony Kelly as John F Kennedy Jr in Love Story on Disney

‘Unapologetically schmaltzy’: how Love Story became Disney+’s most-streamed drama ever

Series about the lives and deaths of Carolyn Bessette and JFK Jr is ‘prestige television without the usual weight’

Morwenna Ferrier 

Fashion and lifestyle editor

Fri 27 Mar 2026 

The plane vanishes. Families are told. Ashes are scattered. So ends Love Story, Ryan Murphy’s schlocky, glossy nine-part melodrama about the doomed marriage between Carolyn Bessette and John F Kennedy Jr. Yet one thing is clear: the myth of Camelot – or at least this version – still captivates.

Why we fell in love with Love Story: JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette

 

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Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly in Ryan Murphy’s hit FX show.

Why we fell in love with Love Story: JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette

Ryan Murphy’s series about the Kennedy heir and style icon has risen above nostalgia-bait to become a ratings blockbuster

Owen Myers

Tuesday 17 March  2026

On a recent sunny Sunday in New York, Love Story seemed to be everywhere. Fans lined up around the block for tables at Panna II, the twinkly string-lit Indian restaurant where Ryan Murphy’s megahit charmingly – and if we’re being picky, inaccurately – sets John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette’s first date. Across town was a JFK Jr lookalike contest, which was rudely organized in Washington Square Park and not in my bedroom. Young women downtown wore hip-hugging pants and clean-girl makeup, and outside a repertory cinema everyone was smoking as though Parliaments were still $2 a pack.

Anya Chalotra / ‘I’ve tried to separate myself from this job’

 

Anya Chalotra

Interview

‘I’ve tried to separate myself from this job’: The Witcher’s Anya Chalotra on fan abuse, Henry Cavill and saying goodbye to the show

After seven years in Netflix’s fantasy epic, the actor has cast her final spell. She talks about the genre’s toxic fans, welcoming new boy Liam Hemsworth to the cast – and what sorcery really sounds like

 

Walton Goggins: ‘How would I like to be remembered? As one of a kind.’

Photograph: Alberto E Rodriguez

Interview

The White Lotus’s Walton Goggins: ‘Who do I most admire? My wife, because of what we have overcome together’

The actor on obsessive cleaning, missing his own teeth, and his sand and dirt collection

Rosanna Greenstreet

Saturday 10 May 2025

 

British actor Jason Isaacs, on March 18, 2025 in Pollença (Mallorca).CATI CLADERA (EFE)

HOLLYWOOD

Jason Isaacs: The villain who managed to dodge fame until ‘The White Lotus’

The British actor, with a decades-long career and iconic roles like Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter saga, managed to stay out of the media spotlight until his starred in one of today’s biggest television phenomena

 

‘Henry VIII is a serial killer and abuser’: why is Britain still so obsessed with the Tudors?

England has long adopted the version of events informed by the Victorians’ biases and neuroses. But what is behind the flood of 21st-century retellings, including the new TV series The Mirror and the Light?

Zoe Williams

Tuesday 12 November 2024

The TV adaptation of the third of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels – The Mirror and the Light – arrived on Sunday on BBC One to rave reviews. “Six hours of magic” was the Guardian’s verdict. The series had been eagerly awaited, but nothing like as eagerly as the book itself. Mantel’s legions of fans waited eight years from the publication of Bring Up the Bodies for the finale to arrive in 2020.

How James Gandolfini’s addictions to alcohol and drugs caused chaos during filming of ‘The Sopranos’

 

James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano.HBO

How James Gandolfini’s addictions to alcohol and drugs caused chaos during filming of ‘The Sopranos’

In a new book, the locations manager on the emblematic HBO series reveals the difficulty of working with the actor who, despite everything, was a beloved presence on set

 

Emma D’Arcy in ‘House of the Dragon’ and Morfydd Clark in ‘The Lord of the Rings.’

‘Rings of Power’ vs ‘House of the Dragon’: Which show is winning the popularity battle?

Audience and social media data give a sense of the results of the confrontation between the two epic fantasies

NATALIA MARCOS

Madrid, 3 November 2022

It wasn’t a battle, but it was. It wasn’t, because there didn’t have to be a victor and a loser – both could have triumphed (and lost). But the simultaneous release of House of the Dragon and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power inevitably pitted them against one another. Now that the voyages back to Middle Earth and to Westeros have ended, and the first seasons are over, which has won in terms of popularity.

Aerial views of the mansion in Mallorca, Spain, featured in the final season of 'The Crown.'

The villa featured in ‘The Crown’ is located in Mallorca, Spain, and can be rented for €60,000 

The mansion, where the Princess of Wales once vacationed in real life, recreates the Al-Fayed family property in Saint-Tropez in the show’s final season

Lucía Bohórquez

Palma, 6 January 2924

Wearing a short red dress, Diana of Wales climbs the stone steps of a staircase that runs from a small private jetty to the entrance of a majestic villa with a yellow facade. Accompanied by her sons, William and Harry, the princess greets Mohamed Al-Fayed, who opens his arms to her as her children splash in a pool built on the edge of a cliff with the immense blue Mediterranean stretching into the horizon. The Al-Fayed family’s summer home in Saint-Tropez figures prominently in the first episodes of the sixth and final season of the hit show The Crown, which fictionalizes the life of Queen Elizabeth II. The splendorous villa, christened The Yellow Castle, is not actually in France, but rather in Mallorca, Spain, where Princess Diana of Wales had spent some summer days during her youth, before she married then-Prince Charles.