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.

David Chase

Best culture of the 21st century

 This article is more than 6 years old

Interview

David Chase on why he wrote The Sopranos: 'I needed help. I needed therapy'

This article is more than 6 years old

As his mobster-in-therapy masterpiece is named the best TV of the century, its creator says he was just thrashing out his own issues with his domineering, suffocating mother

Emma Brockes

Monday 16 September 2018

The first image David Chase had in mind for the show that became The Sopranoswas a closeup of Tony Soprano opening his eyes, “waking up for the day”. That scene ended up falling later in the pilot. The opening scene, as any of the show’s superfans will happily inform you, watches Tony eyeing up a sculpture in a therapist’s waiting room with baffled rage. The show is 20 years old this year, and if that makes you feel ancient, “think how I feel,” says creator David Chase, who, at 74, is ferocious looking, with beady black eyes and the intense, long-suffering air of the protagonist whose name has become synonymous with his own.

David Chase

Television

Interview

‘I wrote The Sopranos to get over my mother wishing me dead’: David Chase on his mob masterpiece – and his new LSD epic

Will the great TV writer ever top his mega hit? He talks us through his new series about the CIA’s attempts to weaponise LSD – and reveals why James Gandolfini called him ‘Satan’

 

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.

 

Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette and Paul Anthony Kelly as John F Kennedy Jr in FX's Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette.

Photo by Eric Leibowitz

US television

‘He was approachable, down-to-earth, irritating’: inside the real-life love story of JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette

As Ryan Murphy’s new mini-series focuses on their explosive relationship, aides and experts explain the real-life couple behind the myth

David Smith in a Washington
Saturday 21 February 2026

He only met John F Kennedy Jr for five minutes but, three decades later, the memory lingers on. “Oh my God, he had it all,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist, recalling their encounter at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington. “He had his mother’s poise and his father’s charisma; it was a perfect combination of the two. If there was anybody destined to be president, it was him.”