Series · Prime Video · 2025

The Rainmaker

A case, a plaintiff, a lie with a letterhead. This is what the form is for.

Grisham's useful story is that a poor client's death can be paperwork to the people who caused it, and that paperwork can be made to speak. The series is another pass at that story. It will overheat. The overheating is forgivable because the place it asks you to care about is a courtroom rather than a man with a gun.

Watch it when you want the argument that the law is slow and still the instrument.

The eight

Industry
7/10
Law as work: files, clients, the unglamorous hour.
Household
4/10
Ambition strains the people at home.
Piety
3/10
Justice is the creed, narrowly.
Courage
7/10
He takes the case the firm can crush him for.
Republic
7/10
A court is the right battlefield. That alone puts it above the vigilante row.
Temperance
6/10
The thriller is in service of a verdict.
Truth
8/10
The plot is a cover-up. Telling is the victory.
Stewardship
5/10
A win for one family, and a warning to the next firm.

Live historicallyIf you owe someone a document, a reference, or the truth in a file, finish it.

Series · Prime Video · 1999

Freaks and Geeks

The rare teen show that likes the uncool kid and does not punish the family for existing.

Lindsay wants to be good and is bored of the official way of being good. Sam wants to get through the day without being hit with a dodgeball. Their parents are worried in complete sentences. Almost no teen television allows all four of those facts at once.

This is the one to hand a fourteen-year-old if the alternative is the row that thinks cruelty is personality.

The eight

Industry
5/10
A father who works. School that is actually attended. The band is a practice.
Household
7/10
The parents are not fools. The siblings share a house and a shame.
Piety
3/10
No creed, but a conscience that has not been ironized away.
Courage
6/10
Lindsay walks toward the kids she was told to avoid. That is a real risk in a real cafeteria.
Republic
5/10
A school, a gym, a kitchen. The institutions are ordinary and therefore believable.
Temperance
6/10
Desire is present and not the only weather.
Truth
8/10
It refuses the pretty lie about high school.
Stewardship
6/10
It was cancelled because it would not become the lie. That is a kind of keeping.

Live historicallyWatch the pilot. If the house laughs at Sam, turn it off. If it worries for him, keep going.