Sarah Krasnostein

The raging popularity of Love Island owes less to the reality show’s slick production and contestants than to the audience’s own primal obsessions.

The Saturday Paper’s television critic looks back at the highlights of 2024.

Apple TV+’s Shrinking is a glorious study of connection, and of friendship through life’s inescapable transitions and difficult initiations.

Charlie Covell’s brilliant Netflix series Kaos doesn’t so much retell the Greek myths as overthrow their narrative laws to build a new and necessary story.

The unpredictable and compelling new series from Apple TV+, Sunny, morphs through sci-fi, thriller, noir mystery, family drama and comedy.

Season three of The Bear is as good as television can be: a mastering of time and emotion, a study of character and success, and the gaps between the two.

The 2015 docuseries The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst famously led to the real estate heir’s conviction for murder. Now season two documents the aftermath.

Netflix’s unsettling psychological thriller Dear Child explores the archetypes of family to reach unerringly into the subconscious.

Drive-Away Dolls – the new film from director Ethan Coen and editor Tricia Cooke – took only a month to shoot but, like their partnership, was a long-term commitment.

Night Country – the fourth season of the darkly philosophical police procedural True Detective – brilliantly reinvents the show.

The Saturday Paper’s television critic looks back at the highlights of 2023.

Nathan Fielder’s new comedy drama, The Curse, takes his work into wilder territory.

The Changeling demonstrates how fairytales can be used to devastating effect to process  our deepest fears and desires.

Sarah discusses how reading that book challenged her expectations and why many people who own Peter Carey's work might be surprised to discover what his books are actually saying.

The Australian women’s soccer team has finally captured the nation’s hearts – the question is why it took so long.

Matildas stalwart Emily van Egmond has watched women’s soccer in Australia come into its own, and she hopes this year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup, the first to be played on home soil, will unleash its full potential.

The racing pulse of HBO’s prestige hit Succession is the emotional whiplash of unresolved family abuse.

The powerful adaptation of PlayStation’s zombie game The Last of Us has unexpected glimpses of human grace amid the primal horror.

Jonah Hill’s astonishing Netflix documentary about his psychiatrist, Phil Stutz, opens up the possibilities of the talking cure.

A new documentary and a docuseries explore the catastrophe that was Woodstock ’99.

A masterful comedy series takes the American dream and reveals its human cost in consistently surprising ways.

The genre-busting pirate romance Our Flag Means Death is straight up hilarious – and artistically and emotionally gorgeous.

Few television series have captured the uncanny as elegantly as Dan Erikson’s beautifully realised Severance.

A gripping docuseries about the gruelling sport of cheerleading reveals its subjects’ lives with finely drawn seriousness.

Nasim Pedrad’s Chad brings an inspiring complexity to the comic gaps of adolescent awkwardness.

In opening up interior terrains, the survival series Alone makes other reality television look like pantomime.

Baltasar Kormákur’s eerie Netflix series Katla is an original work of poetic myth about grief, longing and guilt.

Amazon’s star-studded science fiction series Solos takes on the monologue but doesn’t quite fulfil the promise of its form.

True crime series such as The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness feed our appetites for fear, while shielding us from the crimes of which we should really be afraid.

“Some time between 8.58am and 10.43am on June 29, 2016, after Borce and Karen Ristevski’s daughter, Sarah, left for work, Borce killed Karen, his wife of 27 years, in a manner known only to himself. He then moved her body from their home, placed it in …”

The tricks of the taxidermy trade were once held tight by older, male enthusiasts. But today a new generation of young women are lending their artistic and scientific talents to preserving dead animals in the most lifelike manner.

As Chief Judge Peter Kidd steadily reads his sentencing of George Pell, the author sits among those assembled in court, watching the cardinal, and considering the nature of power in the justice system.

Living in different places around the world has left artist Polly Borland feeling like an outsider with unwanted opinions, but she’s happy to let the subversion of her work speak for itself. “She grew up alone in this apartment with this doll,” Borland said of Dare Wright, creator of the Lonely Doll books. “Her mother would go out, leave her alone. Eventually she became a model and started taking photos. It’s no wonder I’m into dress-up. I get a lot from childhood. What might look childlike is not. There’s a sinister undertow to a lot of my imagery.”