Today, we bring you news from the three ruling realms of the Netflix kingdom. While some disappointing surprises have plagued the fiction side of things, with a fourth and final Sex Education season that couldn’t excite viewers, the true crime district is thriving with a new season about one of the country’s most confounding family murders. As for Reality TV land, the show the world really did not need has dealt its first hand.
Sex Education‘s Season 4 was apparently not the climax fans were hoping for
Sex Education was one of Netflix’s greatest successes, tackling teen sexuality with a fresh unprejudiced look, but its final chapter seems to have let its eager fanbase down. Fans have been waiting to hear back from Otis, Maeve, and the rest of the gang for two years now, but with the show’s fourth and final season finally making its way to the platform, most are now regretting the rush.
The last batch of episodes from the snarky British dramedy premiered Sept. 21 to a less-than-ideal Rotten Tomatoes audience score of 45%. Critics might have embraced the season with open arms and a warm 90% approval rating, but the larger audience was not as easy to please. Comments aggregated by the platform criticize the whiplash caused by changing schools, missing characters from previous seasons, and a rushed and unsatisfying ending to most storylines. While the cast still delivered according to most viewers, the season as a whole is better left ignored.
Season 4 of Sex Education touches base with the students who have been forced to change schools after Moordale closed down at the end of Season 3. Otis and Eric try to open a new sex clinic at their new school, while Maeve is off living her dream in the United States. We Got This Covered’s Scott Campbell agrees with some of the takes expressed by fans of the show in his review, but ultimately recognizes the season’s emotional and dramatic achievements.
New season of Murdaugh Murders drops on Netflix just as family killer pleads guilty to a whole new set of crimes
Alex Murdaugh is back in the headlines after pleading guilty to “22 counts of financial fraud and money laundering,” according to AP. Netflix was shrewd enough to capitalize on the renewed interest in the Murdaugh family, releasing a second season of its searing true crime docu-series Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal, which features multiple interviews from sources close to Murdaugh and his victims — wife Maggie and son Paul.
Among them are housekeeper Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson, Shelly Smith, the caretaker of Murdaugh’s mother, whom he alleges he was with at the time of the murders, and Curtis Smith — Murdaugh’s cousin who shot him in the head at the request of the convicted killer in order to get life insurance money for his only surviving son, Buster. We know — that’s a lot to take in if you haven’t heard of this puzzling case before, but it should also give you more than a few reasons to check out the Netflix documentary, which carefully details all the bizarre moving pieces of this whirlwind of a criminal case.
Murdaugh is currently serving two consecutive life sentences for the murders, of which he was found guilty back in March of this year. Meanwhile the Netflix show’s current position as the fourth most watched globally on the streamer prove the Murdaugh family can hook viewers in like few others.
First look at Squid Game: The Challenge is all about the money, proving they completely missed the point of the show
Halfway through the first official teaser for Squid Game: The Challenge, the reality game show inspired by Netflix’s South Korean smash hit of the same name, a contestant comments that people “have done a whole lot worse, for a whole lot less,” in what almost comes off as a slogan for the upcoming series. Real-life Squid Game takes from all of its fictional counterpart’s settings and game concepts to create a competition involving 456 players, fighting for the biggest prize in reality TV history, $4.56 million.
The British production faithfully reproduced sets and props as iconic as the cubic stairs, the warehouse headquarters, the bright-pink guards, and, Squid Game‘s most famous symbol, the “Red Light, Green Light” giant killer doll. The inspiration for the reality series was obviously a competition too gruesome to be totally mimicked, but set conditions that led to hypothermia and frostbite in contestants indicate the real-life reenactment was not without its own challenges. Cash really is king, after all — it’s just a shame that Netflix couldn’t figure out the dangerous implications of that assessment from its own, incredibly well-made show.