If it weren't for the The Bear to turn everything upside down, then Apple TV could boast that it has two of the five best new series of the year so far. One is the Severance and another one, the excellent "Black Bird.".
For those of you who watched *Mindhunter* and have been wondering for three years now what’s finally going to happen with this series and whether it will return, you can find some relief from that agony in *Black Bird*. Okay, it’s not strictly a crime story, but it does have some key elements of one.
It features interrogations by police officers and lawyers, a serial killer who has murdered 13 young women, and a search for the bodies, and at its core lies the mystery of whether he is, in fact, a serial killer or whether his cognitive abilities are so impaired that he is lying. And it doesn’t take much effort to convince anyone…
Jimmy Keen is a former college sports “wonder boy” who, however, takes a different path in life and becomes a drug dealer. One day, the police raid his home and find several kilograms of cocaine, along with a few automatic weapons and machine guns, which guarantee him a life sentence in prison.
He isn't particularly worried and is convinced that his lawyers will get him off the hook again. This time, however, he won’t get off scot-free. The court sentences him to 10 years without parole, and the ground seems to fall out from under his feet.
The sentence, though fair—and perhaps even lighter than expected—has likely been influenced by higher authorities because they want to put Kin in a position where he cannot refuse the offer they are making him. That proposal is to transfer him to the correctional facility where Larry Hall, the serial—or self-proclaimed serial—killer, is serving his sentence.
Kin will be the law's weapon in solving Hall's crimes and securing the evidence needed to keep him in prison.
However, the plan has one flaw: it cannot predict how Kin will feel when he interacts with Hall, or whether he will treat him with prejudice, or whether he will believe that Hall is not the killer, and therefore he will not try to find the evidence they are asking for.
*Black Bird* has the atmosphere, it has the minimalism, it has Taron Egerton, who doesn’t overdo the expressiveness but maintains a straightforward approach, and it also has Paul Walter Hauser, who was born to play psychopaths, delivering a masterclass just as he did in *BlacKKKlasman*, *Da 5 Bloods*, *Cobra Kai*, and *Richard Jewell*.
Despite its relatively long episodes, his series Apple TV It unfolds organically, without any forced moments or compromises to the value of each scene, every shot, and seems to have staked a great deal on the interplay between the two protagonists, whose virtues complement one another.
So we'd suggest you start watching it right away. Just know that you won't be able to stop after just 1 or 2 episodes—you'll want to see the rest. You can't stop watching this series once you start. Once you get into it, there's no stopping...
