100 Best TV-MA TV Shows on Netflix Right Now

The most obvious cultural reference point for Barracuda Queens is The Bling Ring: both tell the based-on-real-life stories of a group of (mostly) wealthy young women who rob rich people’s houses. But where Sofia Coppola’s movie was rooted in a very specific era and explored the fascinating generational and psychological quirks that drove its disaffected teen burglars to do what they did, this Swedish Netflix series, at least in the first four episodes viewed for this review, makes only a half-hearted effort to evoke its ‘90s setting and takes a much soapier, less forensic approach to its story.

Here, the young women’s gateway into crime is the sky-high bill they rack up after a debauched weekend away. In need of cash to pay it off quickly, they convince themselves that they’re only robbing their wealthy neighbors to solve that problem, but other motivations soon arise. The women — who are mostly university-age, but seem closer to the protagonists of a teen drama — eventually begin to target people they have petty grievances with (like a love interest who spurns the ringleader after a one-night stand) as well as those who have wronged them more seriously (including a rapist, who gets off bizarrely lightly). The adrenaline rush of it all proves addictive for the gang, too. What’s more, for Mia (Tea Stjärne), the only member of the group not from a wealthy background, there’s also a Robin Hood-ish appeal to the burglaries, although this aspect regrettably takes something of a backseat to the girls’ escapades in the show. 

Between the gang’s crime spree and their unbelievably dysfunctional home lives, there’s enough broad drama here to keep Netflix’s autoplay function in good use. Even if it doesn’t provide keen insight, sharp nuance, or a remotely realistic plot, the show does go beyond a surface-level approach by exploring something of the girls’ inner lives, the class dynamics of their friendship group, and the shallowness of their parents’ milieu. At three hours total — and with an opening scene that teases a dramatic rise-and-fall story ahead — it all makes for a very bingeable, if ultimately forgettable, watch.

Buddy comedies, especially those that pair up total opposites, are almost guaranteed to be fun at the beginning, just from the surprise factor of having these personalities clash. But a show needs more than that to sustain interest, and The Brothers Sun just doesn’t fill out its characters enough beyond their respective archetypes within the first two episodes watched for this review. So far, this is a series that seems to be built around moments—in particular, the impressively choreographed fight scenes that communicate both peril and comedy—but without more substantial themes to prop itself up. It’s definitely slickly made and has production values to show off, but it can’t help but feel like it’s just ticking boxes.

As far as heist stories go, Choona gets points for placing so much importance on the act of getting its team together. The first two episodes watched for this review don’t advance forward in plot as much as they pivot from one point of view to another around the same moments in time. Unfortunately, because the series is so particular about its own structure, it loses sight of the reasons why we should be emotionally invested in the heist in the first place. There is a world of gang violence sketched out in these early episodes, but little sense of what’s actually at stake. And with the show’s over-reliance on voiceover narration, Choona sucks the tension out of its plot, as this seemingly omniscient voice constantly keeps us at a distance.

We start off at peak drama straight away, with incredibly stressful plot points at 2 different periods in time—an eerie flash forward cold open, and the more traditional drama bulk of the story. On first glance, it could read like an issue of ill pacing, like these intensely scandalous things could’ve been built up more, to maximize the emotion behind them. But it becomes pretty clear that using every soap opera trope in the book is just the foundation of the whole show. Things happen, things that happen to be traumatic, but there is no discernible story outside of the affair tropes and the reveal at the end of the first episode.

In a world of constant surveillance– CCTV, mass-market trackers, social media– it would seem that it’s not possible to create a murder mystery that wouldn’t be easily solved by just checking the tapes. Fool Me Once proves that it’s possible to do so, it just won’t be satisfying. The series at first seems to have an unexplainable mystery, with a possible resurrection/fake death of Maya’s husband, but the series throws away certain footage (like the CCTV during Joe’s death, or the hospital he was brought to) only to bring back the technology when convenient. The show does keep certain tidbits from us, but for far too long, and without giving smaller clues that would hopefully piece together the whole mystery. And with eight whole episodes that drag out the plot, Fool Me Once seems to have fooled us into thinking that it would have all been worth it in the end.

Sweet heavens, this is cringe. Starting with that edgy, dated intro sequence with the hardcore track. It isn’t accurate to say that there’s a lot of cringe writing because that’s just the default here, with a lot of the material being ‘you won’t believe how strong I am.’ The elaborate fight sequences are full of heavy blows like a button-mashing game and it’s where the show shines, but any semblance of story feels like incidental world-building for a tough guy anime. Maybe the kindest thing to say about it, apart from it promoting martial arts, is the fact that it’s generic enough that you won’t have to remember anything about it afterwards if you don’t want to.