Title Recommendations based on Elaine Benes
Gritty, suspenseful, and hardboiled, True Detective emerged in 2014 as a great contribution to the crime genre and another instant HBO classic. With engrossing dialogue and stark conflict of personalities, True Detective is thrilling, moving, and worthy of its high critical acclaim—with meditations on mortality and what it means to be a true detective and a good human being.
Better Call Saul is set six years before Saul Goodman meets Walter White. We meet him when the man who will become Saul Goodman is known as Jimmy McGill, a small-time lawyer searching for his destiny, and, more immediately, hustling to make ends meet. Working alongside, and, often, against Jimmy, is "fixer" Mike Erhmantraut.
House Hunters is an American reality series focused on house buyers who pick from three alternatives.
M*A*S*H tells the story of the doctors and nurses who work in the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Uijeongbu, South Korea, during the Korean War. They're all just getting through each day and on to the next. The causalities never stop coming; they can't save every wounded soul they find. And the army's micromanaging and red tape is unbearable. So, in their off time, they drink, carouse, and play pranks to create a feeling of normalcy in that crazy war zone.
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time, Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.
Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy through the horrific rule of the Taliban, The Kite Runner is the heartbreaking story of the unlikely and inseparable friendship between a wealthy Afghan boy and the son of his father's servant, both of whom are caught in the tragic sweep of history. Published in the aftermath of America's invasion of Afghanistan, Khaled Hosseini's haunting writing brought a part of the world to vivid life that was previously unknown.
Framed in the 1940s for the double murder of his wife and her lover, upstanding banker Andy Dufresne begins a new life at the Shawshank prison, where he puts his accounting skills to work for an amoral warden. During his long stretch in prison, Dufresne comes to be admired by the other inmates—including an older prisoner named Red—for his integrity and unquenchable sense of hope.
Scrubs follows the lives of J.D. and other medical interns at Sacred Heart teaching hospital. J.D. has a tendency to daydream, which is a bad habit for a doctor working in a fast-paced ward. And on top of that, he is finding that the human body actually makes him a bit squeamish. Demanding Dr. Perry Cox plans to whip J.D. and the other interns into shape, but it's not going to be easy.
In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
Up until senior year, Greg has maintained total social invisibility. He only has one friend, Earl, and together they spend their time—when not playing video games and avoiding Earl's terrifying brothers— making movies, their own versions of Coppola and Herzog cult classics. Greg would be the first one to tell you his movies are f***ing terrible, but he and Earl don't make them for other people. Until Rachel.Rachel has leukemia, and Greg's mom gets the genius idea that Greg should befriend her. Against his better judgment and despite his extreme awkwardness, he does. When Rachel decides to stop treatment, Greg and Earl must abandon invisibility and make a stand.
A botched robbery indicates a police informant, and the pressure mounts in the aftermath at a warehouse. Crime begets violence as everything unravels with the survivors—veteran Mr. White, newcomer Mr. Orange, psychopathic parolee Mr. Blonde, bickering weasel Mr. Pink and Nice Guy Eddie.
Fresh Off the Boat is a genre-bending venture into subculture through the lens of food. Raw, wild, and heartfelt, Eddie Huang gets down in the underbellies of cities around the world in search of what's cooking in their back alleys and underground spots. He's hunting rabbits with biker gangs in Oakland, eating seafood and surfing in Taiwan, hitting low-rider BBQs in East LA, and dining on rice and beans with your drug dealer's grandmother in Miami.
Hell's Kitchen is a British reality show that features prospective chefs competing with each other for a final prize—and getting yelled at by Judge Gordon Ramsey for all the mistakes they make along the way.
Boyz n the Hood is the popular and successful film and social criticism from John Singleton about the conditions in South Central Los Angeles where teenagers are involved in gun fights and drug dealing on a daily basis.
While attending a party at James Franco's house, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel and many other celebrities are faced with the apocalypse.
