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Qiana Thieklin
Figuring out what to watch can be a headache in and of itself, which is why you'll often find me perusing Netflix's top-10 most-watched movies list. Granted, these kinds of rankings on the best streaming services don't guarantee quality, but it's as good a place to start as any.
We've narrowed down the three movies in the Netflix top-10 that are actually worth the hype. This list includes one of the best original Netflix movies in ages, a new Ultraman movie that's fun for the whole family, and a thought-provoking true crime documentary that explores disability rights and asks important questions about consent.
This article is based on the Netflix top 10 list of most-watched movies in the U.S. as of 11 a.m. ET on June 24. If you're looking for even more streaming recommendations, be sure to check out our guide on the best new movies that just landed on streaming as well as everything new to Netflix this month.
I'll admit, I was skeptical when I heard Netflix was rebooting the popular decades-old Japanese hero. However, I was pleasantly surprised that "Ultraman: Rising" is one of the rare good reboots. The movie centers on Ken Sato (voiced by Christopher Sean in the English dub), an arrogant baseball star who secretly lives a double life as the giant superhero Ultraman.
After an attack by giant monsters brings him back to Tokyo, his life gets even more complicated when he adopts a baby kaiju upon defeating its mother. Alongside reluctant parenthood, Ken must navigate a strained relationship with his estranged father and thwart the schemes of the Kaiju Defense Force, which plans to exploit the baby kaiju for their own sinister purposes.
While the two argued it was a consensual relationship, the man's mother claimed he wasn't able to give consent and the professor was charged with sexual assault. This documentary traces the beginning of their relationship and the trial that followed, including interviews with the people involved.
Community is an American television sitcom created by Dan Harmon. The series ran for 110 episodes over six seasons, with its first five seasons airing on NBC from September 17, 2009, to April 17, 2014, and its final season airing on Yahoo! Screen from March 17 to June 2, 2015. Set at a community college in the fictional Colorado town of Greendale, the series stars an ensemble cast including Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, Danny Pudi, Yvette Nicole Brown, Alison Brie, Donald Glover, Ken Jeong, Chevy Chase, and Jim Rash. It makes use of meta-humor and pop culture references, paying homage to film and television clichs and tropes.
Harmon based Community on his experiences attending Glendale Community College. Each episode was written in accordance with Harmon's "story circle" template, a method designed to create effective and structured storytelling. Harmon was the showrunner for the first three seasons but was fired before the fourth and replaced by David Guarascio and Moses Port. After weaker reviews, Harmon was rehired for the fifth season, after which NBC canceled the series. Yahoo! Screen revived the show for Community's sixth and final season.
Despite struggling in the ratings, Community developed a cult following and received acclaim for its acting, direction, writing, and meta-humor. It won a Primetime Emmy Award from four nominations and received the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Comedy Series in 2012, among other accolades. In September 2022, after several years of speculation and development, a feature-length Community film was announced for NBC's streaming service Peacock.[3]
Jeff Winger is disbarred and suspended from his law firm when it is discovered that he lied about having a bachelor's degree from Columbia University. To earn a legitimate degree, he enrolls at Greendale Community College in Colorado. He quickly becomes attracted to his classmate, social activist Britta Perry, and pretends to run a study group in order to spend time with her. Britta invites classmate Abed Nadir, a socially awkward and pop culture obsessed student, who in turn brings other classmates along: religious single mother Shirley Bennett; nave over-achiever Annie Edison; former high school football star Troy Barnes; and bigoted, elderly millionaire Pierce Hawthorne. Despite their differences, the group's members soon become close friends. They are often roped into helping the college's flamboyant dean, Craig Pelton, in his schemes to make the school seem more respectable, as well as having to deal with the antics of their mentally unstable teacher (and eventual classmate and friend) Ben Chang.
Season 1 follows Jeff's creation of the study group and its subsequent misadventures. Season 2 sees Chang forced to enroll as a student and attempt to join the study group despite secretly planning revenge against it, while Pelton is forced to fight for Greendale's sense of pride against the dean of a rival school City College, eventually culminating in a desperate paintball battle. Season 3 focuses on Chang's villainous plot to take over the school, as well as Troy's struggle with whether or not to attend the cult-like air conditioning repair school. Season 4 shows the study group in its senior year, with all the characters (especially Abed) struggling with what may be their final moments together, and Chang recovering from "Changnesia" (a fake amnesia which Chang uses as a coverup). Season 5 sees Pierce's death and Troy leaving in the middle of the season, while the other characters return to Greendale after graduation to save the school, leading Jeff to take a job there as a teacher. Season 6 ends the series with the characters reflecting on the last six years while new staff member Frankie Dart arrives at the dysfunctional school to make it more respectable, forcing the group to question how much Greendale can be cleaned up while still remaining Greendale.
Dan Harmon emphasized the importance of the cast to making the premise of the comedy work. "Casting was 95 percent of putting the show together," he said in an interview.[5] He had worked with several of the cast members previously. Actor Chevy Chase had long been a favorite of Harmon. Though initially not partial to sitcoms, Chase was persuaded by the quality of the show's writing to take the job.[5] Harmon saw similarities between Chase and the character he plays on the show. Though Chase has often been ridiculed for his career choices, Harmon believed this role could be redeeming: "What makes Chevy and Pierce heroic is this refusal to stop."[6] Harmon had to warn Chase against playing a "wise-ass" the way he often does in his roles, since the character of Pierce is a rather pathetic figure who is normally the butt of the joke himself.[6]
McHale, known from the E! comedy talk show The Soup, was also impressed by Harmon's writing. He commented, "Dan's script was so head and shoulders above everything else that I was reading."[7] McHale appealed to Harmon because of his likability, which allowed the character to possess certain unsympathetic traits without turning the viewer against him.[6] To play Annie, Harmon wanted someone resembling Tracy Flick, Reese Witherspoon's character in the 1999 movie Election. Originally the producers were looking for a Latina or Asian Tracy Flick, but they cast Alison Brie, known for her role as Trudy Campbell on Mad Men.[6]
Harmon based the premise of Community on his own experiences. In an attempt to save his relationship with his then-girlfriend, he enrolled in Glendale Community College northeast of Los Angeles, where they would take Spanish together.[5] Harmon got involved in a study group and, somewhat against his own instincts, became close friends with the members, with whom he had very little in common. "I was in this group with these knuckleheads and I started really liking them," he explained, "even though they had nothing to do with the film industry and I had nothing to gain from them and nothing to offer them."[6] With this background, Harmon wrote the show with a main character largely based on himself. He had, like Jeff, been arrogant and emotionally distant to the extreme before he realized the value of understanding other people.[6]
About the creative process behind the writing, Harmon said that he had to write the show as if it were a movie, not a sitcom. Essentially, the process was no different from the earlier works he had done, except for the length and the target demographic.[6]
Each episode of Community is written in accordance with Dan Harmon's template of "story circles" that he developed while at Channel 101.[8] Harmon rewrote every episode (except while not working on the show during its fourth season), which helped lend the show his particular voice.[9] Members of the Community writing staff have included Liz Cackowski, Dino Stamatopoulos, Chris McKenna, Megan Ganz, Andy Bobrow, Alex Rubens, Tim Saccardo and Matt Warburton. Cast member Jim Rash, who won an Academy Award in 2011 for co-writing the film The Descendants, also wrote a season four episode.
The show is known for its frequent use of thematic episodes every season, which use clichs and television tropes as single-episode concepts that play with suspension of disbelief while maintaining plot continuity.[10][11] One notable thematic episode is Season 3's "Remedial Chaos Theory", in which the cast explore seven different parallel realities of the same night, with one key variation being a roll of a single six-sided die in a game of Yahtzee that Jeff uses to dismiss a member of the group to go get a pizza (the seventh variant is that the die was not rolled at all).[12] Frequent episode themes are school-year holidays (Halloween and Christmas being the most frequent), paintball,[13] and various forms of animation.[14][15][16]
Filming the show involved a lot of improvisation, particularly from Chase. Of Chase, Harmon said that he "tends to come up with lines that you can actually end scenes with sometimes".[17] He has also called McHale and Glover adept improvisers.[7] Apart from a few exterior scenes shot at Los Angeles City College, the show was filmed at the Paramount Studios lot in Hollywood, California, during seasons one through five. For season six, the series moved to the CBS Studio Center, and featured exterior scenes from Los Angeles City College for the first time since season two.[18] The series used the single-camera technique, where each shot is filmed individually, using the same camera.[19]
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