Insecure Review

The friendship between Issa and Molly is the show, and the writing about it is unusually honest. These are two people who love each other and are also quietly competitive, judgemental and capable of long silences, and the series lets that relationship break properly rather than resolving each rift within an episode. Yvonne Orji is superb, playing a successful lawyer whose professional confidence collapses the moment she is asked to be vulnerable. The other achievement is place.

This is a Los Angeles of specific neighbourhoods, block parties, a real music budget and local businesses, shot with warmth rather than the usual palm tree shorthand, and it made careers for a generation of artists on its soundtrack. The raps to the bathroom mirror are a device that never gets old. The weakness is the romantic plotting, which cycles through the same reconciliation and betrayal beats across five seasons, and a workplace subplot at a non profit that the writers plainly lose interest in. The final season lands the friendship and fumbles the endings around it.