Billy Crystal, is that you? The actor, known for comedy classics such as When Harry Met Sally, takes a surprising turn by starring in this thriller series as a child psychiatrist who is grieving the death of his wife when a boy with a troubled history arrives on his doorstep. The doctor/ patient connection deepens when the boy seems to have haunting insights into the doctor’s past. Judith Light, Rosie Perez, and 11-year-old Jacobi Jupe co-star. Friday, Oct. 25, Apple TV+.

by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough

Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumously published memoir “clocks her disintegration in real time,” said Allison Stewart in The Washington Post. The only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley battled addiction for the final 14 years of her life, and she never recovered after her only son, Ben, committed suicide in 2020. But Lisa Marie began taping recollections for an autobiography several years before she died at age 54 of complications from weight loss surgery, and the project has been completed by her daughter, actress Riley Keough, who added her own memories in alternating passages. “The book is of two minds: It’s an unadorned, conversational memoir that’s more matter of fact than gossipy. And it’s a frank, almost unbearably heavy meditation on grief.” 

“Anyone who’s skimmed tabloid headlines at the grocery store knows the basics,” said Elisabeth Egan in The New York Times. Lisa Marie was 4 when her parents separated, and 9 and inconsolable when she saw her dying father carried out of Graceland, his famed Memphis mansion, after a heart attack. From 11 to 14, she was abused by her mother’s boyfriend, and soon she was being hounded by paparazzi and publicly criticized for her looks and weight. “I guess I didn’t really have a shot in hell,” she tells us. She claims her brief marriage to Michael Jackson was happy until his drug use escalated, and she did enjoy one pleasant decade raising Riley and Ben before she turned 40 and began a free fall into opioid addiction. 

“It’s a lot,” said Chris Willman in Variety. “But it’s not a slog.” Instead, “From Here to the Great Unknown is engrossing from start to finish.” The book “falls squarely into the realm of autobio-tragedy, bracingly looking at how depression and addiction issues repeat themselves generationally,” but “with almost none of the sentimentalized overlay you might expect a book of this kind to impose.” The story benefits from Keough’s “often preternaturally calm take on the chaos that was her mother’s life,” but no punches are pulled. Instead, the book displays “a brutal honesty that you have to think probably wouldn’t have survived if Lisa Marie had survived long enough to clean up the rawness of her feelings on the tapes she left behind. For better or worse, and you have to think better, she was captured at a point in time when she had exactly zero f---s left to give.”

The Kennedy matriarch who became an activist

Ethel Kennedy led a life marked by privilege and glamour, but also tragedy and loss—and she turned it into a life of activism. Her parents died in a plane crash when she was 27, and she lost two sons, to a skiing accident and a drug overdose. When her husband, Robert F. Kennedy, was gunned down while running for president in 1968, Ethel, then a mother of 10 and pregnant once again, was by his side. Stoic in the aftermath of an assassination that rocked the nation, she was named America’s most admired woman that year. She never remarried, but threw herself into raising her children and carrying on her husband’s legacy of public service. Through the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights foundation, she spent decades campaigning for causes such as gun control and poverty alleviation. “Nobody gets a free ride,” she said in a 2012 documentary made by her daughter Rory. “Dig in and do what you can, because it might not last.” 

Ethel Skakel was born into “a family not unlike the Kennedys,” said the Los Angeles Times, “big, boisterous, Catholic, and rich.” Her father was a coal magnate who raised the family in a 31-room mansion in Greenwich, Conn. Athletic and fiercely competitive, she attended Manhattanville College, where roommate Jean Kennedy introduced her to her brother Robert on a ski trip; the two married after graduation. When RFK became a counsel for Senate Democrats, the pair moved into a sprawling Northern Virginia estate called Hickory Hill. The home became a magnet for “Washington kingmakers, Hollywood stars, Nobel Prize winners,” said The New York Times. Ethel hosted parties and served as “den mother, ringmaster, chief practical joker, and seasoned political pro”—even providing the crucial push to persuade her husband to run for president. 

After his death, she “largely avoided the public eye” as she worked for her causes, said The Boston Globe, “although she never strayed far from it.” A granddaughter overdosed at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., in 2019; more recently, the family was riven by the presidential run of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., condemned by numerous siblings. Ethel, who continued her advocacy into her 80s and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, stayed quiet about her son’s candidacy, just as she’d always balked at discussing her husband’s death or other family matters. “All this introspection,” she said in the documentary. “I hate it.”