More than it does anything else, this week’s episode of Boardwalk Empire confirms the show’s storytelling method, remaining entrenched in the series slow (we might instead say “steady”), novelistic approach to telling its story through the accumulation of character-driven scenes, rather than necessarily through developments of the plot. There are plot developments as well, of…
With this week’s episode, “Toil and Till,” Sons of Anarchy makes the first compelling case for its unending, unrelenting depiction of misery of the season. In fact, I can’t remember the time I was as invested in or even interested by an episode of this show. Considering where I stood last week, we’ll consider this…
That’s much more like it. “The Good Listener” may be the second episode of the season, but it feels like the first. Certainly it’s the first real indication this season that Terence Winter does, in fact, have some kind of endgame in mind that he’s working toward. This week also provides significantly more, and better,…
Welcome to season seven (!) of Sons of Anarchy! I hope you are ready to have some fun, because I sure as hell am. If you’ll remember, last season ended with Gemma bashing Tara’s head in with a kitchen fork, followed shortly by Juice shooting the woefully underdeveloped Officer Roosevelt in cold blood to protect…
Boardwalk Empire opens its fifth and final season with a flashback to 1884, wherein a young Nucky is shown swimming, poorly, in an attempt to earn some of the coins that the Commodore tosses into the ocean. He competes, poorly, with several of his peers. It’s a case of the show going back before it…
Did you know that it’s the first season of Orange is the New Black that is in contention at this year’s Emmy ceremony? I sure didn’t. So go ahead and check out my absurdly belated review of season two that I totally didn’t write by accident after you finish up here. And now, let’s all…
If at any point this essay devolves into just a running list of one-liners, I apologize. But with a show as consistently, uproariously funny as Veep, it’s nigh impossible to resist the urge to simply revel in the wonderful blue humor of Armando Ianucci’s vulgarity-ridden zingers. In the hands of the talented ensemble that fills…
Can you believe that we’re far enough past True Detective’s finale to have already arrived at the True Detective backlash? Neither can I, but here we are nonetheless. In the words of the ever-quotable Gawker Media, Nic Pizzolatto is a schmuck, and he probably also hates women? Pizzolatto mostly disregards that criticism, and mostly he…
I first read Lois Lowry’s The Giver in eighth grade, at which time the YA classic was already ten years old. I have not read it since, and I purposely did not re-read it in advance of watching Philip Noyce’s film adaptation for this review. That said, the book had on me, like it did…
For people of a certain generation, the works of Mike Judge in general, and the film Office Space in particular, are something of a cultural milestone. In fact, Office Space has defined for me (and likely for you, too) my entire approach to corporate culture, and also the restaurant business, and frankly just what it…
