Better late than never, right? For viewers like myself who were growing restless with Shameless’s fifth season so far, “Crazy Love” is a breath of fresh air. Not only is this handily the best episode of the season, it also sits comfortably among the very best episodes of the series to date. The process of…
It could just be that I watched Scandal late this week, and after a stellar night for HBO’s dramas, but color me underwhelmed by “Gladiators Don’t Run,” which is a scattered, confusing mess of an episode, one that twists and contorts the plots into braided pretzels so intricate that even the writers themselves seem to…
I have to admit that as the season wears on, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to write about Shameless. It’s still a bridge too far to call the show weak at this stage—in fact I think it’s attempting a number of really interesting things—but there is a spark that, for me at least,…
Perhaps inevitably, “Where’s the Black Lady?” does not quite reach the fever pitch of last week’s “Run,” though it sure tries like hell to. That said, Scandal packs in some really great scenes this week, and guest director Debbie Allen does some uncommonly great work here, as does Tony Goldwyn in what is one of…
First and foremost, fuck that title, which is a bitch to type and is not clever in the least. With that out of the way, while this week’s episode of Shameless shows sparks of promise in a few key areas, it does not deliver on these within the confines of the episode itself, which is…
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m still waiting for this season of Shameless to get a move on already. It’s by no means bad, but the sum of the parts is not quite adding up to a cohesive whole, at least not yet. That in itself isn’t a sin, but there’s also not…
Say what you will about Scandal, but Shonda Rhimes and her team know how to do a mid-season opener right. “Run” is energetic, tense, revelatory, and downright pulse pounding for early every minute of its running time. Seriously. “Run” is definitely a season best and mostly a series best episode. I didn’t get to watch…
After six long years, the last few of which were rather unexpected, Parenthood draws to a close in solid if unsurprising fashion. So much of this finale has been more or less locked in since the season premiere, if not even before then, that it’s hard to really consider this episode as anything other than…
The penultimate episode of Parenthood is in the curious position of both needing to tie up outstanding stories in time for the finale, while also not really having very much in the way of outstanding stories to tie up. The result is an episode that is emotionally if not narratively satisfying; an episode that in…
Wow. Let’s just all take a minute to consider “Curtain Call,” which is an astoundingly, thuddingly bad conclusion to a season that, while not great, wasn’t necessarily a disaster. Well, leave it to Ryan Murphy to rewrite history at the eleventh hour. “Curtain Call” is awful: tone deaf, flat, boring, ridiculous—take your pick. It is…
