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…
Boardwalk Empire is exceedingly good at doing finale episodes, and its track record with penultimate episodes is equally great. Season two’s one-two punch of “Under God’s Power She Flourishes” and “To the Lost” is looking primed to go down as the best pair of episodes in the series’ history, and in fact, with its focus…
Jack Antonoff is a busy man. In addition to being the guitarist for the pop band fun., he also wrote songs with Carly Rae Jepsen, Tegan and Sara, Sara Bareilles, Christina Perri, and Taylor Swift (the song "Sweeter than Fiction" was nominated for a Golden Globe). However, he takes a slightly different route with Bleachers. The…
“Everything has chains.” That’s hard-learned wisdom from Brian Fallon, The Gaslight Anthem’s frontman, on “Selected Poems”, a latter-half album cut from the Jersey quartet’s latest album Get Hurt. It’s been a particularly hard year for Fallon, as he divorced from his wife of ten years. But he’s also had to deal with the aftermath of…
In its final season, Mad Men is determined to come back to basics, and indeed, throughout these seven episodes the audience, and our characters, come face to face over and over again with the idea that happiness, however we define it, is inherently unattainable. Happiness is caught up in desire, and no matter what we…
With “Inside the Bubble,” Scandal is just about back to the breakneck pace that we know and love. What’s less certain is whether all of the very many things transpiring here are as interesting as the show believes them to be. I’m thinking specifically of the revelation that Rowan arranged for the murder of Fitz’s…
Deborah Harkness’ All Souls trilogy began with A Discovery of Witches in 2011 (which is wickedly funny since the title-drop in that novel is, “It began with a discovery of witches”). The magical trilogy follows the romance between Diana Bishop and 1500-year-old vampire Matthew Clairmont, but hold your horses—Diana is not a love-struck teenager, but…
When I was writing about Parenthood last season, I came rather quickly to the realization that it’s a very difficult show to write about weekly. Owing to its realistic, slice-of-life approach to family drama, there are often episodes where very little happens, at least externally. Many of the stories contain such subtle moments, and are…
Riot Games is the group behind the online multiplayer battle arena game League of Legends, which has more than 2 million players. Filled with colorful, playable characters that have their own unique personalities within this universe, there are five characters that have formed the virtual band Pentakill. Riot decided to release actual music from these characters…
Scandal’s fourth season may have gotten off to a bumpy start, but this week’s episode is proof positive that delaying certain story developments can have rewards down the line. Fitz and Olivia’s almost-reunion is by far the strongest scene of the episode, and of the season to date, owing almost entirely to the amount of…
