“How much?” is a question asked regularly by this show. . How much is enough? How much of yourself will you give up? How much that you love will you sacrifice, and to what end? So far, Boardwalk Empire’s answer to this question is two-fold: eventually you will lose everything, and your loss will be…
Scandal’s fourth season premiere is something of re-pilot, and it functions that way for the bulk of its running time. When we first meet Olivia again, she’s living it up on a private island “a hundred miles off the coast of Zanzibar,” with Jake. She’s completely off the grid and pretending to be happy. The…
I was both excited and concerned coming into the sixth season premiere of The Good Wife. Excited because they were coming off their best season yet and concerned because they were coming off their best season yet. It would be an understatement to say that season 5 was a game changer. We saw who was essentially the male…
Nothing much happens this week on Sons of Anarchy, and yet, I can’t help but feel like this is the best episode of the season so far. As things plummet further into darkness, the show gains a surety of narrative that it hasn’t had in a long time. Now that there is no question as…
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…
SPOILERS AHEAD! Breaking Bad's brilliant final season deserves all the accolades coming to it (see our Emmy predictions here), but why? Here are 11 reasons why Breaking Bad should win at the Emmys. So Hanks finds out about Walt in the premiere, but instead of lashing out, in true Heisenberg style Walt says: When Hank…
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…
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…
