Game of Thrones is one of my favorite series. I look forward to it every week. It's like having a gigantic meal. A lot of meat on those bones. But that doesn't mean it wins every week. There's stiff competition in the Elite 11 and I would argue that three consecutive weeks of some other show being just a bit greater was starting to annoy fans. I know this because they've let me know. A lot. But here it is, so all hail the new king! But can it stay there?
If you were watching TV news cover the "fluid" events in Boston on Thursday night, while simultaneously witnessing Twitter implode from vitriolic annoyance at how bad the news media was handling things, you might have expected some soul-searching and swift change come Friday.
One of the most mesmerizing and memorable aspects of Rectify, the new drama series from the Sundance Channel, is how the camera lingers on the face of its star, Aden Young, as he plays a man who was just freed from 19 years on death row and now tries to understand the world outside.
Although there are flaws in Defiance, the newest sci-fi series from Syfy, which is trying to regain the mojo and audience it had with Battlestar Galactica, there's a lot of ambition and potential as well. So much, in fact, that even if tonight's two-hour premiere doesn't hook you, stay patient and let it find its footing.
And down goes pretty boy! Well, who saw that coming? I didn't -- and I'm the one who does this damned thing. But that's the beauty of The Power Rankings! You come in hard or you get sent tumbling, if not outright packing.
Some outstanding performances on any number of shows brought some big-time flux to the Elite 11. And yes, we're still in All-Drama Mode.
Deep into the second episode of Hemlock Grove, the new horror series from Netflix, a character lies bleeding in the road, screaming: “I don’t want to see that! I don’t want to see that!” You’re not the only one, pal.
This column contains spoilers from the first episode of season six of Mad Men.
Cable has a long history of playing stories through the anti-hero – mostly because that’s a vastly more interesting way of looking at the human condition and partly because the network ideal of not alienating a single viewer had led to decades of clearly delineated white hats and black hats.
Oh, and you thought things would be easy? That Game of Thrones would smack down Orphan Black and take over its rightful rank. Right? But Mad Men has arrived. This is going to get interesting and, our favorite thing, bloody.
This is what I try to tell my bosses all the time: Television doesn't watch itself. (I think they got ear plugs a long time ago.) But there's a lot of truth to that. When we get shows to review, often there are more than one (four for Game of Thrones, for example). There's infinitely more television than film. Not even close. More people watch television than movies. Again, not even remotely close. And unlike a movie that ends in roughly two hours, television has 13 or 22 hours per season.
Easily one of the biggest surprises of the season, Hannibal arrives on NBC and manages -- for one of the few times in memory -- to take what essentially is an overly familiar procedural and make it feel like a cable series.
Despite theoretically being on a 52-week television season, there's still something that smells fishy about a sitcom that arrives in April (and has jokes in it about the Academy Awards). Then again, in a season of constant failure, a comedy that people sample in April has as much of a chance to live another day in the fall as all those highly touted series that actually did come out this fall. So who knows?
As we all try to digest the Jay Leno-to-Jimmy Fallon transition, would it cross over into the realm of overly cynical to say, “I’ll believe it when I see it”?
