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”?
Given that Leonardo Da Vinci is one of the most interesting people in history, it’s surprising nobody has taken a swing at a television series about him.
Hell, he was the original Renaissance man. He’s the reason for the description. But nobody wanted to take a dramatic stab at what his life might have been like? Insane.
There is something disconcerting about the new DirecTV drama Rogue, the satellite TV provider's first, that at first is hard to identify beyond some obvious misses.
As I watched, I kept thinking it felt like a cable drama that really wanted to be taken seriously and would be precisely -- and maybe only -- because it was on cable. It struck me that the last time a show had pretensions this big without the wherewithal to pull it off, that show was AMC’s Hell on Wheels.
If you've watched the video NBC made of Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon talking -- and singing -- about how much they love each other and who cares what everyone's saying about the network's crazy late-night nightmare, you don't need to be told the backstory.
The assumption here is that you know all the angles. OK, then let's move forward with some failure analysis on why the video doesn't work and actually could hurt Fallon.
Well now things are getting damned interesting. And here's an important reminder for you types who don't read the fine print before arguing: The Power Rankings! are based on weekly episodes, not cumulative greatness. That's how we create flux and ride it like something out of Mavericks. Hence you will see some drops below. Also of note: This another All-Drama Edition of the Elite 11. Why? Because this battle is too big and too great to muddy up with comedy right now.
Matthew Weiner always asks critics to avoid very specific spoilers and, despite this demand sometimes going too far in what Mad Men’s creator thinks of as a spoiler, he’s given fans five exceptional seasons of the show and has earned the right to be protective. And since there’s no reason to ruin anyone’s enjoyment, this review will not reveal any of Weiner’s particular plot points or elements of concern.
Given that Real Time With Bill Maher fills an unscripted need at HBO, it’s probably no surprise that Maher’s POV would make him a producer for the television premiere of Vice, a newsmagazine that has a lot more sharp right angles than anything you’ll see on 48 Hours or Dateline. If you’ve been to the Vice website, you should be familiar with its brand of provocative, let’s-go-find-danger-or-something-weird journalism. It just took awhile for someone to realize this might make an interesting 30 minutes of television.
Much of the chatter that drives HBO’s addictive and outstanding drama series Game of Thrones tends to come from people who have read the books by George R.R. Martin, even though relatively speaking they are a minority. But they know a lot. They are very devoted and insider-y and can recall characters that barely have graced the screen -- and even then are covered in dirt and hardly recognizable. These book-first, awesome-television-series second types are way, way ahead of everyone else.
We are in that period of television where the riches are so immense and so deep and varied that you can’t possibly keep reminding yourself how lucky you are. Let’s face it, you’re spoiled.
