In the middle of a brilliant season, it’s telling that a melancholy, drifting episode like “Video Games” is easily the weakest episode so far. It’s certainly not a terrible episode, shifting from the usual setting of New York City to the quieter, pastoral regions upstate. There’s a gentle, half-asleep feeling here, and this is reflected…
“Money Trap” combined a couple plots that should have been compelling television into an unfortunately average episode. Raylan hunting down a fugitive with a grudge and a porn director associate (Paul Kinsey!) has promise, but it felt like an excuse to show that Raylan still knows his way around a gun (and women). Boyd and…
For an episode titled “Boys,” it’s unsurprising that the strongest section of the episode focuses on the men of Girls, and the episode gets a lot of value about exploring the thoroughly weird dynamic between a couple of manchildren: Ray and Adam. Their pathetic little adventure to Staten Island, spurred by a search for Little…
For a while there, it seemed like Community was going to revolutionise television sitcoms. “Modern Warfare” seemed to promise a new age of sitcoms that never quite happened. Those ambitious episodes gobbled up time and money, leaving weaker, less innovative episodes to bracket them. Character growth stagnated, as it tends to in sitcoms. And often,…
“Foot Chase” felt like a return to the “just okay” Justified of season one. It wasn’t a bad episode by any stretch, though; I enjoyed the banter and gradually increasing trust between Raylan and Sheriff Shelby (the more airtime for Jim Beaver, the better). And the suggestion that Josiah might actually be Drew was a…
This week’s Spartacus episode was in many ways a “typical” Spartacus episode – a good stretch of the running time was spent at a drunken party, filled with female and male nudity, a handful of sex scenes and, of course, bouts of violence born of mistrust or competitiveness. The conclusion went from a confrontation between…
“I want everything. I want all the things.” Tonight’s episode of Girls impressed me with the show’s ability to capture those unreal, fleeting moments where things just happen, one after the other, extraordinary events, moments that seem unreal and make a great (if slightly unbelievable) story a year later. It might be a whirlwind marriage…
Community’s season four premiere carries the weight of expectation, given it is the show’s first episode without Dan Harmon as showrunner. The new showrunners address this head-on with a broad parody of Community as a laugh-track-heavy, multi-cam sitcom. It’s supposed to be clever, but is instead remarkably clumsy, and it’s telling that it doesn’t seem…
Justified’s typically laconic pace shifts into second gear in “Kin,” with the mysterious Drew Thompson suddenly getting everyone interested in finding him. Raylan wants to find Drew to stop Arlo getting out of prison, Boyd wants to find him for a hefty reward from Wynn Duffy, who’s after Drew because Dixie mafioso Nick Augustine wants…
Spartacus is a series that’s always made good use of Australian and New Zealand actors and in the second, middling quality episode of Season 3 it introduces a couple new Australasians to the fold. The first addition is Anna Hutchison (Underbelly, Cabin in the Woods) who plays Laeta, introduced to show the human toll of…
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