After last week’s tumultuous, spectacular battle of Blackpool, tonight’s Season 2 finale of GAME OF THRONES was, necessarily, somewhat lower-key.  It served more as a coda, and as a transition to Season 3 (considering that there was no attempt at closure in any of the stories, it’s a good thing that […]

  Starz’s SURVIVOR’S REMORSE took some confident steps forward in its second season, even if that wasn’t reflected in the lackluster ratings.  Season 1 was mostly content with being a sports-driven Entourage clone (a position now occupied by HBO’s Ballers) about basketball star Cam Calloway (Jessie T. Usher) and his family basking in free agency […]

  From the viewpoint of its newly-concluded third season, the first 2 years of Starz’s BLACK SAILS feel like a very long and somewhat misguided prologue to where the series is now.  With Michael Bay as its leading Executive Producer, Black Sails was presented as a yarn of 18th century sea piracy, built around the […]

  The idea of applying a deep coat of existential angst to thriller conventions isn’t new–every Sundance Film Festival has at least a couple of examples of the sub-genre, and there are even sub-sub-genres of the form, like Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, which add surreal humor to the mix.  With 8+ hours […]

  Is the dullness of HBO’s LOOKING a breakthrough or a flaw?  That’s the question that’s been following the series since its premiere two months ago, and it’s been argued both ways. From the start, Looking has been presented as a show about gay men that would break the mold, different from forebears like Will […]

  After a so-so fall spent mostly in Neverland, ONCE UPON A TIME rebounded strongly with its midseason arc, which brought the Wicked Witch of the West (Rebecca Mader) to Storybrooke.  The plotline effectively continued the process of redemption for former Evil Queen Regina (Lana Parrilla) and Hook (Colin O’Donoghue) that had started in the […]

  In its first season, Marc Maron’s self-created series MARON was more of an uneven experiment than a cohesive series.  Maron tried on several different formats in the course of its 10 episodes on IFC–mordant day in the life, surreal Louie-ish flights of fancy, naturalistic multiepisode story arc–and while some tries were better than others, […]

  Few television series have worked so hard to be unlikeable as BOSS.  There had been some thought, after its initial off-putting season, that when Starz replaced series creator Farhad Safinia with Dee Johnson as showrunner, the aim might have been to water down some of the show’s bile, but such was clearly not the […]