Posts Tagged ‘HBO drama’
 

 

THE SKED Season Premiere Review: “Treme”

  TREME:  Sunday 9PM on HBO You don’t need big ratings to be considered a success on HBO (just ask Lena Dunham), but generating buzz is essential.  That’s something TREME never did, despite a small hard core ...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Finale Review: “Westworld”

  For all that HBO’s WESTWORLD is deliberately obscure and oblique, one thing has become increasingly clear through the course of its second season:  series creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy expect viewers to dec...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

THE SKED Season Finale Review: “True Detective”

  Since the TV cop show has come of age–a process that began back in the days of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, but has accelerated greatly in recent years–there have been repeated attempts to push the limits...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Premiere Review: “Westworld”

  WESTWORLD:  Sunday 9PM on HBO No one would ever accuse HBO’s WESTWORLD of being straightforward, but by the time Season 1 ended, series creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy had placed at least some of their cards ...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

THE SKED Season Finale Review: “Boardwalk Empire”

  It’s a continuing paradox that a show could have as many colorful characters, so terrific a cast, as much plot and incident and history (not to mention sex and violence) and visual style as BOARDWALK EMPIRE does an...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Series Premiere TV Review: “Here and Now”

  HERE AND NOW:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – In the Queue HERE AND NOW is sort of the Alan Ball/HBO version of The Fosters, which means that its characters are a generation older, it has a lot of sex, a lot of talk, and a l...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Premiere Review: “The Newsroom”

  THE NEWSROOM:  Sunday 9PM on HBO In the end, just about everyone seemed to be ambivalent about THE NEWSROOM, and that includes its auteur and shining star, Aaron Sorkin.  The Season 2 finale felt like it could well hav...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Premiere Review: “Game of Thrones”

  GAME OF THRONES:  Sunday 9PM on HBO Concerns have been as high as expectations for the final season of GAME OF THRONES.  Season 7, the first with little recourse to George R. R. Martin’s novels due to the lagging...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

THE SKED Season Premiere Review: “Game of Thrones”

  GAME OF THRONES:  Sunday 9PM on HBO GAME OF THRONES is such an assured, expert piece of work that it’s easy to forget how many rules of conventional TV storytelling it routinely violates.  It’s not just the...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

THE SKED Series Finale Review: “True Blood”

  Before the final 2 weeks of its run, the word no one would ever have dreamed of attaching to TRUE BLOOD was “subdued”; it was the guilty pleasure HBO series that was loaded with sex and violence and got great...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

THE SKED Season Premiere Review: “True Blood”

  TRUE BLOOD:  Sunday 9PM on HBO You don’t typically associate HBO with “guilty pleasure”–even its genre shows, from The Sopranos to Boardwalk Empire to Game of Thrones, have the weight of dram...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Season Finale Review: “True Detective”

  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 th...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

THE SKED Series Premiere Review: “True Detective”

  TRUE DETECTIVE:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert It sometimes seems like brooding serial-killer thrillers are as plentiful on the New Television as multi-camera family sitcoms were on the Old.  TRUE DETECTIVE, thou...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Series Finale Review: “Boardwalk Empire”

  BOARDWALK EMPIRE was, from its start, HBO at its best and most frustrating.  The show was sumptuously produced, on a scale that no other small-screen purveyor of content could match, famously including the recreation of...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Series Finale Review: “Sharp Objects”

  The HBO miniseries version of Gillian Flynn’s novel SHARP OBJECTS proved to be a fascinating exercise in adaptation.  Although the TV credits reported the show to be “created by” showrunner Marti Noxon...
by Mitch Salem