As all fannibals know (“fannibals” is here defined as anyone who loves Hannibal so much that they will willingly self-apply that corny portmanteau of a moniker; I count myself among their number), season three was not intended to be the...
On the one hand, it’s not hard to understand why NBC pulled the plug on Welcome to Sweden just four episodes into its second season. The show never, at least in the episodes we saw, found its voice. It went...
For all the crap the network has put out over the years, MTV has always been on the forefront of social issues. Growing up as I did in a repressed, abstinence-focused, Catholic, Midwestern world, it was shocking and, in retrospect,...
When you’re piecing together your reaction to a work of art that takes place over time (be it a movie, a novel or a season of a television show), the ending has a natural tendency to loom largest. After all,...
There aren’t a lot of shows that could get away with the season that Childrens Hospital just had. By almost any standard, it was a very odd run of episodes. But how do you define oddness in a show like...
In its first season, HBO’s Silicon Valley was a very funny show but it wasn’t without its problems. In addition to accusations of being Entourage for nerds (more on that comparison later), it had pacing and consistency issues. The show...
This season of Adventure Time was the one during which we, the viewers, learned that Pendleton Ward was no longer running the show. But instead of derailing without the creator in charge, the integrity of the world and characters Ward...
Given that a jack of all trades is reported to be a master of none, a little bit of suspicion would be in order when faced with the prospect of Outlander, a period/time-travel/political/adventure/romance (with detours encompassing witchcraft, torture and feudal...
There’s a lot of taboo-breaking in comedy, obviously. Upending expectations is one of the tenets of making people laugh. Years of comedians testing limits, however, has left the ground picked pretty clean in terms of what can upset people. So...
In the new, post-Sopranos (and now post-Mad Men) world of television, there’s much more awareness on the part of the public of individual seasons of shows. It’s not just about the contracts of the cast and crew anymore. Seasons are...
