When a show ends, we expect it to answer questions. There are, of course, famous examples of shows that leave questions without answers: Lost, Heroes, 24, The West Wing, The Sopranos- big budget dramas and network television broadcasts that have a lot going on, too much going on to answer every last little question. But none […]
The season finale of The Night Of is coming around the bend. It’s so soon, it seems unreal, despite how long the individual episodes run (one hour and twenty minutes, roughly, for those of us keeping score at home). So, in an attempt to provide a penultimate, final-feeling examination of the plot, I took a […]
There is a book, by Amitava Kumar, called “A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His …
Perhaps more telling of our generation than the procedural crime drama is the prison story. Jailbreaks, great escapes, masterful duels between the jailed and the jailers are sources of endless fascination for us. My theory? Imprisonment is a narrative that allows anyone to be a protagonist. We can side with the heroes of The Green […]
This may have been my favorite episode of the show. Granted, it’s only the 2nd airing of The Night Of, and granted, John Turturro steals the show every chance he can get, and granted, this episode moves the point of view back and forth faster than a shuttlecock, but it’s still my favorite. Let’s not […]
In the long and decorated history of the procedural crime drama, there have been shows, movies and series which go far and beyond the standard pale. In our recent era, Law and Order reigns supreme in terms of broadcast history, the first season of True Detective ranks as most ethereally horrifying, and Twin Peaks probably […]
Finale Season six is over. Hard as it is to comprehend, girls and boys, they ended the season with an hour and twenty-two minutes of the best scenes everyone wanted, stuck together with the fading glue of human interest. The audience got what it wanted in this episode, “The Winds of Winter,” and it got […]
“Battle of the Bastards,” the most recent episode in the sixth season of Game of Thrones, has me thinking about fathers. Well, not fathers, specifically (the word “bastard” implies the absence of fathers, usually, although in the case of our particular bastards, it’s mothers who are the mystery), but loved ones, family members, usually parents […]