“The Americans,” FX’s excellent and exciting spy series about two married, deep-cover KGB agents, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, living in 1980s America, finished its first season in fitting fashion: with a finale full of, but never overrun by, action. The season ender contained not one but two covert missions, a sting, a high-speed car chase, and a shooting, but ended quietly, with the CIA momentarily foiled and Philip and Elizabeth, a bullet wound in her side, finally reconciled. Next season has near endless juicy material to explore: Nina, now a USSR double agent, is out to flip Stan; Elizabeth may want Philip to come home, but one of his alter-egos is still married to Martha; the Jennings’ daughter is getting suspicious of her mother; and the Cold War is only escalating. “The Americans”’ two showrunners, Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, also the series creator and a former CIA agent himself, spoke with me about the finale, season 2, the intentional lack of cliffhanger and those super wigs.How much of what happened this season did you know was going to happen when you began?Continue Reading… … Read More
Watch the “Breaking Bad”-inspired “Simpsons” opening
This Sunday, “The Simpsons” airs a special “Breaking Bad”-themed episode, including a special opening that pays homage to the AMC show. The scene imitates a montage “Breaking Bad’s” mid-season finale, both set to the 1960s song “Crystal Blue Persuasion.” Watch, below:Continue Reading… … Read More
“Justified’s” melancholy finale
“Justified” ended its fourth season last night, with an action-packed yet melancholy episode, a feeling coda to an at times cheeky season. Last week, in the penultimate episode, the last threads of the season’s major mystery— who is Drew Thompson?— got tied up. Shelby and Ellen May were safely taken into the Marshall’s custody leaving the finale to focus on the personal lives of the show’s two main men. Raylan puts together a body count of at least three, but successfully protects Winona and his unborn child from harm, only to end up alone staring at his father’s fresh grave. Boyd, scrambling to get rid of an old corpse so Ava won’t go to jail, fails, and finds himself alone, finally in charge of Kentucky’s heroin trade.The thing that’s so great about “Justified” is how it has rejected some of the pressures to be just like every other ‘serious’ anti-hero drama on TV. It’s always been a little shaggier, funnier, more procedural. (It’s second season, the one with Margo Martindale, was its most acclaimed, but it hasn’t never gone back to that well entirely: each season since has had a long term story arc, but they’ve been broader and punchier than the Mags storyline.) It’s also been willing to inhabit a more total moral ambiguity— not the kind so in vogue where the characters break really, really bad and we, the audience, have to wrestle with our sympathy for them, but where the characters teeter on the edge, bad but with standards. It’s a world where people do terrible things, but it’s they’re not quite monsters. Raylan wears a white hat, but he’s all grey.Continue Reading… … Read More
“Game of Thrones” brings in record viewership for HBO
The season 3 premiere of “Game of Thrones,” pitted against AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and the History Channel’s “The Bible” on Sunday night, ended up bringing in a series record-breaking 4.4 million viewers for HBO. From Deadline:” The one-hour 9 PM premiere was up 13 percent from the 3.9 million who watched the Season 2 premiere on April 1, 2012 and up 4 percent over its previous viewership high of 4.2 million for the Season 2 finale last year. Over its three plays Sunday, Thrones was seen by 6.7 million viewers, up 7 percent from the 6.3 million who watched all the plays of the Season 2 debut.”That number may seem paltry in comparison to “The Walking Dead’s” 12.4 million or “The Bible’s” 11.7 million viewers on Sunday night, but as Slate’s June Thomas explained last year, a premium service like HBO relies on subscriptions over ratings:Continue Reading… … Read More
“Enlightened” cancelled by HBO
Amy Jellicoe’s story ends here.”Enlightened,” the series created by “Year of the Dog” director Mike White, has been cancelled by HBO after two seasons. The series, about Amy (Laura Dern, who won a Golden Globe for the performance) struggling against a destructive corporate culture and her own demons, was something of a cause celebre for critics, in light of its low viewership by HBO standards and moody, melancholic tone.Salon’s Willa Paskin wrote after the season 2 finale, an accidental series finale of sorts: “[I]t’s sweet that ‘Enlightened,’ a show all about the cost of caring too much, should inspire such dedication.” And, on Twitter, fans are calling for Netflix to intervene and provide a third season.Continue Reading… … Read More
Sweden braces for Melodifestivalen final
Swedes around the country are readying for Saturday night’s Melodifestivalen finale in Stockholm, where the nation will decide which act will represent Sweden at the Eurovision finals in Malmö in May. … Read More
