Part 4B: 24: What It Was Accused of and What It Did Right
Before I start with the parts about 24 I liked, I will deal with the most long-lasting effects of the series in regard to its two major features.
The first was the bias that the series repeatedly…
Part 5A: battlestar Galactica and the First Strike in the Pop Culture War
When the Sci-FI Channel did their reimagining of Battlestar Galactica in 2003, they managed to do something remarkable — take a purely science-fiction project that dealt with robots and turn into as realistic a portrayal of the…
Ghosts Reviewed
Every once in a while on a series debuts on television that transcends the medium, reshapes the potential of its genre and truly deserves to be called Peak TV.
CBS’ Ghosts is not that kind of show. It’s the kind of series that, frankly, in the bad old…
Part 4A: Howard Gordon, 24 and What Both Sides Never Got About Jack Bauer
It is almost impossible to discuss TV after 9/11 and not bring up 24. Perhaps more than any other cultural landmark of the new millennium, it basically became a political talking point on both sides of…
The Conclusion Of Matt Amodio’s Incredible Run Or, The Jeopardy Story The Media should Have focused on this past month
As I mentioned in an earlier article, so much focus of the past several weeks on Jeopardy has been over the controversy behind the scenes. The firing of Mike Richards…
An Extraordinary Series. I Couldn’t Bear Watching it Again
Precisely one month ago I gave a very detailed synopsis of HBO’s remake of Ingmar Bergman’s classic Scenes from a Marriage — what the original was about, how great the actors playing the leads before were in general, and I what…
Part 3b: HOW To Get Away With Murder and Criminal Justice as Soap Opera
Had it not been used later, How to Get Away with Murder would have been a perfectly acceptable title for Scandal. Indeed, at one point prior to a Presidential debate, Olivia Pope would break into hysterical…
Part 3A: Shonda Rhimes, Scandal and the Cynicism of Powerful People
Well before the terrorist attacks of 2001, cynicism in institutions had begun to permeate the national psyche. Part of this was due to the rise of cable news and part of did involve several television series of the 1990s…
The New Wonder Years might even be Better Than You Think
About three months I wrote a long article about why I thought the new reboot of The Wonder Years, re-imagined from the perspective of a black family in 1968 Atlanta could truly be a work of art if it…
A Little Later Than Usual: The Chair
During the era of Peak TV, I’ve never really known what to do with Sandra Oh. I’ve admired her film work, from her charming performance in the undervalued Canadian comedy Last Night to her superb performances in such varied movies as Sideways, Rabbit…
