Ted Pigeon

It's a gleeful display of song and dance that conjures a fleeting nostalgia and exhilaration that even the hardest of hearts can fall for in late December.

By casting Rick's protagonist status into question, showrunner Scott Gimple has opened The Walking Dead to new possibilities--both in its narrative and philosophical foundations--and is successfully crafting a rare series of rising caliber and still-widening potential deep into its run.

Minority Report's reverence for the material that inspired it undermines its own attempts to explore and build on the environments and sensibilities it labors so intensely to recreate.

Shades of new angles to the zombie genre fleetingly emerge, but too often they're smothered by the writers' slavish devotion to their own established norms.