Thirdrail

It's an extremely predictable and formulaic western, with a solid cast and excellent production values. There are a ton of interesting characters in Godless (a whole town full of them, really), but sadly, none of them ever escape the B story. Mostly it's a poor man's imitation of Pale Rider. which leads into the inevitable Magnificent Seven finale. In the end, you're left with one main story (two dudes ride horses around aimlessly while coping with their anger problems) which could easily have been told in two hours but gets stretched in eight or nine hours, and a secondary story (about a town full of widows and the rancher woman they may or may not have all conspired to betray) that should have been eight or nine hours, but only gets two or three. It's also weird that this was heralded as some kind of feminist western, because even the sections of Godless that are supposedly about the women are needlessly burdened with not one but two separate male coming of age stories.

This show has a lot to like, and a lot to dislike, frankly. Both the subject matter and the time period are compelling, but the story suffers a little bit from uneven characters. The white couple in the process of joining the underground railroad are by far the most interesting characters on the show (their scenes are very fresh, not reminiscent anything you've watched before), followed by the slave women who work directly for the master (and his mustache twisting wife) in the "big house", followed by the slave hunter/single dad guy who has a slave that doubles as his own father figure (played by the wonderful Clarke Peters from Treme and The Wire), and then the plantation owner has interesting scenes revolving around a run for political office, and his affair with one of the house slaves. Then, in distant last place, as the least interesting group of people on the show, you have the central characters - the male slaves who are planning and executing the escape. Their sections of the show are mostly boring, refurbished versions of scenes we've all watched a million times, in every prison movie and tv show ever made, only now those scenes take places in fields and next to trees instead of the cells and broom closets around a prison. The soundtrack is my other big sticking point. It slides directly into cringe worthy whenever they try to weave in modern music, which is fairly often. Despite these flaws, the show remains pretty watchable, and anyone with a personal investment in the subject matter is likely to find these foibles easy to overlook. If metacritic allowed half points, I'd rate the show 6.5/10, rather than the flat 6, because Underground is SO CLOSE to hitting enough right marks to actually be good, instead of almost there. I'm a little nervous about the second season, too, simply because this is not set up like an ongoing or indefinite scenario, it's one of those stories with a very clear cut mission, where you should either succeed or fail and then have reached the ending, one way or the other. Edit: I've never had to add an addendum to a review before, but this series takes such a hard drift, it only seems fair. As the story progresses, what started as a historical drama slowly turns into pulp fiction. By the time Underground reaches the end of the first season, it borders on being a super hero comic. This transformation actually improves it a little bit as a tv show, as it's clearly more in the comfort zone of the writers, but also completely tosses aside whatever sense of historical realism it had in the beginning in favor of sheer comic book opera. In the end, as weird as it may seem, Underground has far more in common with shows like the Walking Dead, Outcast, or Black Sails than it does more serious fare like Roots. Also, they completely squander Clarke Peters, which is extremely disappointing, to say the least.

If they'd just given Drew Barrymore's part to The Waitress, this show would be a 9, not a 6. Victor Fresco (the genius who had Byron worship a giant sheep in Andy Richter Controls the Universe) is always funny as hell, and while Timothy Olyphant has a couple of rough scenes, he adapts quickly to the material, and shines by the end of the first episode. Unfortunately, there's just no escaping the fact that Drew Barrymore, now sans the puppy dog cuteness that once made her tolerable, is a terrible, terrible actress. She's not funny. She's not endearing. She's just awful; a problem which is only exacerbated by having her play opposite people as talented as Olyphant and The Waitress. I can't not recommend a Victor Fresco show, but, at the same time, the pain and discomfort of watching Barrymore soil the bed scene after scene after scene means that this one comes with a much higher price tag than usual.

I will say, up front, that having characters who are far more interesting than the dumb story they're trapped in is the quintessential Marvel comic book experience, so in that sense, Luke Cage could not be any more true to its source material. The first half of the season is predictable and a little boring, but still works because Colter is so good as Luke Cage, but then the show tries to expand from "Luke Cage vs. Boardwalk Empire" into a larger, more dynamic story, and everything just collapses like a cheap tent in a windstorm. None of it is as bad as those final, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle episodes of Daredevil's second season, but it gets close to being that silly, at times. The series is full of boring action scenes; the show revolves heavily around the simple idea that Luke is bulletproof, and he's surrounded by the same bad guys the entire season, and yet none of them ever stop firing guns at him. Long, long after the point where it becomes the dumbest thing you've ever seen, people who know full well that Luke is bulletproof continue shooting at him. The single silliest sequence is probably the "healing episode", which is wall to wall pseudo-science nonsense babble, and then somehow manages to forget (continuity? anyone? anyone?) one of the two bullets they're trying to remove. Completely. As though it never existed at all. The sad part of all this, of course, is that the characters themselves, from the supporting cast to the main players, are all so fun and interesting, and all so well acted. It's a waste. It would behoove Netflix to put the creative team from Jessica Jones in a leadership position with the rest of the Marvel shows, before they try to combine everyone for the Defenders. Her show was several orders of magnitude better (and more coherent) than Daredevil and Luke Cage, even during their best moments.

Beautiful, funny, and often heartbreaking. Louie has spawned a whole genre of autobiographical comedian stories, which may not be new in structure or concept, but are certainly new in terms of their brutal honesty and willingness to showcase the mental health issues which seem to define and codify most comedians. One Mississippi is the most subtle version of that new post-Louie comedy we've been given so far, in that Tig rarely goes for deliberate jokes, and instead lets her dry sense of humor act as a kind of shield against the pervasive sense of melancholy that permeates almost every scene of this show; it's a fascinating choice. The result is that Tig is actually training you, her audience, in her sense of humor, forcing you to develop the same defense mechanisms in the same organic way she developed them herself, rather than simply putting her humor on display, as all previous comedies have done since the dawn of time. I'm not sure anyone will even notice that dynamic, or realize just how far it puts this show ahead of its time, but I hope that One Mississippi will find the audience, and the creative respect, that it deserves.

Amazing production values, and solid performances. Two things keep me giving this higher marks: one, the core crime itself is just so predictable, it's like a song you've so many times that it can only be grating, no matter who sings it, or why. Killing the slutty free spirited girl was really the best idea anyone in that writer's room could come up with? Seriously, what slutty free spirited girl has ever been deemed worthy to survive a crime story? Like, none, ever, in the history of tv of movies. It's just so painfully par for course. And the kid's reaction to the crime, which is so ridiculously stupid. They might as well have had a UFO or a fairy fly in to control his mind for a few minutes, it wouldn't have been any less outlandish than his reaction to finding the girl dead. And without that insanely dumb/boring stint of writing to set the rest of the story up, you have absolutely nothing, so, as defects, they are tough to ignore. Still, the show is too pretty, and too well executed, on some fundamental level, to actually be unwatchable. It's disappointing they didn't put as much time into the story as they did the look, because this really could have been a True Detective level production, had they simply tried to be a little smarter with their script.

This is a tough show. On one hand, by season three, you've invested a considerable amount of time in things, and the show does maintain continuity, so the ending is in sight. On the other hand, since season two, The Strain has gotten a little less interesting with every passing episode. The characters are not particularly enjoyable to spend time with, and nothing new or surprising happens, or is likely to happen again before the show is over. I think there's a real possibility that by the final episode, I will have gone from watching The Strain, to hate-watching The Strain. Under normal circumstances, I'd lodge a complaint about the fact that the show has turned into a major sausage festival, and is now basically a story about a bunch of stressed white guys who run around yelling and fighting at and about things - a concept we've pretty much done to death over the course of recent human history. Except there's no point, in this case, because The Strain's female characters are just as boring and unlikable as the male characters. But, you know, if you're so strident of a feminist that you'll even champion the right of women to **** equally, then you might be a little bugged with where this show has gone with its lady parts. TL;DR: The Strain has gone from being a show you actually watch, attentively, to being the kind of thing you put on screen two in the background, while you're playing video games.

It's not even that Bojack Horseman is the best thing television has had to offer in the last decade. It's been that for two seasons already. It's that they make it look so god damned easy.

There are times where the HBO drama-esque narrative they're imposing on the animals seems a little sketchy and forced (some is funny, though, too, like the reaction shots from bystander animals), but it barely matters, because every second of the footage is beyond stunning. I have just never seen anything like the camera work The Hunt has going on. So much of it seems impossible, and it's all impossibly gorgeous. I can only assume this is the series that will be selling 4K televisions all over the world for the next decade, the way Planet Earth sold Blu Ray.

For the first eight episodes, this show is a play-it-safe conversion of Jim Gaffigan's stand up routine into a sitcom format. Gaffigan, Ashley Williams, and Michael Ian Black are just funny and charming enough to make it watchable, but there's certainly no edge to any of it, or any real sense of originality. Then, in the ninth episode, things take a very unexpected turn towards the experimental, and suddenly you're watching a show that seems intent on becoming a spiritual successor to Dan Harmon's Community. I don't know what caused the transition, but it's a good one. The show it turns into is really a lot of fun, much like Community was at its high points. They start bending reality to do things like explore alternate timelines and break the fourth wall. I'm tempted to provide spoilers as evidence, but I don't want to ruin the surprises. Some of them are so well executed that I couldn't believe I was watching the same show that did an entire story about Jim's obsessive relationship with cake, just a few episodes previous. I can only hope this stays on the air long enough for people to give it a (well deserved) second look.

The first episode of this new Roots is so good, it does not at all prepare you for the drastic plunge in quality level which sets in with the second and subsequent episodes. Once it goes bad, it just gets sillier and sillier and sillier, to the point where you feel guilty for even being in the same room with it. It's like watching the story of slavery, as told by the writers of Dawson's Creek.