TV #49 of 2020: The Office, season 6 Although not as impressively serialized as the previous season’s arc with the Michael Scott Paper Company, this year of The Office takes a few swings at tinkering with the status quo, first with the promotion of one of the characters to co-manager and then with the corporate …
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TV Review: The Office, season 5
TV #46 of 2020: The Office, season 5 Sitcoms have a tendency to grow stale and repetitive the longer they air, but the better ones find ways to gradually tweak their storytelling dynamics over time. This era of The Office is an excellent example of that, regularly spooling out developments that shake up the status …
Movie Review: The Princess Bride
Movie #13 of 2020: The Princess Bride (1987) This beloved film lives up to my memories and its own reputation, offering thrills, laughs, and emotional stirrings in equal measure. (I legitimately teared up at the last scene tonight, perhaps because my wife and I have each lost a grandfather this year.) It’s a feel-good movie …
TV Review: The Office, season 4
TV #42 of 2020: The Office, season 4 This is a deceptively light season of the classic workplace sitcom, with few of the plot shake-ups that have marked previous years. But there is still the structure of Ryan’s time at corporate bookending this particular run, and some new romantic developments offer intriguing forward momentum that …
TV Review: The Good Wife, season 7
TV #41 of 2020: The Good Wife, season 7 The penultimate run of this legal drama petered out by the end, but this final year is somehow another big step down. On a scene-by-scene basis The Good Wife continues to bear a surface resemblance to the show it used to be, but the characterizations and …
TV Review: The Office, season 3
TV #40 of 2020: The Office, season 3 Another strong year for this classic workplace sitcom, delivering laughs that largely still stand up today and fun new developments to long-term character dynamics. If I have one complaint about this stretch of the series, it’s that it ends up feeling far less daring than it begins: …
TV Review: The Office, season 2
TV #38 of 2020: The Office, season 2 There may be better individual seasons of television than this, but I can’t think of another program that improves so much from its first year to its second (except maybe The Office’s spiritual descendant Parks and Recreation). The tweaks to the cringe-humor formula inherited from this show’s …
TV Review: The Good Wife, season 6
TV #37 of 2020: The Good Wife, season 6 It was perhaps inevitable that The Good Wife would tumble from its near-perfect fifth year, but this following run is still a major disappointment. I actually don’t mind the first part of the season so much, although it’s very plot-driven compared to the program before, with …
TV Review: The Office, season 1
TV #35 of 2020: The Office, season 1 This 2005 debut was a little rough at the time, and another decade and a half of evolving cultural norms haven’t made it any better. Michael Scott is of course a walking HR complaint of offensive and inappropriate behavior, but even our ostensible hero Jim would be …
TV Review: The Good Wife, season 5
TV #33 of 2020: The Good Wife, season 5 Although it peters out slightly at the very end, this is overall an electrifying year of television, boldly delivering on character and plot arcs that have been in motion since practically the pilot. The Good Wife has been plenty strong to begin with, but the momentum …
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