TV #82 of 2021: Fringe, season 2 This year drops the ball a few times in terms of maintaining the tension in its serialized plot — say hi to Meghan Markle, whose junior agent disappears after the second hour — but overall it continues the strong streak that developed late in the initial run. The …
Tag Archives: TV aired in 2010
TV Review: Community, season 1
TV #15 of 2021: Community, season 1 This is an interesting season to approach on a rewatch, even after so long away. Like many sitcoms, the series takes a while to settle into its rhythms and find its distinctive style, and so a lot of the earlier stuff doesn’t quite feel like the Community that …
TV Review: Justified, season 1
TV #4 of 2021: Justified, season 1 I’m not thrilled with the first hour of this show about a trigger-happy US Marshal, which has a whole lot of white supremacist violence and rhetoric used as an apparent shorthand for villainy, I assume so that audiences can know which group of white gentiles are the good …
TV Review: The Office, season 6
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 …
TV Review: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, season 2
TV #36 of 2020: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, season 2 This cartoon is incrementally improving, but I still don’t love it just yet. I’m most invested when the writing manages to tell me something new about a character or concept from the wider franchise, which is why I perked up around this season’s mini-arc …
Continue reading “TV Review: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, season 2”
TV Review: The Good Wife, season 1
TV #14 of 2020: The Good Wife, season 1 The first year of this CBS legal procedural starts out a little clumsier than I remember, with a bit too much focus on the title character’s children and some of the main cast feeling just lightly sketched-in. But the cases (and judge personalities, a rarity for …
TV Review: Friday Night Lights, season 4
TV #11 of 2019: Friday Night Lights, season 4 On a macro level, my biggest criticism of FNL thus far is that every season seems radically different from the one before it — and never in a way that feels especially organic or planned-out as part of a larger design. This year the program shifts …
TV Review: Breaking Bad, season 3
TV #6 of 2019: Breaking Bad, season 3 This series has been incredible from its very first scene, but the third season is where it truly hits its stride in terms of plotting and character work. This run of episodes is all about the chess game against Gus Fring and the battle for Jesse Pinkman’s …
TV Review: Party Down, season 2
TV #41 of 2017: Party Down, season 2 One of the things I love about Party Down – and there’s a lot! – is just how committed it is to its structure. This is the only workplace comedy I can think of where practically every single moment takes place entirely within the workplace. These people …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 