TV #38 of 2025: Derry Girls, season 1 There’s some great specificity to this sitcom about a group of teenagers in Northern Ireland during the Troubles of the 1990s, but six half-hour episodes isn’t quite enough space for the first season to find its footing. I’m also not a huge fan of how all the …
Tag Archives: TV aired in 2018
TV Review: Star Trek: Discovery, season 1
TV #37 of 2023: Star Trek: Discovery, season 1 This 2017 launch is the first of the ‘new Trek’ shows, bringing the sci-fi franchise back to the small screen for the first time in more than a decade since Enterprise ended. It’s a somewhat mixed result, but largely a rollicking experience, with a very propulsive …
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TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 8
TV #45 of 2022: Bob’s Burgers, season 8 I seem to have liked this season better when I watched it upon airing in 2018, given my review back then: “I don’t have much to say about this season of Bob’s Burgers that doesn’t apply to the show at large, but it remains impressively strong this …
TV Review: Scandal, season 7
TV #22 of 2022: Scandal, season 7 Credit where credit’s due: the first five episodes on this last year of Scandal are genuinely riveting. The scripts are tighter, and it really feels like the show has finally locked into who these characters are and how to tell trenchant and complex storylines involving them. Taking that …
TV Review: Star Wars Rebels, season 4
TV #70 of 2021: Star Wars Rebels, season 4 There are two resonant character farewells in this last year of Star Wars Rebels: first in the episode “Jedi Night” and then in the overall finale. We also get the surprise return of Ahsoka Tano following her apparent death two seasons back, which may have worked …
TV Review: The Americans, season 6
TV #61 of 2021: The Americans, season 6 A time-skip is an inherently risky creative maneuver, introducing discontinuities that can suspend audience investment in the ongoing narrative and generate boring mysteries of the what-do-these-characters-know-that-we-don’t variety. (Both examples are apparent in the final season of Parks and Recreation, to note just one prominent example.) There are …
TV Review: Killing Eve, season 1
TV #6 of 2021: Killing Eve, season 1 I have a lot of open questions about this show, some of which might fall under the category of plot holes, but are perhaps more charitably labeled as simply ‘details the writers aren’t interested in.’ At a minimum, this first season seems to revel in ambiguity, throwing …
TV Review: The Good Fight, season 2
TV #2 of 2021: The Good Fight, season 2 Although still not hitting the dramatic heights of its parent series, especially in terms of personal stakes for the protagonist(s), this second year of The Good Fight remains quite riveting. It’s been the tale of high-powered liberal attorneys in the Trump era all along, but the …
TV Review: Shameless, season 8
TV #29 of 2020: Shameless, season 8 What a messy and under-written year of an already shaky program. Shameless has been growing into more and more of a soap opera as it ages, and part of that transition unfortunately involves pruning back the long history that makes these characters so resonant at their best. Sometimes …
TV Review: Better Call Saul, season 4
TV #9 of 2020: Better Call Saul, season 4 My original review from 2018: “I’ve mentioned this before, but one reason that I prefer Better Call Saul to its parent show is that Walter White has always struck me as being evil right from the start – Breaking Bad could be exciting and horrifying, but …
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