TV #20 of 2024: Star Wars: Tales of the Empire, season 1 This six-part animated Star Wars anthology is pretty clearly modeled on the similar Tales of the Jedi project from 2022, and it inherits some of the same structural weaknesses. At least this time around, the story pushes forwards for one of its two …
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TV #18 of 2024: Star Wars: The Bad Batch, season 3 A satisfactory enough conclusion to this corner of the Star Wars franchise, but not one that really pushes the titular characters anywhere exciting. Mostly, the season seems built to lay plausible retroactive groundwork for the infamous “Somehow Palpatine survived” line from the movie The …
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TV #14 of 2024: Shōgun, season 1 An exquisitely-rendered adaptation of the classic historical fiction novel about simmering political tensions and warfare in 17th-century feudal Japan. I can’t compare it to the 1980 NBC miniseries, which I haven’t seen, but I’m impressed with how closely this one hews to the original book in its plot …
TV #8 of 2024: True Detective, season 4 Officially subtitled Night Country, the latest installment of this sporadic anthology series takes place in a remote section of Alaska, during the time of year when it stays dark for weeks on end. Unsurprisingly, that turns out to be a great setting for showcasing the program’s typical …
TV #3 of 2024: Fargo, season 5 I like sporadic elements of this season of Fargo. The gas station shoot-out in episode one is a remarkably tense action sequence, and Jon Hamm and Juno Temple are both acting up a storm with those accents. As ever for this anthology series, the midwestern pleasantries masking dark …
TV #1 of 2024: Echo, season 1 I’m torn in my reaction to this premiere ‘Marvel Spotlight’ production — a designation meant to indicate a series that, while canonical to the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe, should stand on its own for any audience and focus on smaller-scale personal stakes that don’t majorly affect any ongoing …
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