These shows prove the marathon-watching juggernaut’s concern for both quantity and quality.
In the beginning, at least, The Leftovers sounds familiar.
It’s another stultifying example of pop culture’s determination to elevate potentially serviceable pulp to the realm of capital-A art.
The series is a hungry anticipation for what machines can and will do, but it only has a cursory interest in the complex humans that built them.
The episode is best understood as a microcosm of the previous nine episodes.
Nothing lasts forever without repeating itself, and in its final season, True Blood seems to have exhausted its stores of surprises.
If “Elevator” proved a sweet treatise on being with someone to stave off loneliness, “Pamela” at last lets Louie ease his way into a real relationship.
Game of Thrones tends to peak with its penultimate episode, leaving finales open to operate as a form of self-summary.
You know by now that I take Orphan Black’s allusions to the prolific work of English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon seriously.
For the most part, however, the episode unspools as a dreary, clichéd story about Louie’s first exposure to pot.
This minimal setup stands in sharp contrast to the previous season’s showstoppers.
It may be a measure of how much Orphan Black has won me over, warts and all, that watching Tony sidle up to Felix for a kiss left me so discomfited.
The art is the reason to see the enjoyable but egregiously slight Remembering the Artist.
Power is a warmed-over soap opera only superficially obsessed with its protagonist’s relationship to guns and drugs.
It takes the aesthetic premise of Louie, in which the world around its protagonist matches his passive, fatalistic outlook, to its logical extreme.
It grapples with familial and societal forces in the service of an ensemble that counts among television’s most engaging.
The episode isn’t so much a lead-up to the showdown promised by its title as a delay of game.
The frustratingly inconsistent second season of Orphan Black has been a tale of two series.
Parts four and five of “Elevator” devote nearly half their running times to extended digressions.
Matthew Weiner and company make a point of echoing Cutler’s flippantly opportunistic nature twice over before the episode concludes.
The cutting-room switchbacks required to hold the tune for nine—or is it 10?—narrative threads foil any chance at building momentum.