This post contains spoilers through the October 10 episode of Boardwalk Empire.

As a Boardwalk Empire newbie who’s shotgunning the series all at once, one of the things that stands out most about the show is its manneredness, its theatricality. Sometimes this works beautifully: Steve Buscemi’s very good at pulling off slight strangeness or outsizedness and making it seem natural, while Kelly Macdonald’s very good here precisely because she’s a bit of a neutral agent. She can do things like sneak into Nucky’s offices by pretending she’s a pregnant, itinerant Irish girl: she’s good at seeming invisible when it counts. But it doesn’t always work well, and last night’s episode focused on two characters where I think the mannerdness of the show doesn’t necessarily work very well: Lucy and Nelson.

I should make no bones of the fact that I think Paz de la Huerta isn’t a very good actress period, and in this role, she’s playing a character who is flighty and maybe doesn’t have much education or sense as if she’s stupid to the point of disgust. When she whines to Nelson that “I wanna go out…That neighbor lady stopped by the other day. She invited us for dinner…a simple dinner. Some conversation. Some music, for god’s sake…a Victrola…I used to be out every night in the week…Say what you want about Nucky, at least he was fun,” it’s hard not to feel anything but contempt for her. Has she managed to learn absolutely nothing about Nelson in the months he’s effectively kept her locked up in? Does she genuinely have no idea that there is precisely nothing in that whine that will move a man who, as he explains to her, without judgement of his parents, “was taken to a Christmas pageant by an aunt in 1894. When my parents found out, they broke off all relations.”
Read more

By Kate Linnea Welsh

The Good Wife is all about image, innocence, and blaming the victim as half of Lockhart/Gardner, including Will and Alicia, are stuck in a hotel for a court-ordered mediation—with the defense lawyers are led by Will’s ex, Celeste. The show gets into issues of regulation and patent law as Lockhart/Gardner negotiate on behalf of a woman disabled by pain caused by the malfunction of an unapproved medical device of her doctor’s own invention. He didn’t tell her the device had not been FDA approved, and the patient thought he was using her as a test subject without her consent. Celeste first tries to blame the victim by claiming that the problem would have been recognized before permanent damage was done if the patient hadn’t been overmedicating, but when that fails, Celeste turns to a defense that centers on the device’s regulatory status. She claims that the device is a minor modification of an existing device, and therefore doesn’t need to be approved by the FDA, but Kalinda finds a patent application made in which the doctor says his device is original work, not a modification. In this case, regulation and governmental oversight of medical technology is presented as an unqualified good.

Lockhart/Gardner win this case on the facts – the mediator says as much – but the techniques they use to get there offer some insight into what the firm, and especially Will, will and won’t do to win. He will neither sleep with Celeste nor bet the outcome of the case on a card game with her – he insists he’s grown up – but he will use that game to figure out what the defense is willing to pay. And when he realizes that Celeste plans to play Alicia by making her jealous of Celeste’s past with Will, Will and Alicia gleefully use this supposed jealousy to play upon the mediator’s sympathies. After two seasons of Alicia’s public stoicism in the face of Peter’s infidelities, it was delightful to watch her play-act storming out of a room in a jealous huff. The mediator knows he’s been played, but he seems to admire Lockhart/Gardner for it, rather than hold it against them, and says he’d hire them himself if he needed representation. Once again, virtually everyone in the world of this show expects everyone else to be operating in a moral gray area, and it’s refreshing that the show doesn’t waste time on people getting unrealistically outraged about these things.
Read more

This post contains spoilers through the Oct. 9 episode of Homeland.

The difference between a good television show and a great show is often that the latter, even when an episode is somewhat below-par, is still capable of doing something smart and surprising. Homeland got put to that test in this second episode, and I think it passed. So even though I’m slightly underwhelmed by this second episode, I still think this is the best new show of the fall.

One of the things I liked best about this episode was the way it built parallels between Carrie and Nicholas, between the man being hunted and the woman hunting him. It’s in some little things: Carrie’s body curling up as she paints her toenails in an imitation of the safety Nicholas finds in the corner when he can’t bring himself to face the cameras outside the house; Nicholas lying on the couch to watch the game and Carrie lying on the couch to watch him. These are both deeply messed-up people operating in parallel, Carrie desperately seeking absolution from the people around her while everyone wants Nicholas’ blessing; Nicholas is opaque to the people around him while Carrie is too clear, too open, too easily wounded.

I found myself wishing that the folks who shoot Breaking Bad were shooting this show, particularly Nicholas’s flashbacks to the time of his captivity. Can you imagine that scene of him digging his fellow captive’s grave, singing the Marine’s Hymn, with the kind of weird color saturation as Gus’ confrontation with Walt in the New Mexico desert? But from those flashbacks we see Brody’s isolation in captivity, and we see him come to the light again in a mosque. Even so, I was genuinely surprised by the image of him praying in his garage. His disappearance, the trip to the hardware store, all suggested some terrible project, some weapon as a monster in the basement. That he was picking up a prayer rug instead both delays the tension and suggests a deeper conversion. Is Brody not a Manchurian Candidate, but instead, a true believer?

And i thought it was powerful that said revelation came after the show took some time to explore how deeply how many branches of government are invested in Brody as a symbol. “The man represents a significant victory in the war on terror thanks to our friends at the CIA,” the brass warns Mike, before blackmailing him by revealing that they know about his affair with Jessica. “Putting aside for the moment that Sgt. Brody owes him his life, these are the facts. bin Laden’s dead. America thinks, or wants to think, that this war is drawing to an end. Politicians are pushing for a wholesale withdrawal from Afghanistan.” And when Mike makes the mistake of thinking about Nicholas’ well-being, they make it clear what they think: “Fuck it. Drive on. Isn’t that what you Marines say?” In keeping with that deep connection between Brody and Carrie, David is in on that meeting, applying the pressure. “He has career stakes in Brody, whom he and his department brought home to great fanfare,” Saul warns Carrie. “You want to challenge that? Get all your ducks in a row, first.”
Read more

This episode contains spoilers through the season finale of Breaking Bad.

If there was any doubt going into this episode about whether Breaking Bad is a horror show or not, that seems to be decisively settled. But I suspect questions will linger about whether the decision to put one of the most shocking scenes I’ve ever seen in a television show, of Gus Fring’s destroyed face after Walt and Don Salamanca conspire to destroy him in a suicide bombing, made the show better. And while we have one hell of a fifth season set up in the final scene revelation that it was Walt, not Gus, and not the cruelty of fate, that landed Brock in the hospital, that Walt has become the moral equivalent of the man he turned into a pulp, it’s hard for me to imagine a series finale that would be more powerful than the sequences that ended the fourth season of this show.

But back to the episode itself. Much of what happened between the end of the last episode, which left Walter on a roof, stranded and in fear of his life after failing to kill Gus, felt like fancy and sometimes amusing clockwork, which essentially it was. There are a lot of strong moments embedded in it, though. First, Jesse is taken in for questioning by the Albuquerque Police Department, who are vastly curious to know how a kid with Jesse’s education and criminal record can pinpoint the drug that appears to be killing his girlfriend’s son. “I don’t know. I must have seen it on House or something,” Jesse tells them in the first of several callouts to other shows, a reminder that these characters live in our world, rather than a fantasy where we’re safe from them. “Sometimes, your brain just makes these connections.”

Then, there’s the moment when Walt has to deal with Saul’s deeply annoyed secretary to get Saul over to jail to take care of Jesse. It’s nice to see someone who knows Walt for what he is, completely and without reservation, judging him for us, and taking him for all he’s worth in the matter of the door repair. “You’re a pain in my ass, you know that?” she tells him. “You’re the reason I have to go on unemployment for God knows how long, then goes on to take him for $25,000, a price she moves up to after Walt starts sputtering about reputable vendors. Walt is dangerous, and getting more so, but he’s still enough of a scared little rat to buy off people who know where his price point is. And I also liked the moment later when, recruiting Don Salamanca, Walt has to hide from Gus’s henchman outside Don Salamanca’s window, a position from which he’s almost given when when the elderly lady next door starts to loudly flirt with Walt through her window.

But I would have loved to see, in flashbacks or otherwise, Walter talking Don Salamanca into committing the suicide bombing that kills Gus. It’s a shocking act, even considering the depth of Don Salamanca’s hatred and his quality of life, and it’s a real test of Walt’s capability in evil. It’s one thing to do tremendously dreadful things, and it’s another to get people to do tremendously evil things for you, and I think the show would actually be interesting if it spent more time exploring the latter dynamic. At the end of this episode, Walt comforts Jesse, telling him that for sure Gus had to be killed, but he hasn’t actually had to talk Jesse into anything here: Jesse is not involved in the plan for the final killing, and in fact, is totally surprised by the sight of Walt with that .38. Vince Gilligan says, in a quite interesting interview with Maureen Ryan at Aol that:
Read more