FX

In a funny, eclectic episode, we check back in on the Louie/Pamela dynamic.

The venerable genre series’ final episode pays tribute to its literary inspiration in surprisingly bittersweet fashion.

Louie’s fifth season stumbles out of the gate with a been-there, done-that premiere.

The newest FX comedy, starring established legendary comedian Billy Crystal and up-and-coming stage and screen star Josh Gad as established legendary comedian Billy Crystal and up-and-coming stage and screen star Josh Gad, sets itself up as more than just a vanity project for its two leads, developing well-rounded characters and making for an entertaining watch.

Louie returns Thursday for a fifth season of life lessons and awkward experiences. The loosely structured yet acclaimed FX comedy, given free reign by the network, comes back true to form while still finding the ability to surprise its audience anew. After a Season Four filled with some mini-arcs that missed the mark Season Five returns to the episode model of earlier years, deploying episodes and through lines in a seemingly random order that still finds a way to make perfect sense. The show doesn’t go as far as completely abandoning the abbreviated story arcs CK has come to rely on, but after a stretch of almost looking like a more traditional half hour cringe comedy Louie is back to its old ways.

The penultimate episode of Justified prompts some reflection on just how we got here.

The series’ third-to-last outing gets seriously gnarly.

A twist-rich episode shifts the power dynamics just in time for the endgame.

The pace kicks it up a notch as key recurring characters take what may be their final bows.

Justified follows up the season’s best episode with its worst, because of course it does.

An uncharacteristically intimate episode examines the series’ two main romantic pairings, and uncovers some sad, troubling material in the process.

Justified: finding pathos in the strangest places.

An exceptionally entertaining hour nevertheless exposes some troubling flaws.

When it comes to planned-in-advance TV endings, in general, you can do it straight, or you can do it serpentine. Do it straight (Breaking Bad, The Wire) and you guarantee a high degree of fan contentedness, though usually at the cost of spontaneity. Do it serpentine (Lost, Battlestar Galactica, The Sopranos) and you run the risk of pissing off a large percentage of the fanbase, though you’ll have the side-benefit of being debated into eternity. On occasion, a series finds a way to split the difference and reaps incredible rewards. Justified seems destined to opt for the former route. While it’s supplied some artful twists and surprise developments in the past, it’s never been a series built on narrative trickery or hifalutin thematic development. It’s always had (at least) one foot planted firmly in the realm of traditional genre storytelling.

“Noblesse Oblige” continues to do things at its own deliberate pace, even as the end looms in the distance.

A plot-thin establishing episode reasserts the series’ considerable wit.

  Archer: Season 6 Airs Thursdays at 10m ET on FXX, starting January 8th When it was first announced, Archer Vice, AKA the completely serialized fifth season of Archer, blew minds. The notion of a popular comedy ditching its usual episodic-with-bits-of-serialization format, changing the occupations of its entire cast, and completely changing the locale for …

Hold on. This episode was promoted as the season finale, and all research online confirms this to be true. But this is not a season finale episode of television. It would’ve been much more effective in the middle of the first season, and even then it would’ve been a rather middling hour. Was anyone really hoping to find out in the season’s last episode whether Eph would relapse and drink again? Was that a payoff someone was counting on? Truth be told, that could almost be considered one of the peaks of the episode. Strap in, guys, this is going to be depressing.

The penultimate episode of The Strain’s first season reminds us most of “Across the Sea”, the third-last episode of Lost’s final season. That episode came very near the end of Lost’s run, but left the present action to show the origins of Island inhabitants Jacob and the Man in Black. Choosing to halt the action and go back into the past to tell a story that only revealed a small amount and to do so that late in the season felt misguided and a little pointless. “Last Rites” is not quite as much of a side-step, but the return of Setrakian’s flashbacks was certainly a surprising development.

Let’s start this week by talking about Eph. No one particularly wants to, but he’s still our ostensible hero and that has become The Strain’s most consistent and scarring flaw. The first mistake the writers make this episode is to spend it pitting Eph against Fet in something that isn’t much more than a dick measuring contest, and everyone is undoubtedly on Fet’s side. And it’s a colossal hindrance to the show that we can’t tell whose side we’re supposed to be on. We can’t tell if we’re supposed to see Eph as our great hero, or if this is some subtle takedown of the arrogant straight white male leader trope.

The decision to devote a significant portion of an episode to Eph’s wife, whose name is Kelly (in case you understandably couldn’t remember), was pretty ballsy for The Strain at this stage of the game. This is a tangential character that we have literally no emotional connection with, but the crux of this storyline is the writers’ belief that we should care about her slow descent into vampirism. This is compounded by the fact that we can’t even connect to how this supposedly heartbreaking development will affect Eph since we don’t really care. If the intention of these scenes was to have them weigh heavy on us emotionally, they were an utter failure.

Louis C.K., who seems capable of doing just about anything these days, has just received a 10 episode order for a sitcom he is working on with Zach Galifiankis called Baskets. Deadline reports that Galifianakis will star in the show as a man wishing to pursue his dream of becoming a professional clown by finding …

This is Richard Sammel’s episode. As the Nazi vampire Eichorst, Sammel has been excellent up until now, but “For Services Rendered” gives him ample screen time to wow us, both in the present and in flashback. He is firing on all cylinders this week, to use a frustratingly apt cliché, to the point where it seemed certain they were going to kill him off after focusing so much on him. Luckily, he hitches a ride on the side of a passing train car, which is badass.