Justified, Season 5, Episode 9: “Wrong Roads” Written by Dave Andron and Leonard Chang Directed by Michael Dinner Airs Tuesdays at 10pm ET on FX – Now that it’s too late for Justified‘s fifth season to rank with the restof the series – relatively speaking, there’s simply been too much chaff to make that cut …
Justified, Season 5, Episode 8: “Whistle Past the Graveyard” Written by Chris Provenzano Directed by Peter Werner Airs Tuesdays at 10pm ET on FX – Take what you can get: “Whistle Past the Graveyard” doesn’t fix what’s wrong with Season 5 of Justified, but it at least has the decency to provide a few jolts …
Justified, Season 5, Episode 7: “Raw Deal” Written by VJ Boyd Directed by Bill Johnson Airs Tuesdays at 10pm ET on FX – Why does it feel like so little happens in “Raw Deal”? A relatively major character bites the dust, Boyd’s Mexican adventure appears to be imperiled nice and early, Ava makes a play …
Justified, Season 5, Episode 6: “Kill the Messenger” Written by Ingrid Escajeda Directed by Don Kurt Airs Tuesdays at 10pm ET – Thank goodness; “Shot All To Hell” appears not to have been a fluke, and Season 5 is finally, officially, cooking with oil. “Kill the Messenger,” while not bucking the trend of Justified‘s almost …
True Detective, Season 1, Episode 4: “Who Goes There” Written by Nic Pizzolatto Directed by Cary Fukunaga Airs Sundays at 9pm ET on HBO – Given that I am not your standard True Detective recapper (Ricky D is on The Walking Dead duty this week), it seems worthwhile, now that the first series is half …
Justified, Season 5, Episode 5: “Shot All To Hell” Written by Chris Provenzano Directed by Adam Arkin Airs Tuesdays at 10pm ET on FX – Ask and ye shall receive. The first four episodes of Justified‘s penultimate season were mostly fine, but felt a little compromised and slight compared to past seasons, which tended to …
Justified, Season 5, Episode 4: “Over the Mountain” Written by Taylor Elmore Directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton Airs Tuesdays at 10pm ET on FX – In case the theme of Season 5 of Justified wasn’t already abundantly clear, “Over the Mountain,” the latest in a too-long string of set-up episodes, underlines it in felt-tip. If the …
Justified, Season 5, Episode 3: “Good Intentions” Written by Benjamin Cavell Directed by Dean Parisol Airs Tuesdays at 10pm ET on FX As a general rule, the longer a heavily serialized series goes on, the more laborious the early episodes of seasons become, as they strain to incorporate new elements while servicing long-simmering plotlines …
Justified, Season 5, Episode 1: “A Murder of Crowes” Written by Fred Golan and Graham Yost Directed by Michael Dinner Airs Tuesdays at 10pm ET on FX – When we last saw Raylan Givens, he was kicking back – sort of. Having just brushed Nicky Augustine off his shoulder by serving him up to his …
Masters of Sex, Season 1, Episode 12: “Manhigh” Written by Michelle Ashford Directed by Michael Dinner Airs Sundays at 10pm ET on Showtime – Project Manhigh was a primitive pre-astronaut experiment that sent men into the stratosphere in balloons; it’s all kinds of appropriate that this tentative step towards full-blown space exploration in a principal …
Masters of Sex, Season 1, Episode 11: “Phallic Victories” Written by Amy Lippman Directed by Phil Abraham Airs Sundays at 9pm ET on Showtime As the first season of Masters of Sex draws to a close, it’s worth taking stock of the series’ considerable contribution to the televisual landscape, even for those among us (myself …
Masters of Sex, Season 1, Episode 10: “Fallout” Written by Sam Shaw Directed by Lesli Linka Glatter Airs Sundays at 9pm ET on Showtime – It seems to be a requirement of popular fictions set in times of war that, at some point, the looming threat of total annihilation brings interpersonal tension to the surface. …
As Masters of Sex continues to grow and evolve, what’s increasingly clear is its clear affection for (and sly subversion of) classic Hollywood melodrama. That connection is made very explicit in “Brave New World,” whose two key motifs are the theories of Sigmund Freud and the novel (and subsequent film adaptation) Peyton Place.
If anything, “Brave New World” too prominently pushes those motifs. All of a sudden, every character is bringing up, questioning or outright mocking Freud’s theories on female and male sexuality. To make Freud’s work such a prominent issues only makes sense; after all, his influence had barely waned even two decades after his death, but the teleplay is a little too insistent on making that omnipresence clear. A little subtlety goes a long way, and the strangest thing about Masters of Sex is that it seems to understand that on a number of fronts, while being blaringly obvious on others.
If there’s one week in which a series entitled American Horror Story simply has to deliver the goods, it’s the one containing All Hallow’s Eve. In that respect, “Fearful Pranks Ensue” falls a little short, particularly if one expected it to step up the freakiness and/or gore quotient. Actually, as it turns out, it belongs to a entirely different sort of tradition: the time-honored transitional episode. Only in its closing moments does it threaten to take its genre elements to the next level of nutty.
One of the cornerstones of the Golden Age (or Second or Third or Umpteenth Golden Age – take your pick) of television lies in an individual episode’s ability to convey a thematic throughline without being too on-the-nose about it. Series like Deadwood, The Wire, Mad Men, The Sopranos and many more manage to convey motifs through means other than direct address, whether that involves allusion, visual connectivity, performance tics, or other, less obvious factors. As Masters of Sex continues to find its feet, its ideas about how to form an episode’s thesis continues to evolve, and “Catherine” will likely go down as an important turning point in that evolution.
Despite the wink-wink, nudge-nudge titling, “Thank You For Coming” is likely the gravest episode of Masters of Sex yet, concerned as it is with male abuses of power and privilege (not to mention outright physical abuse). The best thing the series has going for it right now is that it’s able to pursue its themes in multiple directions – even through the spectrum of a single character.
The title “Standard Deviation” more obviously refers to William Masters’s chance encounters with homosexual men, who provide his latest ethical and moral hiccups in pursuing sexuality scientifically, but it also works to demarcate the episode as being the precise point Masters of Sex decides to make a clean break from history and chart a potentially very different path for its characters. I won’t go into too many specifics for fear of potential future-series spoilers, but it’s already clear that Michelle Ashford is setting out to use Masters and Johnson as more of a loose framework to probe big ideas about societal relationships to sexuality than strict historical portraiture.
Part of the fun of watching a first-time showrunner flex their muscles is to see just what narrative strategies they’re prepared to deploy in service of a story. With “Race to Space,” Masers of Sex expands its stylistic/narrative catalog a bit, allowing in daydreams, allegory, and montage, while it hones in on Virginia and her reaction to Dr. Masters’s request that they themselves engage in sex. It’s not all effective, but the willingness to toy around with different storytelling modes bodes well for the series’s future.
Breaking Bad is not a series generally noted for its lightness of tone, but Vince Gilligan and his collaborators have always managed to wring humor and quirk out of what would seem to be a hopelessly grim set of story beats. That’s what makes “Granite State,” the series’ super-sized penultimate episode, so hard to watch. Save for a few passing moments of sewer-downhill-from-the-gallows “humour,” “Granite State” is a relentlessly bleak hour of TV, wherein even the glimpses of “hope” are really just (in all likelihood) presaging more carnage.
Breaking Bad, Season 5, Episode 14: “Ozymandias” Written by Moira Walley-Beckett Directed by Rian Johnson Airs Sundays at 9pm ET on AMC – Holy bloody damned hell. – First, some (mild) vindication. I mentioned last week that there was absolutely no way this week’s outing would open with Hank dead, just like that. True enough, once …
Breaking Bad, Season 5, Episode 13: “To’hajiilee” Written by George Mastras Directed by Michelle MacLaren Airs Sundays at 9pm ET on AMC – Remember a couple of weeks back, when it seemed like Breaking Bad couldn’t milk its cliffhanger tendencies any more than it already had? Those days seem so quaint now. “To’hajiilee” puts that …
Breaking Bad, Season 5, Episode 12: “Rabid Dog” Written by Sam Catlin Directed by Sam Catlin Airs Sundays at 9pm ET on AMC – “He’s smarter than you. He’s luckier than you.” – “Rabid Dog” is more or less all talk, no (explicit) action, but as the Breaking Bad endgame begins in earnest, it does …
There’s no shame in stealing from the greats. So when “Destino” begins to feel like a hyperkinetic Justified/Breaking Bad mashup for a few minutes during a trailer-park raid gone very wrong, it’s just the kick in the pants an hour this scattered needs. Not everything about “Destino” works, but its peaks are very encouraging.