BuzzFeed: "The Good Wife Is The Best Show On Television Right Now"

The CBS legal drama, now in its sixth season, continually shakes up its narrative foundations and proves itself fearless in the process. Spoilers ahead, if you’re not up to date on the show.

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "The Good Wife Is The Best Show On Television Right Now," in which I praise CBS' The Good Wife and, well, hail it as the best show currently on television. (Yes, you read that right.)

There is no need to be delicate here: If you’re not watching The Good Wife, you are missing out on the best show on television. I won’t qualify that statement in the least — I’m not talking about the best show currently airing on broadcast television or outside of cable or on premium or however you want to sandbox this remarkable show. No, the legal drama is the best thing currently airing on any channel on television.
That The Good Wife is this perfect in its sixth season is reason to truly celebrate. Few shows embrace complexity and risk-taking in the way that this show has done and, even after last year’s stellar season — which saw Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) and Cary Agos (Matt Czuchry) leave their mentors and start their own law firm and which shocked us with the death of Will Gardner (Josh Charles) — the show has pushed itself into even more challenging territory more than 100 episodes into its run.

Created by husband-and-wife team Robert and Michelle King, The Good Wife has always looked to test the plasticity of its concept. Initially a legal procedural with serialized elements, the show balanced a case-of-the-week format for Alicia with ongoing domestic issues. The first season followed Alicia as she struggled with the decision to stand by her husband, incarcerated Illinois State’s Attorney Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), even after he admitted to sleeping with prostitutes. How would she care for their two teenage children, Zach (Graham Phillips) and Grace (Makenzie Vega), while juggling a demanding career and competing with associates 20 years younger than her? And what of her unresolved feelings for her employer, Will?

But these basic queries soon became further tempered by the deep themes that the show has enjoyed exploring over the years, issues of morality, marriage, technology, and legality. The Good Wife incisively probes our collective cultural institutions to find spots of vulnerability and exposes these potential weaknesses, prodding them with a well-sharpened blade. If the show has been about, as the Kings have suggested in interviews numerous times, the “education of Alicia Florrick,” viewers have been able to see how Margulies’ Alicia has had to compromise her ethical integrity in pursuit of other goals, some lofty and idealistic and others personal and perhaps selfish. Alicia has had to exist in the harsh glare of the public spotlight and make choices that others, living lives of quiet privacy, have not. Every one of her actions has been under scrutiny, both that of the public within the show’s narrative and that of the viewer.

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BuzzFeed: "The Affair Advances Hollywood’s Heated War-Between-The-Sexes Conversation"

The new Showtime drama joins movies Gone Girl and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby in its exploration of gender wars, a topic that’s currently heating up the pop culture landscape. Warning: Minor spoilers for both films and the series ahead.

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "The Affair Advances Hollywood’s Heated War-Between-The-Sexes Conversation," in which I review Showtime's The Affair and examine it in the context of the similarly themed battle-of-the-sexes dramas Gone Girl and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby.

While we can attempt to empathize, it’s impossible to truly ever know every crevice of someone’s psyche, whether it’s the stranger you pass in the street or your own spouse. Other people are innately unknowable.

Gone Girl, whose gender politics have been hotly debated, takes this notion to an operatic and hyper-intense place as the audience is forced to contend with the unreliability of two narrators — Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), the seemingly perfect husband with a quick and easy smile, and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), a Cool Girl with her sharp nails very much intact. The plot of Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl and the subsequent film adaptation, also written by Flynn and directed by David Fincher, toys with the preconceptions of the viewer, jumping back and forth between male and female perspective, between past and present, between fact and fiction, in a tantalizing and telling way, though it never attempts to capture the realities of everyday marriage. The more realistic film The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them presents the complete breakdown of the marriage between Eleanor Rigby (Jessica Chastain) and Connor Ludlow (James McAvoy), flitting between his and her viewpoints as they attempt to regain their equilibrium in the face of searing loss. It’s the grounded and ultimately gut-wrenching counterpoint to Gone Girl, depicting both sides of their struggle with poignancy and grit. If Gone Girl is the cinematic equivalent of a head-on collision, Eleanor Rigby is more like a glancing blow that nonetheless ends up destroying you.

In their own ways, neither film is easy to watch as they portray the vast chasm of perception between the male and female characters — and each is structured in a way that borrows from the mystery format: Did Nick kill Amy? Just what are Eleanor and Connor running from? They achieve their ends in very different ways, however: Gone Girl builds to a Grand Guignol crescendo of horror, while Eleanor Rigby ultimately parcels out the central issue between the estranged couple, posing the question of whether two people, having fallen apart, can ever grow back together. Eleanor Rigby, as a result, becomes a film of two halves — his and hers — as it shifts between the female and male views of the couple. The couple here is far more reliable than Amy and Nick, and Eleanor Rigby director Ned Benson goes to lengths so that neither appears wholly responsible for the breakdown in their marriage — they’re both relatable and relatably flawed. The director actually created three films out of the material that he shot on the project: Them and Him and Her, which are being released in select theaters this weekend, showing the extremes of perspective that unfold over the course of their plots.


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BuzzFeed: "How To Get Away With Murder Doesn’t Quite Get Away With Its Framing Device"

The Shonda Rhimes-executive produced legal thriller might be pushing some boundaries, but its over-reliance on a wonky narrative device is leaving something to be desired. Warning: Contains spoilers if you are not up to date on the show.

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "How To Get Away With Murder Doesn’t Quite Get Away With Its Framing Device," in which I examine the Shonda Rhimes-executive produced thriller and look at the way in which the show constructs its framing device... and falls short as a result.

There are many things for which How to Get Away With Murder — from creator Peter Nowalk and executive producer Shonda Rhimes — ought to be celebrated. ABC’s new legal thriller, which has aired two episodes to date, follows the Rhimes-ian ideals of its forebears, resulting in a show that is thoroughly modern and diverse, brimming with complicated characters who are inherently flawed and yet innately watchable.

Likewise, the show has already challenged several conventions of television, potentially depicting the first broadcast use of analingus (surely, this hasn’t happened on network television before) and positioning a middle-aged black woman front and center while reveling in its depictions of her sexuality. In the pilot episode, Viola Davis’ Annalise Keating is shown receiving oral sex from a man who is most definitely not her husband. It’s a brave and bold start, intended to shock, and it announces that Annalise is not going to be powerful but desexualized, nor is she going to be the one merely doling out pleasure to someone else. The show’s second episode followed up by having Annalise beg her cop boyfriend for help only to go home and engage in sex with her husband — whom she now suspects of murdering one of his students — only to roll over, a single tear falling from her left eye.

It’s a telling moment about Annalise’s complexity and further jumpstarts the sexual politics on display within the show, and it’s a milestone in terms of representation that it’s Davis who is so far engaged in these bedroom gymnastics; it’s rare to find a dark-skinned black woman on television who is presented as a sexual being in a positive or even neutral way.

But despite the impressive themes at work within How to Get Away With Murder, there are two narratives within the show that continue to jostle, rather unsuccessfully, against once another, even this early on in the series’ run. There’s the overarching narrative, one in which Annalise has put together a team of young law students — including Alfred Enoch’s naïve Wes, Aja Naomi King’s ambitious Michaela, Matt McGorry’s slimy Asher, Karla Souza’s timid Laurel, and Jack Falahee’s sly Connor — and has them assist her with a case of the week, Good Wife-style. In the second episode, they were tasked with undermining the prosecution’s case against Annalise’s client, an eccentric Colin Sweeney-esque millionaire (Steven Weber) who may have murdered his wife. The students flounder, they figure things out, they learn, and they end up helping Annalise. It’s a pretty precise formula, one that has worked for The Good Wife and countless other legal procedural dramas.

Then there’s the other narrative at play here, one that is set several months in the future and which finds the aforementioned law students attempting to — you guessed it! — get away with murder, in this case the murder of Annalise’s possibly-no-good husband Sam (Tom Verica), revealed to be the body at the end of the pilot. The students conspire, using information gleaned from Annalise’s law class — whose nickname is the title of the show — in order to seemingly cover up a killing committed by… Well, it’s not entirely clear just yet whodunnit or why. Or even if Sam is an innocent victim or something more.

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BuzzFeed: "Lost Changed My Life In More Ways Than I Can Count"

“Guys, where are we?”

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "Lost Changed My Life In More Ways Than I Can Count," in which I revisit the 10th anniversary of Lost's premiere and look at how my life has changed in the time since the show first began.

I saw the pilot episode of Lost a few months before it premiered on ABC exactly 10 years ago today — on Sept. 22, 2004.

I was working in television development at the time, and a box of pilots — they may have even been on VHS tapes — had just arrived from a talent agency. My co-workers and I gathered in a tiny, cramped office to sort through the 30–40 screeners, most with titles and premises now forgotten, to find our copy of Lost. Damon Lindelof was an unknown name to us then, but we were addicted to Alias, the trippy espionage drama from Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams, who had also won our hearts with the wistful Felicity.

Twitter and social media as we now know them did not yet exist and, while we had followed the development of the super-expensive pilot in the Hollywood trades (when people still read printed trade publications), we knew nothing of the plot beyond the seemingly simple strangers-survive-a-plane-crash premise. We had no idea just what was in store for us as we dimmed the lights and hit “play.”

The 90-minute pilot was full of scares, surprises, and even a few laughs (that wonky polar bear!), and, most importantly, it introduced mysteries that had us immediately talking and questioning. And it’s the latter that became a trademark effect of the show, one that would be closely associated with Lost until its finale in 2010 and well beyond, and one that was instrumental in helping to cement the show’s massive success. (Almost 20 million people tuned in to the pilot when it aired.) What was this island? What was a crazed polar bear doing in the jungle? What was going to happen to these survivors and, to borrow the words of rocker Charlie (Dominic Monaghan), “Where are we?”

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BuzzFeed: "Downton Abbey Season 5 Begins With A Jolt"

Julian Fellowes’ costume drama begins its fifth year with a slew of domestic intrigues in place, as well as some new tensions. WARNING: Minor spoilers ahead!

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "Downton Abbey Season 5 Begins With A Jolt," in which I review the fifth season premiere of Downton Abbey, which launches on ITV in the U.K. (Sorry, U.S. readers!)

Period drama Downton Abbey had begun to show signs of wear and tear, particularly in its fourth season, where the creakiness of the subplots began to match that of the house’s ancient stairs.

It was, simply put, not the best year for the drama, which had come off the narrative highs of its third season, including the highly emotional deaths of two linchpin characters, Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) and Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay). But, in its fourth, Downton sagged into overt melodrama with storylines involving murder, blackmail, and the shocking and highly controversial rape of Anna Bates (Joanne Froggatt). For a series that once had such great promise and potential, it felt like the life had been sucked out of the show somewhat as it was forced to restructure in light of those two high-profile departures.

Resurrecting my crackpot theory that odd-numbered seasons of Downton Abbey are far superior to their even-numbered counterparts (I’m looking at you, Season 2!), the fifth season opener of Julian Fellowes’ period drama — which airs Sept. 21 on ITV in the U.K. and Jan. 4, 2015, on PBS’s Masterpiece in the U.S. — offers a reinvigorated Downton, one full of downstairs intrigues and domestic drama. The first episode back is a bit of a whirling dervish: There are so many subplots that it’s almost impossible to account for all of them.

But rather than feel overwhelming, there’s a particularly pleasing rhythm to all of this narrative dance work, with scenes that are short on time but long on significance. Long-simmering plots come to the boil. The ongoing love triangle between Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), Lord Gillingham (Tom Cullen), and Charles Blake (Julian Ovenden) twists in a most unexpected direction, at least by the standards of the time. (It’s 1924, after all.) The relationship between James (Ed Speleers) and Lady Anstruther (a particularly aptly cast Anna Chancellor) is explored with clarity, humor, and a potential resolution. Isobel (Penelope Wilton) and Violet (Maggie Smith) are once again at odds — their temporary cease-fire marred by a new twist in their rivalry, this time over Isobel’s romantic prospects.

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BuzzFeed: "Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces Makes You See Fire Walk With Me In A Different Way"

David Lynch unveiled nearly 90 minutes of deleted and extended scenes to his 1992 film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me at a Los Angeles theater last night. It was intense and weird.

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces Makes You See Fire Walk With Me In A Different Way," in which I look at the so-called Missing Pieces from Twin Peaks — the deleted scenes from David Lynch's Fire Walk with Me — unveiled by Lynch last night at the world premiere in Los Angeles.

WARNING: The following contains information about the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer. If, by some chance, you are reading this and haven’t finished the more than two decades-old series, stop reading before you are spoiled.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, David Lynch’s follow-up prequel to cult classic television series Twin Peaks, has always been an odd beast. It recounts the final seven days of the life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), whose inexplicable and brutal murder is the impetus for the short-lived drama that riveted viewers when it aired between 1990 and 1991. It is also about the similarly brutal murder of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley), a woman killed a year before Laura in a similarly ritualistic manner whose death puts FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) on alert, following the disappearance of one of his colleagues investigating her murder.

One would expect that the film is a strict prequel, but it is not: Fire Walk With Me plays with time in a unique and nonlinear fashion, making it both prequel and sequel in an odd, contradictory sense. Like Twin Peaks, it is both dreamy and nightmarish, making the conflation of time make sense slightly more. There are visions and sigils, haunted rings and groves of trees, whirring ceiling fans and rustling curtains. The film itself is cryptic and strange, embracing a full-tilt Lynchian mode that the director successfully curtailed in the ethereal Mulholland Drive. Fire Walk With Me is about dreams, desire, and death. It is about answers and more questions. And it is also an unflinching look at the horrors of incest.

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BuzzFeed: "The Whole Of Orange Is the New Black Season 2 Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts"

After a sterling first season, expectations were high for the sophomore season of Jenji Kohan’s female prison drama. Fortunately, Season 2 proved to be just as juicy, sweet, and tart as you’d want it to be. (MAJOR SPOILERS ahead.)

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "The Whole Of Orange Is the New Black Season 2 Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts," in which I review the entirety of the incredible second season of Netflix's Orange Is the New Black.

Orange Is the New Black’s stunning second season manages to be ambitiously large and somehow intimate. It’s the equivalent of a pointillist painting: from up close each dash and dot has its own individual identity and meaning, but when viewed at a distance, they coalesce into something altogether different and dependent on its parts.

In its deeply complex and magnificent sophomore year, Jenji Kohan’s Orange Is the New Black offers a scathing indictment of a broken system, using Litchfield Penitentiary as a stand-in for the failings of society as a whole. As the season progresses and conditions at Litchfield become worse and worse — because of venal officials, embezzlement schemes, force majeure, and general lack of empathy or interest — it becomes clear that these inmates have permanently slipped through the cracks as the most basic requirements of the prison system (keeping these women “safe and clean”) are not even being met. (The bubbling up of sewage from the toilets becomes an emblem of the corruption and rot at work here.)

The freedom of choice within the non-Litchfield lives of the corrections officers — even Fig (Alysia Reiner), the mercenary assistant warden, gets some deeper shading this season as her life implodes —appears to be wholly at odds with that of the women they’re sworn to protect. Healey (Michael J. Harney), who’s in a miserable marriage to a Russian mail-order bride, enters therapy to deal with his anger issues and creates a “Safe Place” for the inmates to open up as a way of compensating, perhaps, for his ineffectualness. Joe Caputo (Nick Sandow), the masturbatory administrator, becomes a hero of sorts over the course of the season until he too is seduced by power, opting not to do the right thing or even listen to it, such as when Matt McGorry’s Bennett confesses that he got inmate Daya (Dascha Polanco) pregnant. The truth becomes an inconvenience, something to be shrugged off and compartmentalized. It’s far easier, then, just to put a Band-Aid on matters, to drag out a nun (Beth Fowler’s Sister Jane Ingalls) to make a pre-scripted statement. Caputo sees himself as a savior of these women, but he chooses ultimately to perpetuate the broken system that surrounds them. The prison officials are, in actuality, also just as trapped — by red tape, by bureaucracy, by personal desire, by anger issues — as the inmates.

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BuzzFeed: "Orange Is the New Black Continues The Dickensian Tradition Of The Wire"

The second season of the Netflix prison drama is a gripping, beautiful, majestic thing. Warning: Spoilers for Season 2 ahead!

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "Orange Is the New Black Continues The Dickensian Tradition Of The Wire," in which I review Season 2 of Netflix's Orange Is the New Black, which returns June 6 on the streaming platform.

There are the television shows that you love to watch but that drift from powerful and provocative to comforting background noise, and then there are those that arrive with the momentous force of a revolution, issuing a clarion cry that is impossible to resist.

Women’s prison drama Orange Is the New Black, which returns for its second season on June 6, is most definitely the latter, a groundbreaking and deeply layered series that explores crime and punishment, poor circumstance, and bad luck. (At its heart, it is about both the choices we make and those that are made for us.) It constructs a gripping narrative that owes a great deal to the work of Charles Dickens, a social-minded and sprawling story that captures essential truths about those at both ends of the economic continuum. Just as in the Victorian era, within the world of Litchfield Penitentiary, everything is in its place and in its place is everything: Each of the characters is a cog in a larger machine.

The literary tradition of Dickens — so notably captured in HBO’s 2002–2008 crime drama The Wire — is keenly felt within Orange, as the action shifts between disparate characters in each episode, exploring their inner lives and hidden pasts. There is a strong sense of righteous indignation in the face of a broken and corrupt system, the failures of Litchfield a microcosm for the breakdown within the larger society. In the sixth episode of Season 2, Officer Susan Fischer (Lauren Lapkus) — perhaps one of the more genuinely sympathetic of the corrections officers — goes so far as to make the comparison, as she eavesdrops on the inmates’ telephone conversation recordings. “It’s so interesting, all these lives,” she says, her eyes gleaming with unrestrained excitement. “It’s like Dickens.”

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BuzzFeed: "Halt and Catch Fire: AMC Has Found A New Don Draper And He’s Ginsberg’s Worst Nightmare"

The Lee Pace–led Halt and Catch Fire, set in 1983 Dallas, offers up a pitch-perfect pilot about ambition, greed, and visionary dreamers at the heart of the tech revolution.

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "AMC Has Found A New Don Draper And He’s Ginsberg’s Worst Nightmare," in which I review the pilot episode of AMC's new period drama Halt and Catch Fire, which begins Sunday at 10 p.m.

Mad Men has made the world safe for period dramas: Nearly every cable network seems to be launching a time capsule program (and quite a few broadcasters have tried and failed) designed to penetrate our cynicism and trap a bygone era in amber. As Mad Men, the blue chip iteration of the period drama, wraps up its seven-season run, Showtime’s Masters of Sex and even Penny Dreadful, HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, and AMC’s Turn have sprung up in its shadow.

Which brings us to AMC’s latest deep dive back in time, the ’80s–set computer drama Halt and Catch Fire (which begins June 1 in Mad Men’s 10 p.m. Sunday time slot). The title is a reference to a line of code about self-destruction and that impulse carries over into the insidious behavior patterns of the show’s lead character, mysterious ex-IBM salesman Joe McMillan.

Played with precise intensity by Lee Pace, Joe looks like a Patrick Nagel illustration come to life, all hard angles, jutting shoulders, and slick eyebrows, who turns up in Texas and launches a complex game against his former employers by cloning an IBM computer. He is a riddle in more ways than one: a charming confident man who conceals some dark secrets that are only touched upon in the pilot episode.

Though his mysterious past remains as such throughout the episode, we know that Joe is a dark and potentially malevolent figure. For one, there are the scars on his chest, which point toward… well, I’m not sure what yet. And then there’s the fact that he wrecks his brand-new apartment early on, picking up a baseball bat that holds a telling inscription from his father (daddy issues!) and connecting it with a ball thrown in the air. Smash. Boom. Crash. As the ball careens around the glass-enclosed apartment, we see the damage Joe is doing, not just to his surroundings, but to the people he’s encountering on his curious mission. It’s no coincidence that Joe is introduced to the audience as he runs over an armadillo, trailing destruction in his wake, wherever he goes, not unlike Mad Men’s Don Draper before him.

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BuzzFeed: "The Midseason Finale Of Mad Men Is One Giant Leap Forward"

Don’t be fooled: Matthew Weiner’s period drama has always been about the future. Warning: contains spoilers for “Waterloo.”

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "The Midseason Finale Of Mad Men Is One Giant Leap Forward," in which I review the midseason finale of AMC's Mad Men ("Waterloo"), which represents a giant leap forward for the characters and for the show itself.

For a show about the past, Mad Men has always been about the desperate pressing of the future against the figurative glass. In looking back to the 1960s, the show has held up a tarnished mirror to our own society, our own failings, our own future. A moon landing is full of promise; an old man lives just long enough to see the impossible made possible. Old ways — and the literal old guard — slip away. Companies perish and new ones are formed. Alliances, once fractured, are renewed.

This dance is eternal, the combustive pressure between the past and the future, between cynicism and hope. That embrace that occurs towards the end of the episode, between Don (Jon Hamm) and Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), is more than just a hug: it’s a willing and proud acceptance of a new order.

The midseason finale of Mad Men (“Waterloo”), written by Carly Wray and Matthew Weiner and directed by Weiner, potentially revealed the series’ endgame as the countdown to the show’s finale began. (Unfortunately for us, Mad Men’s seven final episodes won’t air until sometime in 2015.) It is a superlative piece of television that captures the hope and beauty (and awe) of the 1969 moon landing and juxtaposes against the potential collapse of Sterling Cooper and Partners, as the struggle between disintegration and cohesion takes place behind the scenes.
Much discussion is made of how people react to the future, whether it’s with cynicism (Sally, initially) or fear (Ginsberg, alarmed to the point of insanity by the IMB 360 computer), resignation (Kevin Rahm’s Ted Chaough) or acceptance. Influenced by a cute boy, Sally (Kiernan Shipka) initially recoils against the possibilities that the future offers, seeing only a cynical view of the cost of the moon landing, rather than what it means for mankind, sitting on the shoulders of giants. The cost of all things weighs heavily on the show; the characters after all are always selling something: a product, the false lure of a happy life, the emblems of happy hearths and childhoods. (Christina Hendricks’ Joan even sold herself at one point.) And the moon landing was an expensive, if seismic, moment in the history of humankind: As we’re reminded, it cost $25 billion, though that seems a small amount for such a monumental leap forward.

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BuzzFeed: "16 New And Returning TV Shows Worth Watching This Summer"

Lee Pace in an ’80s computer-programming drama, a Victorian horror mash-up, sex researchers, Jack Bauer, Louie, and female prisoners? Check, check, check, check, check, and check.

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "16 New And Returning TV Shows Worth Watching This Summer," in which I round up 16 new and returning shows that are worth watching (or at least checking out) this summer, including Penny Dreadful, Halt and Catch Fire, 24: Live Another Day, Rectify, Last Tango in Halifax, and more.

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BuzzFeed: "Twin Peaks Is 24 Years Old And It Still Haunts Your Dreams"

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s grand opus celebrates nearly a quarter century of influencing television. Damn fine show.

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "Twin Peaks Is 24 Years Old And It Still Haunts Your Dreams," in which I (very briefly) explore just why Twin Peaks continues to hold a special allure nearly a quarter century after it first premiered.

Nearly 25 years after it first premiered on ABC, Twin Peaks — the brainchild of David Lynch and Mark Frost — continues to exert an inescapable gravitational pull on the imaginations of viewers and on the television landscape as a whole. Yes, there is still the totemic power of such influential series such as The Wire, or Six Feet Under, or The Sopranos, but Twin Peaks remains a powerful shorthand for ethereal, riveting mystery, and for good reason.

Nominally about the investigation into the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), the serialized drama was responsible for creating the nightmares of many as it delved into both the seedy underbelly of a seemingly idyllic town in the Pacific Northwest and into a haunting dream world where giants and dwarves roamed the halls of the Great Northern Hotel, perfect cherry pie could be had at the local greasy spoon, and murder most foul could rip a town in two. The show itself embraced the somnambulist visuals of its co-creator, infusing the whodunnit with a lyrical, somber, and, at times, terrifying feel. (You all know which moments I mean: A tableau of lovelorn teenagers singing a song segues into a nightmarish encounter. A skipping record signals doom. Red curtains part to reveal horrors.)

For those of us who experienced the show as it aired, tuning in each week to gather more clues about Laura’s killer and marvel at the deductive reasoning skills of the show’s resident Sherlock, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), it’s almost impossible to describe the strange appeal that Twin Peaks had and the hunger to solve the murder in the days before Twitter, Television Without Pity message boards, or social media at all. It was a true watercooler show in the days when such things as watercooler conversation still existed. It caused many a sleepless night as you pondered just what the dwarf meant, or whether Laura’s lookalike cousin Maddy Ferguson (also played by Lee) was connected somehow to the specifics of her death.

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BuzzFeed: "7 Reasons Call The Midwife Is One Of The Best Shows On Television"

Besides the number of times this period drama makes you sob like a baby.

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "7 Reasons Call The Midwife Is One Of The Best Shows On Television," in which I extol the virtues of Call the Midwife, which returns for its third season on Sunday, March 30.

The third season of BBC’s Call the Midwife — which wrapped up last month in the U.K. and begins on March 30 on PBS in the States — attracted an audience of more than 10 million viewers when it aired across the Atlantic, a figure that puts it on nearly equal footing with Downton Abbey. But that series gets far more attention than this subtle and superb period drama.

Set in 1950s East End London and based on Jennifer Worth’s memoirs, Call the Midwife tracks the lives of a group of young midwives and the sisterhood of nuns with whom they work at Nonnatus House. Babies are born, labors — both real and figurative — undertaken, and love blossoms and fades. It is an extraordinary show about birth and death and what comes in between. As written by Heidi Thomas and her talented staff, Call the Midwife manages to be both warm and profound in equal measure, opening a window to a time long gone yet offering a glimpse into the eternal and the transitory. It’s tea cozy television with a very deep soul.

But if you haven’t yet watched Call the Midwife (or have already fallen in love with its easy charms), here are seven reasons why it is worth watching. (Warning: Minor spoilers ahead.)

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BuzzFeed: "Was That Good Wife Twist Cheap Or Profound?"

No one saw that coming, not even BuzzFeed Entertainment Editorial Director Jace Lacob and Senior Editor Louis Peitzman, who discuss the shocking reveal on the legal drama. MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD, if you haven’t watched.

Over at BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "Was That Good Wife Twist Cheap Or Profound?" in which Louis Peitzman and I debate whether the twist in this week's episode of The Good Wife was warranted or manipulative.

The March 23 episode of The Good Wife (“Dramatics, Your Honor”) pushed the critically acclaimed legal drama into new directions, courtesy of an unexpected plot twist that somehow stayed under wraps until it unfolded on-air.

(If you haven’t yet seen Sunday’s episode, stop reading right now. I mean it. STOP. Just stop. There are MAJOR SPOILERS ahead and if you’ve somehow managed to avoid finding out what happened, this is your last chance to do so.)

On this week’s episode, Will Gardner (Josh Charles) was shot and killed by his client — college student Jeffrey Grant (Hunter Parrish), who had been accused of murdering a woman he claimed was a stranger — during an eruption of gunfire in the courtroom after Jeffrey was seized with panic for his life and reached for a deputy’s gun. What followed was traumatic to watch: Will bleeding out on the floor of the courtroom, and then his body being discovered by Kalinda (Archie Panjabi) and Diane (Christine Baranski) on a gurney in the hospital.

For some, it was the perfect way for Josh Charles’ Will to leave the show, one that closed the door on any reconciliation between him and Julianna Margulies’ Alicia. For others, it felt like a cheap twist. We debate just how well the show handled Will’s death and what it means for The Good Wife.

Jace: I was genuinely shocked by the twist. Jaw-on-the-floor, didn’t-see-that-coming shocked. And for a split-second, I didn’t believe that Robert and Michelle King would actually kill off Will, who is nominally the male lead. But what The Good Wife has proven itself willing to do is to shake the foundations of its narrative in unexpected ways. And that’s what Will’s death has done. And in the Age of Spoilers, that they managed to keep it a secret is another miraculous feat. While I’ll miss Will, I love that the show was able to surprise its viewers in such a kick-to-the-gut sort of way.

Louis: I was surprised, too, though perhaps not as surprised as you were, thanks in part to the fact that CBS was heralding this as, “the episode of The Good Wife that you can’t miss.” I hate that. If you warn me that a big twist is coming, I will spend the entire episode waiting for a major character to die, and that ruins a lot of the suspense. But I digress. I will say that, yes, The Good Wife is willing and able to pull the rug out from under its viewers — and I think that’s why I was a little let down by Will’s abrupt death. It felt cheap, the kind of twist another lesser show would use. The Good Wife doesn’t need a random shootout to shock us.

Jace: Wait a minute: It needs to be said that Josh Charles had decided to leave the show a la Dan Stevens and Downton Abbey and was meant to leave at the end of Season 4 and came back under a short-term deal for the fifth season. To me, there’s no way to write Will out of the show that wouldn’t feel cheap except for him dying, likely in some chance way. To me, the fact that it happened under such unexpected and illogical circumstances compounded the tragedy. This wasn’t a protracted cancer storyline where Will learns he’s dying and has to say goodbye to Alicia. There is no goodbye, no closure, no catharsis about the time they lost fighting. His life ended, sadly and without reason.

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BuzzFeed: "A Lover And A Hater Debate The Veronica Mars Movie"

BuzzFeed’s Entertainment Editorial Director Jace Lacob (that's me!) and Chief Los Angeles Correspondent Kate Aurthur sat down to discuss the sequel film. They agreed on one thing. Maybe two.

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "A Lover And A Hater Debate The Veronica Mars Movie," in which I sit down with Kate Aurthur to debate the merits of the new Veronica Mars movie, which opens on March 14.

Jace: Ah, Veronica Mars. A long time ago, we used to be friends… And I’m honestly happy that the former teenage sleuth is back in the Veronica Mars feature film, which I quite enjoyed. Yes, I’m one of those people who has watched all three season of the UPN-CW drama several times over, and that may have played a role in my feelings about the film. But I feel like, while you loved the show, you didn’t feel the same way about the film?

Kate: Yes, I loved the show — or at least the first season, which I thought was close to perfect. After that, I found it sporadically great, with Kristen Bell being wonderful throughout, but the plots and her supporting cast hit-or-miss. (Season 3 was almost all miss, sadly.) As for the movie, I wanted to love it! And there were a few moments when I was transported and delighted, mostly, of course, because of Bell, who has worked steadily but hasn’t yet equalled her Veronica Mars heights. I just thought it all felt so… small. I had other problems with it, but let’s leave it at that for now. What did you like about it?

Jace: Well, I’ll be honest and say that the third season of Veronica Mars was… not very good. But those first two seasons — which had really taut, byzantine mysteries — felt closer in spirit to the film, which offers some genuinely surprising twists and callbacks. But the false note that the show ended on doesn’t diminish the pleasure that comes from catching up with Bell’s Veronica and the rest of the characters in the film, such as Tina Majorino’s Mac, Ryan Hansen’s Dick, and Krysten Ritter’s Gia. Yes, the movie is a bit of fan service (given that it was, well, entirely funded by the fans) and it certainly plays that way, even with the recap at the beginning designed to catch non-viewers up. (Are non-viewers going to see this movie? I doubt it.) And the film does offer a really fascinating look at how these characters have grown and changed in the time since the show concluded… though Neptune seems just as trapped in its noir-tinged class warfare as before.

Kate: Before I criticize it, I want to say a few things I really liked about the movie. Have I mentioned Bell? Bell. Bell’s a ringing, Bell on wheels, Bell and whistles, etc. Her delivery is sharp, and she punctuates everything she says with wit (but not wink), intelligence, and when the scene calls for it, a deep sadness. If only Rob Thomas — who created Veronica Mars and is responsible for its excellence, but has never directed a film before — didn’t squash so many of her jokes with his clunky directing. But back to the praise! Bell and her co-star Jason Dohring, as Logan, still have chemistry, both romantically and by being able to throw ping-pong-fast dialogue at each other. Gaby Hoffmann and James Franco (playing himself) both have inventive little arcs. I also liked the continued menace in Neptune; and I liked the sense that the characters, whom we haven’t seen for years, really have progressed in their lives — they’re all kind of different now, imperceptibly but actually. But, Jace, didn’t seeing the gang back together make you a little sad about the gang? The ensemble was fine for TV, but in a movie, I just got kind of depressed watching the Piz and Wallace of it all.

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BuzzFeed: "The Americans Season 2 Arrives Just As U.S.–Russian Relations Turn Icy"

After Sochi, the wolf, the bitter protests, and human rights violations, the second season of the FX Cold War drama arrives at the perfect time to look back at failed Soviet ambitions. Minor spoilers ahead.

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "The Americans Season 2 Arrives Just As U.S.–Russian Relations Turn Icy," in which I review the second season of FX's The Americans.

With the closing of the Sochi Olympics earlier this week, Russia is on our collective minds once more: FX has rather cannily picked the perfect time to launch the second season of its gripping Cold War drama The Americans, which revolves around a set of married Soviet sleeper agents, Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), in suburban 1980s Washington, D.C.

Yes, The Americans has car chases and street brawls, silly wigs and costume changes (not to mention one scene in particular that pushes the boundaries of basic cable depictions of sexuality), but these elements are window dressing for what lies at the true heart of the series: an exploration of national and personal identity. While the show might depict the high-stakes Cold War skirmishes and battles between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, there is a canny investigation of ideology, loyalty, and self-identity unfolding within these characters, even as the collateral damage they create in their wake mounts.

The risky missions and the tradecraft that the Jenningses embrace — dead drops, legends, and sleeper cell mentalities — become emblematic for thwarted Soviet ambition. Until the Sochi Olympics, this intracountry strife and its secret wars seemed so far removed from our daily life, but The Americans arrives at a time when Russia is once more at the forefront of the news cycle. The futility of these spies’ operations is a tacit reminder of the fluidity of the international stage and the shortness of memory of its participants.

In the show’s first season, the audience quickly learned the stakes for the Jenningses. They live on a seemingly placid street across from Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), who, coincidentally, is the FBI agent tasked with tracking down undercover KBG officers. And the duo is also in constant fear both of being unmasked and of having their children — Paige (Holly Taylor) and Henry (Keidrich Sellati), who initially have no idea what their parents are doing — taken from them.


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BuzzFeed: "A Girls Lover And Hater Debate The Season 3 Premiere"

The always buzzed about HBO comedy returned tonight and BuzzFeed’s Entertainment Editorial Director Jace Lacob, who’s looked forward to watching every episode of the series, and Deputy Entertainment Editor Jaimie Etkin, who’s begrudgingly watched every episode of the series, discussed the back-to-back episodes. They agreed on one thing. Maybe two.

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "A Girls Lover And Hater Debate The Season 3 Premiere," in which Jaimie Etkin and I hotly debate the two-episode third season premiere of HBO's Girls.

SPOILER ALERT if you have not yet seen the Season 3 premiere of Girls!

Jaimie: I am simultaneously excited and nervous about this. My Girls rage is about to become public knowledge. I mean, I don’t have negative feels about Lena Dunham as a human or woman, but her show just makes me really frustrated. HOWEVER, I must say it was eye-opening to see how people talk to her, as exhibited by the TCA debacle last week. Dunham handled Tim Molloy’s awfully approached question about Hannah’s nudity very gracefully and of all the things I find unrealistic about the show, the nudity isn’t an issue for me. Let’s be honest: Pants are the enemy.

Jace: HA. I’m not bothered by the nudity at all within Girls. (Randomly, I’m listening to Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” right now, I should add.) To me, it’s an integral part of the emotional reality of the show; Hannah’s willingness to bare herself is not at odds with her interest in baring her emotions to everyone around her. And the scene in the season opener, where she rolls over to answer Jessa’s call, makes so much more sense that she wouldn’t be dressed; there’s more verisimilitude because of it. Why are people still so bothered by the notion that she’s not dressed, three seasons in?

Jaimie: (Sure. “Randomly.”) Because Hannah doesn’t have the conventional Hollywood body type. And as a twenty-something woman who doesn’t either, I appreciate that. That said, I have to be honest and say, that I think it’s incongruous with her very insecure character to be wearing bikinis (as we see in the trailer), some of those short shorts, mesh tops (::cough::), and the like. That, to me, doesn’t make sense for her character. But in the comfort of her own home, it’s very honest to see her not wearing clothes because, unlike in most shows, even on cable, we see someone get out of bed with their partner and put on clothes to answer the phone or something similar, which is just not realistic.

Jace: It’s the magic of the L-shaped sheet that we see so often in television shows! To me, it’s refreshing that Hannah, for her hang-ups in other areas, is very comfortable with her sexuality and her nudity. We should celebrate that, not denigrate it. But the show itself, to me, is refreshing in the honesty of how it handles the dynamic of female, twentysomething relationships. The Hannah-Marnie dynamic — with its embedded animosity and resentments — is endlessly fascinating to me. As is that between Hannah and Jessa. I loved the scene between them at the end of the second episode: anger mixed with relief.

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BuzzFeed: "13 Returning TV Shows To Get Excited About"

Girls is back on Sunday and the onslaught of returning shows is just beginning. Set your DVRs now!

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "13 Returning TV Shows To Get Excited About," in which I run down 13 returning television series worth watching this winter. (And, yes, I know that Game of Thrones isn't on there: We still don't have an airdate.)

1. Justified (FX)

Season 5 of Justified finds Timothy Olyphant’s Raylan Givens tangling with some Florida lowlifes, relatives of Dewey Crowe (Damon Herriman), one of Harlan County’s sleaziest denizens. Plus, Boyd (Walton Goggins) tries to find a way to get Ava (Joelle Carter) out of prison… and he exacts a bloody revenge against those who put her there in the first place. Along the way, wisecracks are exchanged, along with gunfire.

Season 5 premieres on Tuesday, Jan. 7 at 10 p.m.

2. Girls (HBO)

The stellar third season of HBO’s Girls finds the quartet struggling with new challenges and the first two episodes — which air back to back as a one-hour premiere — reintroduce new realities for these characters. (The brilliant second half of the premiere is a precise and gorgeous tone poem about a road trip.) While Hannah (Lena Dunham) has settled into a life of domestic bliss (relatively) with Adam (Adam Driver), Marnie (Allison Williams) is in a perpetual state of free fall, reeling from her breakup with Charlie (Christopher Abbott). Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) is trying to find her wild side, while Jessa (Jemima Kirke) continues to create chaos in her wake. Change both big and small is on the horizon for these women, and the first few episodes of the season capture the pain and humor of self-transformation. Not to be missed under any circumstances.

Season 3 premieres Sunday, Jan. 12 at 10 p.m.

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BuzzFeed: "Season 4 Of Downton Abbey Is A Bit Of A Downer"

Has the bloom gone off this English rose? Warning: Minor spoilers ahead!

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "Season 4 Of Downton Abbey Is A Bit Of A Downer," in which I review the fourth season of Downton Abbey.

After the shocking events of last season’s bloody finale — in which heir Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) was unceremoniously killed off — Season 4 of Downton Abbey, which returns to PBS’ Masterpiece on Sunday, Jan. 5, sees an awful lot of restructuring in the wake of not one but two major character deaths. Yes, there are plots aplenty for both upstairs and downstairs as the series is now firmly entrenched in the changing times of the 1920s, when estates like Downton were in even greater jeopardy. When the series returns, the relics of privilege and luxury teeter unsteadily on a knife’s edge as the world advances without them. (There is an electric whisk in the kitchen!)

Season 4 of Julian Fellowes’ Downton Abbey picks up six months after Matthew’s death and finds a family deep within the throes of mourning: Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is a ghostly presence in the household, a black-clad widow staring out the window with unspeakable loss weighing on her slight shoulders. And the rest of the Crawleys are concerned about her, plagued by the question of whether to shield her from further hurt or bring her back to the world once more. While Mary and her also widowed brother-in-law, Fenian chauffeur-turned-Crawley hanger-on Tom Branson (Allen Leech) are thrown together in grief, their storyline oddly splinters after a few episodes. While I’m glad to see that the two aren’t forced into a ghastly romantic subplot together, as some fans may have hoped, there’s something strange about the way their familial plot fizzles out.

This is true largely of Season 4 as well. Numerous plots are either resolved far too quickly or not at all, and slight mysteries are left dangling endlessly into Season 5.

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BuzzFeed: "Sherlock Is Back From The Dead And Better Than Ever"

The hotly anticipated British mystery drama returns with the revelation of just how Sherlock Holmes faked his death two years ago. Warning: Minor spoilers ahead!

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "Sherlock Is Back From The Dead And Better Than Ever," in which I review the spectacular third season opener of Sherlock ("The Empty Hearse"), which airs Jan. 1 in the U.K. and on Jan. 19 on PBS' Masterpiece.

Just how did Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) fake his own death?

When Sherlock picks up — two years after the action of the 2012 Season 2 finale, “The Reichenbach Fall” — the facts surrounding how the master sleuth pulled off the seemingly impossible are kept firmly under wraps for much of the ingenious 90-minute season opener, “The Empty Hearse” (which airs Jan. 1 on BBC One in the U.K. and on Jan. 19 on PBS’s Masterpiece).

This is not to say that viewers are denied a revelatory sequence in which the truth about just how Sherlock faked his own death is laid out. The taut sequence that reveals how he achieved such a feat is both simple, yet cunningly complex (not to mention quite spectacular), though I won’t spoil the outcome for anything on this Earth. However, the episode’s writer Mark Gatiss (who once again pulls double duty as Sherlock’s glacially cold brother Mycroft) rather smartly withholds the reveal until “The Empty Hearse” is almost concluded, creating an ongoing mystery that continues to swirl around the minds of both the viewers and several characters within Sherlock itself.

And throughout “The Empty Hearse,” those characters fantasize about just how Sherlock may have pulled off the stunt of faking his death, though the fantasies they depict often say more about the characters themselves than they do about the great detective. Forensic tech Anderson (Jonathan Aris) sees Sherlock as a swashbuckling daredevil, crashing through windows and planting kisses on co-conspirator Molly Hooper (Louise Brealey), a fantasy that sets up Holmes as someone inherently larger than life. (Which makes sense given the obsessive Carrie Mathison-style wall of clues he’s created in his flat.) Another character sees the entire exploit as a romantic bluff by Sherlock and Moriarty (Andrew Scott), a fantasy that plays to a very particular subset of Sherlock slash fiction.

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