The Daily Beast: "Emmy Awards’ Dark Horse Nominee: Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black"

If you didn’t watch BBC America’s clone drama Orphan Black, you missed one of the year’s best dramatic performances. My take on why Tatiana Maslany deserves an Emmy nod.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Emmy Awards’ Dark Horse Nominee," in which I offer a look at one of the year's best television performances, that of Tatiana Maslany on BBC America's Orphan Black, and state why this dark horse deserves at least an Emmy nomination.

If you don’t regularly tune in to shows about global conspiracies, illegal medical research, and genetically identical clones, you may be forgiven for not watching Orphan Black, the serpentine Canadian-American science fiction drama that wrapped up its first season earlier this month on BBC America. (Season 2 will air in 2014.)

But not watching this compelling and surprisingly emotional cult drama—created by Graeme Manson and John Fawcett—means that you missed out on one of the year’s most intense and astonishing television performances. In Orphan Black, Tatiana Maslany delivers a daredevil turn, playing no less than seven different roles, each one with their own mannerisms and secrets.

It’s no surprise that Maslany, a 27-year-old Canadian actress, has already been racking up accolades for her electrifying acting. On Monday, she was awarded the Critics’ Choice Television Award for Best Lead Actress in a Drama Series and, on the same day, nominated for a Television Critics Association Award for Individual Achievement in Drama. While roughly two weeks remain before Emmy nomination ballots are due back from voting members, Maslany is already receiving buzz as a dark horse contender for a Best Actress spot. And with good reason, as Maslany’s versatile performance in Orphan Black would be a staggering feat for a veteran actor, much less for one recently starting out.

Maslany plays Sarah Manning, a sharp-tongued British grifter who sees an escape from her problems when a woman—one who looks identical to her—jumps in front of a moving subway train. Desperate to escape her abusive drug dealer boyfriend Vic (Michael Mando) and reclaim her young daughter, Sarah assumes the identity of her lookalike, slipping into her life in order to start a new one. But the dead woman—Beth Childs—is a cop under investigation for the shooting death of a civilian, and by assuming her identity, Sarah is drawn into a conspiracy that reveals her own true nature: that she and Beth are clones, closely monitored by their creators, and that someone is trying to kill them off. (The result is something akin to Ringer crossed with Krzysztof Kieslowski’s La double vie de Véronique with some Alias thrown in for good measure.)

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The Daily Beast: "The Red Wedding: HBO’s Game of Thrones Reveals Its Latest Twist"

Yes, that actually did just happen. My take on the latest shocking twist on HBO’s Game of Thrones, and why the disturbing outcome of the Red Wedding was crucial for the series. Spoilers abound!

At The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "The Red Wedding: HBO’s Game of Thrones Reveals Its Latest Twist," in which I offer my take on this week's shocking episode of Game of Thrones ("The Rains of Castamere") and why the twist was necessary for the longevity and narrative stakes of the series.

And they partook of his salt and bread.

Oaths are meant to be sacred: after all, a man is only as good as his word. But a world in which oaths are meaningless and void is a terrifying place without logic, justice, or order. On this week’s episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones (“The Rains of Castamere”), we see the ramifications of breaking one’s word. Just as Robb Stark (Richard Madden) betrayed his vow to Walder Frey (David Bradley), promising to marry his daughter in exchange for Frey bannermen, so too does Walder Frey betray the most sacred oath of all, that of hospitality.

This week’s gut-wrenching episode hammered home the dramatic stakes at play within HBO’s Game of Thrones, one that perfectly captures the bloodshed of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels and their underlying notion that no one is ever truly safe. That goes for kings and queens, mothers and children, the old and the unborn.

In a series that’s already rife with whiplash-inducing plot twists, the Red Wedding is one of the most unsettling, horrific, and terrifying moments, not least because it lulls the audience into a false sense of safety. By eating Walder Frey’s bread and salt, the Starks engage in the age-old custom of hospitality. To betray one’s guests in one’s home is a most grievous sin, yet that’s just what Walder Frey does to enact a most terrible vengeance against the King in the North and his clan, murdering Robb, Catelyn (Michelle Fairley), and their men at the wedding feast, transforming this bawdy celebration into a bloodbath from which no one escapes.

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The Daily Beast: "17 Shows Worth Watching This Summer"

Get out of the sun—there’s recovering zombies, addictive serial-killer mysteries, and the Breaking Bad finale on TV. My take on what not to miss for this cool summer season.

At The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "17 Shows Worth Watching This Summer," in which I round up 17 shows worth watching during the sweltering months to come, from FX's The Bridge and BBC America's Broadchurch to ABC Family's Switched at Birth and CBS's Under The Dome. (Plus, Showtime's Ray Donovan, which SHOULD NOT BE MISSED.)

Summer isn’t the television wasteland that it used to be. While the broadcasters are still figuring out what to do with their real estate during these lazy months (original drama? reality competitions? burn-offs?), cable channels have long known the power of airing high-profile series throughout the heat, and there is quite a lot of original programming to be seen during these next sweltering months.

CBS is launching the event series Under the Dome and attempting to tap into the runaway success of BBC’s The Great British Bake Off (which I reviewed here) with American remake The American Baking Competition. So You Think You Can Dance, The Bachelorette, Masterchef, and America’s Got Talent are all back on their respective networks’ schedules, while many of you will be too busy bingeing on the return of Arrested Development on Netflix to notice much else.

But as far as what shows you should be putting on your TiVo’s Season Pass, here are 17 new or notable returning shows—from the expected (Breaking Bad) and high-profile (FX’s The Bridge) to the more offbeat (Netflix’s The Fall and BBC America’s Broadchurch).

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The Daily Beast: "Arrested Development: Why Netflix’s Revival Failed"

Fans eagerly awaited the return of Arrested Development, brought back from the TV graveyard by Netflix. Jace Lacob on why the show’s fourth season revival falls flat.

At The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Arrested Development: Why Netflix’s Revival Failed," in which I review Season 4 of Netflix's Arrested Development revival, for which all 15 episodes were released yesterday. Unfortunately, despite my obsession with Arrested Development's first few seasons, I didn't enjoy this at all.

If you have an Internet connection, you know Arrested Development returned from the dead on Sunday, with all 15 episodes of the show’s fourth season available on Netflix on the same day.

This strategy falls in line with the other original series rollouts that the streaming platform has launched this year, from House of Cards to the abysmal Hemlock Grove, given the belief that Netflix wants to offer the viewer “choice” as to how it consumes content: will you watch just one episode or will you binge on the entire season, watching anywhere from eight to 13 hours of television in a single day or weekend?

There’s something to be said for choice, but there’s also something to be said for restraint on the part of the viewer. The to-binge-or-not-to-binge internal conversation may be happening only in social media-obsessed households, where FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) trumps the time commitment necessary to stay ahead of everyone else you know. I previously compared binge-viewing to eating a bag of potato chips, but I also think that there’s an unintended consequence of such behavior: the viewing purge. This doesn’t happen with typical episodic television, where there is time between installments to consider, analyze, and evangelize about the show you’re watching. Typically, there is time to engage in conversation with fellow viewers, whether that be at that perpetual cliché of office conversation, the watercooler, or a virtual one on Twitter or Facebook. Television, after all, is meant to be a communal activity, an experience that is shared and ongoing, whose conversation twists and bends as the season goes on.

That’s not the case with Netflix shows, which—thanks to the binge-viewing phenomenon—the conversation around appears limited to a narrow timeframe immediately after the release of the full season. Sure, there will be people who will watch weeks or months down the line, but the volume of the conversation is highest during those first few days, where people take to Twitter to share quotes, discuss plot elements, or share their progress.

So when Netflix released all 15 episodes of Arrested Development on the same day, the company clearly intended to have the show follow the same patterns as its previously released fare, knowing that the diehards would devour all 15 episodes while others would look at Netflix as a time-released delivery system, choosing when and where to watch an episode.

The show may prove to be a ratings success for Netflix (though the company will never disclose viewing figures), being was one of the most highly anticipated television events of the year, but the problem is, creatively, Season 4 of Arrested Development isn’t very good.

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The Daily Beast: "The Dark Lure of Gillian Anderson's The Fall"

BBC Two’s The Fall, starring Gillian Anderson and Jamie Dornan, debuts on Netflix on May 28. My take on Anderson and Dornan’s searing performances and why you need to watch.

At The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "The Dark Lure of Gillian Anderson's The Fall," in which I review BBC Two's serial killer drama The Fall, which stars Gillian Anderson and which makes its Stateside debut next week on Netflix.

It is virtually impossible to talk about The Fall—BBC Two’s addictive and provocative serial killer drama, which begins streaming stateside on Netflix on May 28—without mentioning the ghost in the room: Prime Suspect.

The allusion to Prime Suspect, a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic, is well founded. For one, The Fall is the closest that television has come to capturing the taut alchemy of Prime Suspect: part police chase, part psychological portrait of the hunted and the hunter. At the time of its premiere in 1992, Prime Suspect captured the institutional misogyny of the Metropolitan Police and placed at its center Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison, a knife-sharp detective who wasn’t content to hover at the edges of a “man’s world.” Over the seven seasons that Mirren portrayed Jane, viewers came to see her as a brilliant, if flawed, protagonist, who somehow remained tethered to the glass ceiling that she had shattered and who turned to drink and sex to dull the loneliness of her life.

In The Fall, we see both the hard road that Mirren’s Tennison had to walk but also the women—both fictional and real—who followed Tennison’s path in the 22 years since she first appeared on screen. Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson, played here with precision and grit by Gillian Anderson (The X-Files), joins this tradition as a confident and headstrong copper who flits between steely logic and rational detachment. To call her emotionless is to miss the point: Anderson’s Stella has real and vivid emotions, often deeply so, but she’s far more calm and rational than her male colleagues, a capricious and sensitive lot who can dodge bullets but can’t avoid wounded egos.

Created by Allan Cubitt (who not surprisingly cut his teeth on Prime Suspect 2), The Fall is a top-flight mystery that taps into political tensions in Northern Ireland and the troubling undercurrent of violence against women. Stella Gibson, a Metropolitan Police detective from London, arrives in Belfast to conduct a 28-day review of a high-stakes investigation into the murder of a professional woman who was found strangled in her home, her body artfully posed in her bed. What Stella—an out-of-place Englishwoman—discovers is that Belfast is far from peaceful, with the locals’ simmering rage constantly threatening to boil over into violence, and that this crime may be connected to another unsolved murder. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has stumbled upon a string of murders perpetrated by a killer who has the same level of precision and dedication to his own craft as Stella does to hers.

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The Daily Beast: "Family Tree Brings Christopher Guest’s Mockumentary Style to HBO"

He pioneered the mockumentary on film. Now Christopher Guest is bringing his latest comedy, HBO’s Family Tree, to a TV landscape crowded with the format. My take on whether he succeeds.

At The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Family Tree Brings Christopher Guest’s Mockumentary Style to HBO," in which I review HBO's latest comedy, Family Tree, which begins Sunday evening, and which stars Chris O'Dowd (The IT Crowd) and hails from the fertile mind of co-creator Christopher Guest (Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, A Mighty Wind).

Over the last few decades, the mockumentary format has become almost totally synonymous with Christopher Guest, the writer/director (and often actor) best known for films such as This Is Spinal Tap, Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Consideration. Each film—to varying success—mined the documentary format for laughs, setting up its eccentric characters as the butts of the joke ... or the only ones in on it.

It’s no surprise, then, that Guest would eventually seek to bring his brand of comedy to television, which has had significant success with the format: numerous comedies, from Modern Family to The Office and Parks and Recreation, have embraced the single-camera mockumentary format, allowing for characters to engage in “talking heads” segments in which they speak directly to the audience via an unseen film crew. It’s through this technique that characters are able to comment on what the viewer has just seen or will see, an act that creates an instantaneous and perpetual sense of intimacy. That rapport, in essence, sets up the audience as an additional, unseen character in the room, removing the narrative distance between the action and the viewer at home.

With Guest and Jim Piddock’s semi-improvised genealogy comedy Family Tree, which begins its eight-episode season this Sunday evening on HBO, the television mockumentary format may be reaching oversaturation. But for Family Tree, the result is nonetheless appealing, what I like to call “tea-cozy television”—nothing too precious or too taxing, but comforting to watch all the same.

The show, which features a slew of familiar faces from Guest’s previous film work, revolves around sad sack Tom Chadwick (Bridesmaids’ Chris O’Dowd), who has, in rapid succession, lost both his job and his girlfriend. Cuckolded and on the dole, Tom flounders until he receives an unusual bequest from his Great-Aunt Victoria: a mysterious box containing ephemera from his family’s complicated history. Rather than see the box as full of rubbish, he chooses to see it as an invitation to a quest: to reconstruct his family tree and come to terms with the Chadwick clan’s rather checkered past (and, one imagines, his own in the process).

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The Daily Beast: "Broadchurch: This British Murder Mystery Will Be Your Next Television Obsession"

British murder mystery Broadchurch, heading to the U.S. later this year on BBC America, is a worthy successor to Forbrydelsen. My take on ITV’s tantalizing thriller, which wraps up tonight in the U.K.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Broadchurch: This British Murder Mystery Will Be Your Next Television Obsession," in which I review ITV's sensational murder mystery Broadchurch, which stars David Tennant and Olivia Colman and which will head Stateside later this year on BBC America. Not to be missed!

The British have an insatiable appetite for crime fiction, whether it appears in print or on television screens. Putting aside the twee tea cozy mysteries of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot, however, these thrillers are not only taut but also bleak depictions of the psychological fallout from murder: tracing, as novelist Ruth Rendell has done so well in her work, how crime affects not just the victim, but also those left behind. Murder doesn’t just destroy a single life; it corrupts everyone with which it comes in contact.

ITV’s superlative murder mystery Broadchurch, which wraps up its eight-episode run tonight in the U.K. (it heads Stateside later this year on BBC America), explores just that, a gorgeously realized and emotive thriller that revolves around the murder of an 11-year-old boy, Danny Latimer (Oskar McNamara), in a seaside town on the Dorset coast, and the investigation by the police and the media to unmask his killer.

Created by Chris Chibnall, Broadchurch is, in many ways, a homegrown response to the riveting Nordic Noir television trend, which has captured the imagination of U.K. viewers in a very unexpected and palpable way. Like Forbrydelsen before it, Broadchurch focuses on both the police investigation—embodied here by churlish Detective Inspector Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and eager-to-be-liked Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman)—and how Danny’s family copes in the wake of such monumental grief. ITV’s Broadchurch—which was deemed “another jewel in the channel’s drama crown” by The Independent—has proven to be a huge success in its native Britain, luring in roughly 9 million consolidated viewers, putting it on par with the massively successful Downton Abbey.

Everyone is a suspect in Danny’s death, from the cheerful local vicar (Doctor Who’s Arthur Darvill) and the grizzled newsagent (David Bradley) to Danny’s own father, Mark (Andrew Buchan). Secrets have a way of spilling out in a murder investigation, and Broadchurch does a fantastic job of charting the numerous atomic explosions that follow in its wake. Everyone in the idyllic seaside town has something to conceal, something they’re running from, a terrible past that they’re looking to forget. Even Danny, the poor dead boy at the center of the story, seems to have harbored some terrible secret, one worth killing him over. Just what that is—and whodunit—remains the overarching plot that carries an electric current throughout the action.

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The Daily Beast: "Hemlock Grove: Netflix’s Latest Original Show Is Scary Bad"

Netflix will today offer all 13 episodes of its latest original series, Eli Roth’s horror drama Hemlock Grove. My take on how Netflix has stumbled with this poisonous fare.

At The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Hemlock Grove: Netflix’s Latest Original Show Is Scary Bad," in which I review Netflix's newest original series, Hemlock Grove, which is not only nonsensical and almost unwatchable, but also could signal a misstep for the streaming video platform. (A sample quote: "Roman’s mother, Olivia, played by Famke Janssen as though she is channeling Madeleine Stowe’s Victoria Grayson through a hazy, upside-down kaleidoscope, is some sort of supernatural creature as well, her darkness symbolized by her haughty indifference, cut-glass English accent, and penchant for wearing black lingerie.")

Netflix has recently had a rather simple mandate: to fund their own original series under the auspices of well-known creative talent and use their streaming video platform—which is now ubiquitous in households around the world—as a dynamic delivery mechanism, offering every episode on the same day. No more waiting, no more timeslots, and no more viewer fatigue; in fact, the technique removed any sense of delayed gratification, playing to viewers’ innate need to binge and “just watch one more.”

This scheme worked quite effectively with David Fincher’s remake of the British cutthroat political drama House of Cards, which launched on Netflix in February and received much critical adulation. (The company is prepping for an Emmy awards campaign, in fact.) Numerous media stories were written about the binge-watching movement and whether Netflix’s model would make the broadcast and cable networks cower.

Not yet, anyway. Ahead of next month’s return of Arrested Development, the company today launches its second original series, the bizarre horror drama Hemlock Grove, from creators Brian McGreevy and Lee Shipman. (It’s based on McGreevy’s 2012 novel of the same name.) As with House of Cards, all 13 episodes of Hemlock Grove are available to stream today. Which means, if you get hooked while watching the first episode today, you can call in sick to work and plow through the entire season.

With Hemlock Grove, however, that seems unlikely to happen. Fincher’s House of Cards, with its serpentine protagonist, stellar cast, and compelling plot, established Netflix as a major player in the original series arena, a gladiator competing with the legacy networks and the upstart cable channels. It felt like a paradigm-shifting enterprise that unfolded before our eyes and threw off the shackles of cable providers and outmoded ratings systems. But with Hemlock Grove, one can’t shake the feeling that the streaming video goliath has effectively stumbled.

Hemlock Grove, unfortunately, is absolutely dreadful. The Eli Roth-directed drama is an almost unwatchable muddle of horror tropes and painfully creaky dialogue. The show is set in an eerie Pennsylvania town that is equal parts Twin Peaks; Twilight’s Forks, Washington; and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Sunnydale. The brutal murder of a high school student puts the entire town on edge, particularly since it appears that she was ripped apart by a wild animal while en route to a lesbian encounter with her teacher. Two suspects in her killing quickly emerge: Peter Rumancek (Terra Nova’s Landon Liboiron), a Gypsy who the local kids believe to be a werewolf because of his “quite excessive body hair,” and cherub-faced teenage playboy Roman Godfrey (Bill Skarsgård), who isn’t a werewolf but is… something else.

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The Daily Beast: "Sundance Channel’s Rectify is the Best New Show of 2013"

Sundance Channel’s ‘Rectify,’ which begins on Monday, is a weighty meditation on crime, punishment, beauty, and solitude. It is also insanely riveting television.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Sundance Channel’s Rectify is the Best New Show of 2013," in which I review Sundance Channel's Rectify, which begins Monday and which I name the best new show of 2013: "With Rectify, McKinnon creates a world of light and darkness, and of heaven and hell, one that exerts a powerful gravity from which it is impossible to escape."

Sundance Channel, the indie-centric network that is closely aligned with corporate sibling AMC, is quickly ascending to a place of prominence in an increasingly fragmented television landscape. For the longest time, the network was identifiable as the home of independent films, repeats of Lisa Kudrow’s short-lived HBO mockumentary The Comeback, and some forgettable reality fare. It lacked a cohesive programming identity and existed within the same hazy hinterlands as IFC.

But in the last year, Sundance Channel has found itself in the white-hot spotlight normally reserved for AMC—home of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead—thanks to a slew of high-profile and critically acclaimed shows, like the gripping paraplegic unscripted series Push Girls, Jane Campion’s haunting mystery drama Top of the Lake, and now Rectify, a six-episode drama that begins Monday.

The network’s first wholly owned original series, Rectify, created by Ray McKinnon, is exactly the type of show that would have once aired on AMC. (Ironically enough, it was originally developed for the channel.) It’s a breathtaking work of immense beauty and a thought-provoking meditation on the nature of crime and punishment, of identity and solitude, of guilt and absolution. It is, quite simply, the best new show of 2013.

Sentenced to die for the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl, Daniel Holden (Aden Young) is released from prison after 19 years, when his original sentence is vacated, due to new DNA evidence that was overlooked at the time of his original trial. Thanks to the persistence of his headstrong sister, Amantha (a perfectly flinty Abigail Spencer), and his lawyer, Jon Stern (Luke Kirby), Daniel returns home to his mother (True Blood’s J. Smith-Cameron) and to a world he hasn’t seen since he was a teenager. In the small town of Paulie, Georgia, Daniel must rediscover a life forgotten and distant, while outside forces look to demonize him and swing the executioner’s axe once more.

I watched the six-episode first season of Rectify with the sort of rapt attention one usually reserves for high-end television dramas these days, but with one distinct difference. Like Top of the Lake before it, I watched Rectify in two sittings, eagerly speeding through these six episodes with almost beatific devotion. I don’t want to call that “binge watching,” because binge has a rather negative connotation (it implies that you should, perhaps, feel guilt for overindulging). Instead, I see it as “holistic viewing,” attempting to judge the work on its complete form, rather than on just its individual parts.

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The Daily Beast: "The Great Bates Motel Debate: Sex Scenes, Mother Issues & Implausible Twists"

Windy sex scenes! Dumpster diving! Imaginary mommy meltdowns! Or as it says at the site: "A conflicted Jace Lacob and a hooked Anna Klassen debate the merits and flaws of A&E’s Psycho prequel, Bates Motel."

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "The Great Bates Motel Debate: Sex Scenes, Mother Issues & Implausible Twists," in which Anna Klassen and I debate the merits and flaws of A&E's Bates Mote, which was recently renewed for a second season and approaches Season One's halfway point tonight.

A&E’s Bates Motel, the Psycho prequel overseen by Carlton Cuse (Lost) and Kerry Ehrin (Friday Night Lights), hasn’t just attracted an audience—4.5 million viewers tuned into the pilot. It has already been renewed for a second season of Oedipal strife between Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore) and his overbearing mother, Norma (Vera Farmiga), set against the backdrop of a seemingly idyllic Pacific Northwest logging town that hides more than a few secrets.

Sound familiar? The Twin Peaks allusions are very much intentional here, as is the ominous mood lingering over the action, which so far has seen Norma murdering a would-be rapist and covering up the crime, Norman discovering a human smuggling/prostitution ring, and Norma’s other son, Dylan (Max Thieriot), keeping watch over an enormous pot field. Not to mention that a local cop (Mike Vogel) may or may not have an Asian girl chained up in his basement.

As the halfway point of the first season approaches Monday night, The Daily Beast’s Jace Lacob and Anna Klassen debate Bates Motel’s pros and cons, as well as last week’s episode, “Trust Me,” which had both them scratching their heads.

JACE LACOB: I’m so conflicted about Bates Motel. I like it, but I don’t love it. And last week’s episode didn’t resolve my inner turmoil.

ANNA KLASSEN: I disagree. Bates Motel is a cleverly crafted show with complex characters. As we approach Episode 5, we have just begun to touch the surface of Norma and Norman’s relationship, but I am completely hooked and want to see more of their twisted family life unfold.

LACOB: Interesting. For me, Vera Farmiga is by far the best part of the show, but I feel like lately they’ve moved away from exploring the Norman-Norma dynamic. Which is fine, to a certain extent, as I’m intrigued by the Twin Peaks aspect of the show: that its own way White Pine Bay, Ore., is in concealing a dark underbelly of drugs, murder, and human trafficking. That’s interesting to me in the same way the denizens of Twin Peaks reflected the darker impulses of society. But we’ve gotten away from that too, as the show focuses more on Norman and Bradley, whose tumble in the sheets this week seemed really, really creepy to me. For one, Freddie Highmore looks like he’s 12 years old, but also it was just so...odd.

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The Daily Beast: "Mad Men Season 6 Review: Triumphant, Lyrical, and Way Existential"

Mad Men’s Don Draper returns for his penultimate season on AMC Sunday—and he’s as down in the dumps as ever. I write about the dark mood hovering over the show’s brilliant sixth season.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Mad Men Season 6 Review: Triumphant, Lyrical, and Way Existential," in which I review the fantastic sixth season premiere of AMC's Mad Men, which returns on Sunday at 9 p.m. for its penultimate season: "Don isn’t so much a person as a reflection, a shadow, the wet ring left on a bar by a glass of Scotch."

Spoilers are funny things.

It’s tricky enough to write about a show without delving into the plot mechanics, and even more so when you can’t even touch upon certain aspects of the plot in even a cursory way. But that’s always been the case with AMC’s Mad Men, which returns for its sixth—and penultimate—season on Sunday at 9 p.m.

Creator Matthew Weiner wants to ensure that even the most quotidian of details about the plot remain concealed. Members of the press who received an advance copy of the two-hour season premiere were instructed not to reveal several elements about the new season, a detailed list of plot points that are considered verboten. Those restrictions make writing about Mad Men’s beautiful and bravura Season 6 opener (“The Doorway”)—gorgeously written by Weiner and directed by Scott Hornbacher—a minefield of potential missteps, but fortunately not entirely impossible to navigate.

The title is a clue to what is at play within Mad Men’s ambitious sixth season. Doorways are, of course, both a means of entrance and exit, and how you see this portal depends a lot on your state of mind at the time. Are we coming or going? Or, in an existential sense, aren’t we all always coming and going, the world forever on that inexorable loop of birth and death? Issues of mortality carry over from the brilliant (if somewhat polarizing) fifth season, which saw all manner of death imagery swirl around Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and the staffers at Madison Avenue ad agency Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. This emphasis on the transitory nature of life—embodied in last season’s suicide of Lane Pryce (Jared Harris)—looms still over Season 6.

If we are forever on that trajectory—from the womb to the grave—what matters most is perhaps how we spend the time we have, and what we make of ourselves. But for Don Draper, the quick-change chameleon ad man, identity is something fluid and fraught. An admonition to “be yourself” results in nothing but confusion. Who is Don, really? It’s a question that has been posed time and time again throughout the first five seasons of Mad Men, and one that he often answers through the relationships with the women in his life: first wife Betty (January Jones), daughter Sally (Kiernan Shipka), and his latest wife, actress Megan (Jessica Paré). Don isn’t so much a person as a reflection, a shadow, the wet ring left on a bar by a glass of Scotch.

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The Daily Beast: "Chopped: Why I’m Obsessed with Food Network’s Reality Competition Show"

Food Network’s Chopped returns for its fifteenth season. I write about why sea cucumbers, speculoos, and lacinato kale--on the surface, ingredients which many of us have never heard of--matter.

At The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Chopped: Why I’m Obsessed with Food Network’s Reality Competition Show," in which I I write about my insatiable obsession with Food Network's Chopped, and how the competition show brings a deeper and richer awareness of food and culinary diversity to the public at large.

When the Food Network, the culinary-themed cable network available in approximately 99 million American homes and 150 countries around the globe, launched Chopped in 2009, no one could have imagined the eventual impact the show would have.

And by no one, I mean me.

I was initially less than enthusiastic about Chopped—a culinary competition show featuring four chefs squaring off by cooking an appetizer, entrée, and dessert from various mystery basket ingredients—during the early part of its run. I complained about the under-lit sets, the under-enthusiastic judges, the under-utilization of knowledgeable foodie host Ted Allen. I compared it unfavorably to Bravo’s Top Chef, from which it had appeared to borrow its overall conceit.

Over time, Chopped course-corrected: the set now no longer looks like it’s perpetually twilight, and the judges—a selection of well-known and well-respected chefs and restaurateurs—are now very much engaged and invested in the action in front of them. As for host Ted Allen … well, I always wish the show’s producers would give him something to eat, or at least offer him a chair.

I came back to Chopped a few years ago to discover the show’s transformation from staid and predictably over-produced competition show into something more intriguing and rewarding: a show that celebrated the competitive nature of chefs and brought a level of awareness—of technique, of ingredients, of culinary passion and poise—to a wider audience than ever before.

Years ago, Food Network’s primetime lineup was overflowing with how-to cooking programs. In the late 1990s, you couldn’t flip on the channel without seeing Emeril Lagasse or Ming Tsai or Bobby Flay preparing a dish, step by step, for the viewers. There was even a live call-in program, Cooking Live Primetime, hosted by Sara Moulton, which often featured sommeliers and wine experts in the mix. It was approachable, accessible, and most definitely focused on viewers who understood food and its preparation.

Over time, the network subtly changed its remit; in more recent years, it is stocked with various culinary competition shows, programming that places the emphasis more on competition (whether it be cupcakes, elaborate cakes, chocolate structures, new program hosts, etc.) than the food, per se. It wasn’t necessarily food television for foodies, but rather escapist fare for people who might derive more enjoyment from watching people cook than cooking themselves. (A spinoff network, the Cooking Channel, was created in 2010 to service the latter group.)

Chopped, however, occupies a unique strata within the world of Food Network. It might, like its similarly themed brethren (the terrifying Sweet Genius, for example), be a reality competition show in the vein of Top Chef, but Chopped manages to be absolutely riveting television that educates, informs, and thrills at the same time.

Four chefs enter the kitchen; one is crowned the Chopped Champion at the end, having gone through three courses and no less than a dozen mystery ingredients, ranging from the mundane (leftover pizza) to the sublime (abalone). The clock is relentless as they churn out dish after dish, being judged on creativity, taste, and presentation. Egos flare, tempers simmer over, and occasionally true culinary genius and ingenuity is glimpsed.

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Newsweek: "Here Be Dragons: Season 3 of HBO's Game of Thrones Reviewed"

Based on a 1,000-page novel, the third season of HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ is the best—and most complex—one we’ve seen yet.

In this week's issue of Newsweek (and online at The Daily Beast), you can read my latest feature, "Here Be Dragons: Season 3 of HBO's Game of Thrones Reviewed," in which I review the first four episodes of Season 3 of HBO's Game of Thrones, which might just be the best season yet.

When it launched in 2011, HBO’s fantasy drama Game of Thrones quickly became part of the global collective consciousness, an often brutally violent and staggeringly beautiful series that offered viewers an immersive television experience.

Based on the gargantuan bestselling novel series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones depicts the bloody and vicious battle for control of the Iron Throne in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, a fictional world that bears a resemblance to medieval Europe ... if Europe had once been the home of magic, dragons, and a long-slumbering ancient evil. However, unlike most fantasy stories, Game of Thrones presents a complex morality that is far more nuanced than simply the forces of good vs. evil. Here, good men are killed while the wicked are rewarded; innocence suffers in the face of depravity; and everyone has a personal agenda to advance, a knife hidden behind the most beatific of smiles.

Season 3 of Game of Thrones kicks off on HBO on March 31 with 10 episodes that are based on Martin’s perhaps most beloved novel, A Storm of Swords, a hefty 1,000-page tome that is by far the most complicated and intricate of the five books in the series to date. It is a sweeping saga that flits between dozens of narrators and across continents—from the sultry heat of Slaver’s Bay to the raw iciness beyond the Wall—as alliances are formed and broken, lives taken, and conspiracies hatched.

ranslating such a monumental work of fiction to the screen is no easy feat, and executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have done an incredible job thus far in balancing the needs of diehard fans, the demands of the story, and a sense of accessibility to those viewers who don’t detect the nuances between the Dothraki and High Valyrian tongues. Adaptation, particularly of an ongoing series, is a fluid, mercurial thing, and the show’s executive producers have proven largely capable of shifting content, paring it down, and inventing new material in order to make the narrative fit within the confines of a weekly television series.

Season 3, which will depict roughly the first half of Martin’s A Storm of Swords, will present Benioff and Weiss with their greatest challenge yet, as both sides attempt to pick up the pieces after the last season’s climactic Battle of the Blackwater. The first four episodes of the new season, provided to critics ahead of its premiere, demonstrate a canny ability to fuse the literary with the visual, resulting in an exhilarating and magnificent thing of beauty, particularly in those scenes that make full use of locations as diverse as Iceland, Croatia, and Morocco.

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The Daily Beast: "Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Bates Motel: 15 Shows Worth Watching This Spring"

How to choose from the slew of content about to hit the airwaves? From miniseries (Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake) to returning favorites (Game of Thrones) and new offerings (Rectify), I makes my picks for what's worth watching on television this spring.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Bates Motel: 15 Shows Worth Watching This Spring," in which I offer up 15 television shows to check out in the coming months, from the tried-and-true to those off the beaten path.

With the promise of warmer weather just around the corner, a slew of new and returning television shows are hitting the airwaves. HBO welcomes back Game of Thrones on March 31, AMC travels back in time for another season of Mad Men on April 7, and Sundance Channel offers two spellbinding new original dramas: Top of the Lake, a mystery series from co-creator Jane Campion, and Rectify, a searing drama that looks at what life is like after being released from prison after 19 years. But it’s not all heavy drama: two serial killer thrillers are on tap, with A&E’s Bates Motel squaring off against NBC’s Hannibal (as in Lecter), the Doctor returns with a new companion in Doctor Who, and HBO’s Veep returns for another season of vice-presidential comedy. I round up 15 new and returning television shows that are worth checking out this spring.

Top of the Lake (Sundance Channel)
The Piano writer-director Jane Campion and the film’s Academy Award-winning star Holly Hunter reunite in the seven-part Sundance Channel miniseries Top of the Lake, which stars Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss, Peter Mullan (War Horse), David Wenham (The Lord of the Rings), and Lucy Lawless. Set in the breathtaking wilderness of New Zealand, the miniseries charts the disappearance of a pregnant 12-year-old local girl and the journey of a detective (Moss), returned home to care for her ailing mother, as she struggles to discover what happened. What Moss’s Robin Griffin discovers is a world of savagery and wonder, as she is forced to trace both the girl and her own dark history. Gorgeous, provocative, and mythical, Top of the Lake is not to be missed. (Launches March 18 at 10 p.m.)

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The Daily Beast: "Girls Gets Graphic"

This week’s episode of Girls graphically depicted the results of a male character’s climax. Why the scene has outraged some, and why it’s a watershed moment for the HBO comedy.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Girls Gets Graphic," in which I write about Girls, viewer responses, graphic content, and why THAT scene from this week's episode was a watershed moment for the Lena Dunham comedy.

HBO’s Girls has always been a lightning rod for critical reaction, whether it be allegations of nepotism, privilege, or racism. It’s impossible to imagine a week going by without someone, somewhere, having an adverse reaction to the Lena Dunham-created comedy.

And that’s okay: art is meant to trigger emotional responses. I’d far rather watch a television show that stirred up feelings within its viewers—that challenged them to watch something complicated and often uncomfortable—than a show whose main goal was simply to please the most people, across all demographic swaths, week after week.

Girls is the most definitely the former rather than the latter. It’s a show that revels in its own complexity, in the often-unlikable natures of its characters, in the comedy of the awkward that follows. This week’s episode (“On All Fours”)—written by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner and directed by Dunham—expectedly led to all sorts of responses from its viewers, many of which was of the outraged variety.

Joe Flint at the Los Angeles Times yesterday penned a reaction to this week’s episode of Girls, focusing in particular on the graphic sex scene between Adam (Adam Driver) and his new girlfriend, Natalia (Shiri Appleby), which was challenging to watch: after making her crawl to his bedroom on all fours, he proceeded to engage in some disconnected, rough sex with her and then finished himself off on her chest.

“But Sunday's episode was graphic even for those fans used to seeing creator and star Lena Dunham's no-holds-barred approach to story-telling,” wrote Flint. “This was not a first for cable TV, or the movies. An episode of HBO's Sex and the City showed fluid but played it for laughs, as did a well-known scene featuring Cameron Diaz in the comedy There's Something About Mary.”

“However, this time it was a jarring end to a violent and hard-to-watch scene,” he continued. “Even theatrical movies with sexually explicit material and adult pay-per-view channels typically steer clear of such displays, especially if it's not for comic relief."

Flint is right in saying that this was not “a first” for cable television. But he (and an HBO spokeswoman quoted in the story) seem to have a short memory, as HBO’s short-lived drama Tell Me You Love Me featured an even more graphic scene involving “fluids” that was most definitely not played for comic relief.

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The Daily Beast: "Revenge: What Went Wrong with ABC’s Once-Daring Thriller?"

Last year, Revenge was a thrill-a-minute vengeance fantasy but now, in its second season, it’s a convoluted mess. My take on the show’s head-scratching fall from grace.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Revenge: What Went Wrong with ABC’s Once-Daring Thriller?" In it, I ponder just what went wrong with ABC's Revenge that caused its shocking second-season drop in quality.

What a difference a year makes, particularly in the life of a serialized television narrative.

At this time last year, ABC’s Revenge—Mike Kelley’s modern-day retelling of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, set among the Hamptons polo set—was a dazzling vengeance fantasy, reveling in its dark nature and the even darker journey of Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp), a woman scorned who was out for payback against the wealthy clan who destroyed her life and shattered her family.

It functioned on several levels and tapped into the zeitgeist of 2012; it could be seen (as I had written) as “not only winking noir … [but also as] a retribution fantasy for the 99 percent,” as Emily looked to take down the conspirators who ruined her life and set up her father (James Tupper) as a fall guy for a terrorist-funded financial scheme that resulted in the downing of a passenger plane. Her vast fortune—acquired from a tech mogul, Nolan Ross (Gabriel Mann), whom her father had helped when he was starting out—was used in service of her holy mission of vengeance.

And each week, Revenge found Emily immolating her sense of morality as she concocted yet another grandiose revenge scheme, caring little about the collateral damage she was causing around her. She was entrancing, as I wrote last year: “Emily—criminal mastermind, computer hacker, cat burglar, and willing arsonist, not to mention a ronin in Giuseppe Zanotti stilettos—recalls Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander as much as she does Dumas’s Edmond Dantès.”

Where did that character disappear to? Season 2 of Revenge has seemed, in comparison to its deftly (and magnificently) plotted first season, a convoluted mess. Rather than further the central conceit—Emily’s quest for revenge against the Grayson clan, headed by femme fatale Victoria (Madeleine Stowe) and robber baron Conrad (Henry Czerny)—the show has meandered into all manner of narrative trouble: plots about a broader conspiracy, psychotic mothers, vengeance buddies (see: Barry Sloane’s Aiden), computer programs, kidnapped sisters, waterfront shakedowns, lazy double-crossings, and a ruthless terrorist organization called The Initiative, whose operative (Wendy Crewson) appears to do little besides be chauffeured around New York all day long.

In the first season, Stowe’s Victoria provided a menacing nemesis for Emily, but her role has been usurped by The Initiative, which is more evil and ruthless than even Victoria. But that’s a problem: by making Victoria the puppet of people even worse than her, it’s taken away much of her power. Additionally, Crewson’s Helen Crowley proved to be not half as interesting, complex, or scary as Victoria Grayson. The balance of power didn’t just shift in Season 2, it fell right off the scales.

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The Daily Beast: "ABC Family’s Switched at Birth ASL Episode Recalls Gallaudet Protest"

Almost 25 years to the day after the student protest at Gallaudet University began in 1988, ABC Family’s ‘Switched at Birth’ features a storyline about a deaf student uprising in an episode, airing March 4, that’s told almost entirely in American Sign Language.

At The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Do Not Adjust Your TV: ABC Family’s Switched at Birth ASL Episode Recalls Gallaudet Protest," in which I offer praise of ABC Family's extraordinary Switched at Birth, which presents a nearly all-ASL episode on Monday, a landmark installment that connects both to Deaf culture/history and to the seminal 1988 Gallaudet student protests (DPN). Not to be missed.

A generation has passed since the weeklong act of protest known as Deaf President Now, and its influence on deaf culture is likely a distant memory for the hearing community. That may change, however, thanks to a pivotal and landmark episode of ABC Family’s Switched at Birth, which will present a television first: an installment that is enacted nearly entirely in American Sign Language (ASL).

For the deaf community, the Gallaudet University students’ uprising was a metaphorical crossing of the Rubicon, just as vital and significant as Stonewall or Rosa Parks. It was a momentous act of revolution that has remained a critical cultural and social touchstone, reaffirming deaf identity, culture, and pride.

In 1988, Gallaudet, the world’s first higher educational institution for the deaf and hard of hearing, had just announced as its seventh president yet another hearing appointee. Elizabeth Zinser, assistant chancellor at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, had been the only hearing candidate for the job. Jane Bassett Spilman—chairwoman of Gallaudet’s board of trustees, largely made up of hearing individuals—announced Zinser’s appointment and defended the board’s decision by allegedly saying, “The deaf are not yet ready to function in the hearing world.”

Furious, deaf and hard of hearing students barricaded Gallaudet’s gates, refusing to leave and denying anyone entry until a deaf person was appointed as university president. Effigies of both women were burned during Deaf President Now (DPN), which received national coverage in the media.

In the end, Zinser would resign from her position, the university’s first deaf president, I. King Jordan, would be appointed after 124 years, and more than 2,500 protesters would converge on Capitol Hill, holding banners that read, “We still have a dream!”

Today, outside the deaf community, pioneers and crusaders like I. King Jordan; Laurent Clerc, America’s first deaf teacher; and Jean-Ferdinand Berthier, a deaf intellectual and political organizer who wrote about deaf culture and history, are sadly all but unknown.

But the ASL episode of Switched at Birth—titled, fittingly, “Uprising,” and airing March 4—will bring fresh attention to the Deaf President Now movement at Gallaudet, recalling a time of deaf activism that continues to inspire a new generation of students today.

For those not familiar with Switched at Birth, the show, created by Lizzy Weiss and now in its second season, charts the collision of cultures, identities, ethnicities, and classes when two teenage girls (Vanessa Marano’s Bay Kennish and Katie Leclerc’s Daphne Vasquez) discover that they were switched at birth and their respective parents convene in a blended family to become reacquainted with their biological children.

The drama, which won the Television Critics Association award for youth programming last year, isn’t just about the drama that ensues after the switch is discovered. It is a deft and sophisticated look at the way we communicate and express ourselves; whether through ASL, street art, or music. Switched at Birth is also the most nuanced and complex depiction of deaf culture and individuals ever to air on television. It’s all the more astounding that what unfolds before us—intelligent, emotionally resonant, and even profound—is packaged in what is nominally a teen drama.

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The Daily Beast: "Southland: Television’s Most Underrated Drama"

TNT’s gripping police drama Southland is back for a fifth season, but hardly anyone’s tuning in. My take on television’s most criminally overlooked show.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Southland: Television’s Most Underrated Drama," in which I take a look at a superlative yet underrated drama: Southland, which returned last week for a fifth season.

Why aren’t more of you watching Southland?

Created by Ann Biderman (NYPD Blue) and executive-produced by John Wells (ER), TNT’s uncompromising cop drama returned for a fifth season last week to only 1.16 million viewers, down 34 percent from last year. In a television season that has given us dreck like Zero Hour, Mob Doctor, and Do No Harm, Southland should be a hit.

That it’s not is a shame, as Southland remains one of the most morally complex and insightful dramas on television today. It deftly juggles multiple crimes and incidents, as well as the private lives of these LAPD officers and detectives, played by an extraordinary cast that includes Ben McKenzie, Regina King, Shawn Hatosy, and Michael Cudlitz.

Southland shines at showing these officers as both heroes and flawed individuals whose psychological issues are often magnified by carrying a badge and gun. The battles they face—pregnancy, drug addiction, custody, the death of a loved one, a fallen comrade—are often just as dangerous as gunfire in the line of duty.

Season 5 of Southland continues the slow moral erosion of Ben Sherman (McKenzie), who began the series as a naïve rookie officer and who slowly has been transformed into a decorated, hardened cop whose motivations are often now less than altruistic. McKenzie, best known for his role as Ryan Atwood on Fox’s The O.C., carries himself completely differently than he did when Southland began back in 2009, the weight of what Officer Sherman has seen and experienced etched on his forehead in visible lines. As an actor, the maturity does McKenzie good; he’s cast off the “pretty” label that plagues many former teen drama actors, exchanging his adolescence for a tempered adulthood.

When Ben asks his barber to cut off his blond locks in the season premiere, it isn’t just a physical transformation for the character but a deeper psychological one. It is another manifestation of Ben’s colder, harder persona and his unexpected lack of empathy, one that manifests itself in surprising ways. When, in last week’s episode (“Hats and Bats”), he takes a phone call from his sister while standing feet away from an elderly woman whose sister has been brutally murdered in the home they shared, it’s a shock to Sammy Bryant (Hatosy), yet more evidence of his poster boy partner’s disregard for anyone but himself.

Is it that protecting the innocent—being granted powers and responsibilities beyond mere ordinary folk—sets you apart from humanity? Does power, in its insidious way, corrupt even the most noble of hearts?

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The Daily Beast: "Downton Abbey Crashes" (Or My Thoughts on the Controversial Season Finale)

My take on the frustrating finale of Downton Abbey, which ended its spectacular third season with heartbreak. WARNING: Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen Sunday’s episode.

At The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Downton Abbey: Why Last Night’s Season Finale Has Fans Seeing Red," in which I offer my thoughts about the controversial Season 3 finale, which aired last night on PBS's Masterpiece Classic.

He had to die.

There was no other way for Dan Steven’s Matthew Crawley to leave Downton Abbey other than in a body bag. As the heir to the grand estate and the title, it would have been impossible for sensible, responsible Matthew to shirk his responsibilities and head to America to start a career on the New York stage, or—to borrow from Monarch of the Glen, a Scottish Highlands-set drama that featured Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes as part of its cast—to go climb a mountain somewhere.

No, Matthew Crawley was not only wedded to Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) but to the great house itself, and there was no getting around the fact that, in order to accommodate actor Dan Steven’s desire to leave the show, Matthew had to be killed off in some fashion.

It’s the means in which Matthew was unceremoniously dispatched that I take some umbrage with, however. I raised this point in a vague fashion in my advance review of Season 3 of Downton Abbey back in January, giving the season a glowing recommendation while criticizing the heavy-handed finale.

After a season that was particularly top-heavy with death—the gutting demise of beloved Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay)—and disappointment, Matthew’s death threatens to topple the entire show with its melodramatic weight. And, let’s be honest, the minute that Lady Mary gave birth to a son, ensuring the continuation of the dynasty and a rightful succession (lest we be plunged right back into another entail drama like Season 1), Matthew was a goner. He had served his purpose, ensuring that the Crawley line would continue and that Downton Abbey—which he had absolutely and completely saved by dragging it and Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville) into the 20th century—would not only remain in the family, but also turn a profit.

Matthew was, in essence, a stud bull. His only purpose was to father a son. With that act completed and Downton saved, what was Matthew’s future importance within the narrative? Other than potential squabbles with Mary—serving again to prove how headstrong she is—where would the drama have come from? His plots were tied up way too neatly for him to survive, in other words.

The rabid fans of Downton Abbey wouldn’t accept another actor playing the dashing and modern Matthew, nor would they have accepted a flimsy excuse for why Matthew had decamped to other climes. But what I found frustrating was how Fellowes orchestrated his demise, having Matthew run off the road by an errant milk truck after joyfully greeting his baby boy for the first time. It was maudlin and too predictable, especially compared to the way in which Sybil had just been sent out of the world a few episodes earlier. Sybil’s death rocked both the audience and the show itself, a brutal reminder of how far medicine and childbirth have come in the last 100 years and also how wealth and privilege don’t always insulate families from loss and harm.

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The Daily Beast: "Zero Hour: Is This the Dumbest Show Ever to Air on TV?"

ABC tries to get back in the Lost game with the ridiculous Zero Hour. My take on the show, launching Thursday, that just might be the dumbest ever on television.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my review of the first episode of ABC's overhyped adventure drama "Zero Hour" (entitled ""Zero Hour: Is This the Dumbest Show Ever to Air on TV?"), in which I call the Anthony Edwards-led drama "nothing more than stale schlock, an hour full of zeroes.

Ever since Lost went off the air—and, actually, before—the broadcast networks have desperately searched for a show that could tempt viewers eager to get, well, lost in the complexity, mythology, and mystery of the Damon Lindelof/Carlton Cuse drama.

Zero Hour is not that show.

The ABC drama, which begins Thursday night at 10 p.m., recalls fiascos like FlashForward more than Lost. Created by former Prison Break writer Paul Scheuring, Zero Hour is no valentine to television, offering up a ludicrous mash-up of overtly familiar tropes: doomsday devices, the birth of the Anti-Christ, secret societies, and a witch’s cauldron of yawn-inducing fare. Did I mention that there are also goose-stepping Nazis, clocks embedded with treasure maps, demon spawn, and enough nonsense to make The Da Vinci Code seem downright plausible?

The plot—and I use that term lightly—revolves around Hank (Anthony Edwards), the shlubby editor of a paranormal magazine (called Modern Skeptic, no less) whose wife, clock seller Laila (Jacinda Barrett), is kidnapped by a ruthless assassin on the FBI’s most wanted list as part of a conspiracy that involves the end of the world.

There’s also the appearance of 12 mystical clocks, constructed during the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and the Rosicrucians, a secret Catholic mystical sect said to be guarding some sort of device with the power to bring about “zero hour” for the planet. Hank sets out on a world-spanning mission (funded by whom?), heading for the Artic circle after discovering a diamond whose flaw is actually a map to something called “New Bartholomew” in an effort to find Laila and the man who took her.

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