Twenty-year-old Josh’s (Josh Thomas) world explodes twice in the Please Like Me pilot: first when he realizes he’s gay and again when his bipolar mother, Rose (Debra Lawrance), attempts suicide. Josh takes both revelations in stride, though he dreads having to inform his mom, whom he’ll be living with and…
In the Golden Age of scripted television, reality TV is supposed to be dying, but you wouldn’t know it from Survivor’s tenacious resilience — or its just-debuted 31st season. The show that launched reality TV as mainstream programming at the turn of the millennium returned two weeks ago with an…
The American Dream killed Jay Gatsby and Willy Loman, but their TV counterparts have mostly fared better. Sure, Walter White ends up in a metaphorical ditch and Tony Soprano may too. But the serialization of TV storytelling largely means that characters on shows like Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,…
Narcos, Netflix’s new drug-war docudrama, is nearly as ambitious as its central character, Pablo Escobar. Over the course of 10 dense, sprawling episodes, the series tells the 20-year history of the narcotrafficker’s rise and fall in relation to Colombia’s blood-soaked history and the U.S.’s escalating drug war, from Richard Nixon…
Less than a generation ago, Yonkers, New York, became the face of segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation in my backyard. A federal court order to construct 200 units of low-income residences east of the Saw Mill Parkway, i.e., in the white part of town, led to riots and bombings, death…
The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was a boon to comedy, but the comedians who feasted then look gouty today: A small group of white, male millionaires — one of whom would later confess to having ultiple office affairs, perhaps to distract from sexual-harassment allegations — collectively decided to call Lewinsky, then a 22-year-old…
BoJack Horseman lurched out of the gate last year with a whole lotta animal puns and one uncomplicated thesis: Old sitcoms suck. An aggressively stupid and mawkish show from the late Eighties called Horsin’ Around, about an equine-human hybrid in Cosby sweaters who adopts three adorable orphans, made its star,…
Few networks are as willing to bet on new voices as Comedy Central. The network’s hustling approach to original programming has yielded such breakout hits as Broad City, Inside Amy Schumer, and Key & Peele — some of the freshest and most distinctive shows of the last few years. Just three…
After 12 years on the air, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart became required viewing during the Dubya years, when much of the nation was desperate to look to almost anyone else for political leadership. The Comedy Central series offered nightly catharsis in five- or eight-minute bursts, voicing the anger and…
Prison life is reliably repetitive, but conditions can be frighteningly unstable, too. Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, which returns June 12 for its third season, reflects that paradoxical state of affairs by delivering more of the same — heartfelt but complicated relationships, inspired capers, compelling personalities, stomach-twisting flips in…
iZombie is about as sunny and optimistic as the zombie genre gets, which of course isn’t all that much. Even by supernatural standards, it’s a bloodthirsty canon, demanding regular sacrifices of innocents and grisly feats of skull splitting and cerebellum cannibalizing. The CW’s Seattle neo-noir boasts plenty of both to…
During “Compliments,” a first-season sketch on Inside Amy Schumer, a group of female friends respond to every bit of praise with a verbal self-maiming: “I tried to look like Kate Hudson but ended up looking like a golden retriever’s dingleberry,” says one. Sighs another, “Of course I see everyone when…
Blues legend Bessie Smith was arguably America’s most powerful black woman during her heyday in the ’20s and ’30s. Her reign wasn’t just based on being the highest-paid African-American entertainer of her generation, but, according to the new HBO movie Bessie, on the freedoms she allowed herself after breaking with…
Author J.K. Rowling’s rags-to-riches biography is arguably better known than her most famous creation, Harry Potter. As the oft-repeated origin story goes, Rowling was a single mother making ends meet, aided by government assistance while she was scribbling the first installment of her phenomenally successful fantasy series in a café…
No show wears its love for language and land more proudly than FX’s Justified, which ended its six-year run on April 14. Based on a novella by Elmore Leonard and starring squinty-eyed sex symbol Timothy Olyphant, the hillbilly noir never received the critical adulation or the audience one might expect…
It may be hard to remember now, but there once was a time when Daenerys was the most exciting character on Game of Thrones. Played by Emilia Clarke, the exiled royal best embodied the HBO drama’s paradoxical appeal: its mix of historical authenticity and rousing fantasy. Reduced to currency by…
Mad Men has always been, among many other things, about the exit of the old guard and the entrance of the new — and the acceleration of that transition by the mood and the movements of the Sixties. The pilot, set in 1960, finds the Sterling Cooper higher-ups scrambling to…
Doing everything right in one generation just makes you old-fashioned, even obsolete, in the next. That’s the harsh reality that confronts 40-year-old Liza — played with spirited, sarcastic élan by Tony-winning actress Sutton Foster — when she attempts to re-enter the workforce after a decade and a half of stay-at-home…
Clueless rich guy Tom Perkins rightly became the laughingstock of the internet last year after comparing America’s “war on one-percenters” to the Nazi Kristallnacht. However detestably fatuous Perkins is in real life, it must be admitted he’d make a fascinating fictional character, perhaps in a Greek tragedy about a wealthy…
The world is a terrible place. That’s the uncompromising truth with which Tina Fey and Robert Carlock begin Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix), their follow-up to the under-seen but culturally monumental 30 Rock. The very first scenes of Unbreakable’s first season, which will be released in its binge-able entirety on March…
TV shows aren’t too different from people in at least one respect: The longer they’ve been around, the less interest they tend to garner. But the sixth season of FX’s beloved spy spoof Archer is like few others. It’s an “unrebooting” of the previous year, in which creator Adam Reed,…
Empire most certainly wasn’t built in a day, but its reputation as a breakout hit has been made in virtually no time at all. Since the series debuted six weeks ago, every episode has drawn more viewers than the one before it. Buoyed by positive reviews and especially word of…
