HBO

Serial Killers: Are HBO-Style Dramas Ruining the TV Episode?

I’m currently fighting off a cold so potent that you probably caught it simply by reading this sentence, so blogging may be a little light for a while. Fortunately, my colleague and critic-pal Ryan McGee at the A.V. Club has offered up an essay that should keep you busy for a while. In it, he argues that The Sopranos and every hallowed HBO drama that followed it (like Luck) have changed TV for the worse by focusing on long-form stories at the expense of individual episodes that are enjoyable on their own terms:

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The Morning After: FlashForward, Over and Out

Brief spoilers for FlashForward’s SeasonSeries finale coming up. It is cheap and too easy, I realize, to cite FlashForward as a comparison point to Lost’s finale. If you believe Lost failed, then another show’s greater failings do not make it any better. But in the end, it’s still instructive. Having a plan from the beginning [...]

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The Morning After: A Step (Flash)Forward

ABC’s FlashForward returned/relaunched last night, hoping to address some of the complaints that dogged the first half of the season. I thought the two-hour return episode was an improvement in a story sense, giving us some serious movement on the backstory of who and what caused the blackouts. But the show is still on probation [...]

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The Morning After: FlashForward Hits Pause

Still a while yet before I complete my duty-watching of the “fall finale” of FlashForward. But I thought I should get a Morning After post up for the interested, not least because I’ve technically already run out of morning. Did the episode make you more eager to see FF when it returns? And what do [...]

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The Morning After: Flash News

Acting on the advice of a commenter here a while ago, I am committing to the practice of saving myself time and simply watching the last five minutes of any given FlashForward, at least until and if the series shows some improvement. Thus it’s not really fair for me to review the show per se, [...]

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The Morning After: Cement Shoes

As I mentioned yesterday, my visit to the Monty Python reunion means I have a greater Thursday-TV backlog than usual. (I did catch the weak, overly wacky “Mafia” episode of The Office, which doesn’t require much comment.) So use this space to discuss any of last night’s shows. In the meantime, I’m thinking of taking [...]

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Our Thursday Problem

The emerging consensus in Tuned Inland is that Thursday is becoming a problem. A high-class problem, yes: too much good (or at least potentially good) TV. I don’t even watch Grey’s Anatomy, yet at this point, I find myself finishing my time-shifted Thursday-night programming somewhere around the following Monday—especially since Mrs. Tuned In and I [...]

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The Morning After: Moving Forward?

As I mentioned last week, I haven’t given up on FlashForward, not quite yet, but it is distinctly in my I’ll-get-to-it-when-I-get-to-it category. I know it’s the kind of show that demands next-morning analysis, though—isn’t it?—so feel free to DIY it, and I’ll either update or sound off in the comments if I have something to [...]

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The Morning After: Second Flash

Still working my way through my Thursday-night TV backlog, with a thing or two else on my plate, so I’ll open the floor to your thoughts on the second FlashForward and/or the second Fringe of the season. As I mentioned last week, FlashForward intrigued me, but I didn’t actually like its writing or characters enough [...]

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TV Tonight: Can FlashForward Get Lost?

When I pot post my Test Pilot first impressions of new shows over the summer, I make the point of stressing that they’re not reviews, because the pilots can be reworked before they’ve aired. That’s not a lie, but in the case of ABC’s FlashForward, the for-air pilot hasn’t changed from what I saw in [...]

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TV for the Law-Abiding: FlashForward Preview

Public-service announcement: you can now watch the first 18 minutes of FlashForward on Hulu. That’s if you haven’t already watched the whole damn thing via BitTorrent, where it has apparently leaked. (Incidentally, so much for ABC’s hoo-hah notion that not sending critics a screener would prevent piracy.) See my (disappointed) original thoughts on the pilot [...]