[Televisionary]

Back in 2006, I founded a television blog called Televisionary (the very one you're reading now).  At the time, it was a little side-project that I stared while working in television development: something to do during the off-hours or (my infrequent) down-time or at my desk during my lunch breaks.  Over the next few years, Televisionary morphed into a full-time job as I watched almost everything on television and cataloged my thoughts, penning reviews, conducting interviews with talent, breaking news, and aggregating the day’s entertainment news headlines and major listings every morning. It got noticed by Entertainment Weekly and The New York Times , The Chicago Tribune and CNN, Deadline and Variety . Televisionary took on a life of its own. It became discussed in Hollywood and I was always surprised to discover that actors or producers or executives who read my TV blog. It was a secret at first, one that I eventually shared with a few friends before spreading outwards, th...

The creative force behind the period drama talks about where his characters are as his show begins its final episodes. “We left off with everyone’s material needs being met in an extreme way,” says Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner of where we last saw the characters on his critically acclaimed period drama when the show went on hiatus 10 months ago. “Then the issue is, what else is there?” That is the central question with the return to US TV of the AMC hit, one demanding to be answered by both the show’s characters, and its creator whose success is the envy of the television industry. Mad Men has been a defining part of Weiner’s life for the last 15 years. He wrote the pilot script on spec while he was a staff writer on CBS’ Ted Danson sitcom Becker in 1999, using it to land a writing gig on HBO’s The Sopranos in 2002. It would take another five years, filled with multiple rejections, before the first episode of Mad Men would make it on the air. Someone with less determination ...

Switched at Birth , which kicked off a multi-episode arc last night about campus rape featuring one of its main characters, might just be the bravest show on television. The anger directed at HBO's   The Newsroom   in December in the wake of   an episode that attempted to capitalize on the debate surrounding the scourge of college sexual assault   crystallized the complexity of emotions surrounding the very complicated issue plaguing campuses nationwide. At the time, the   Rolling Stone /UVA debacle was dominating headlines — a magazine story that was meant to serve as crusading journalism, peeling back the lid of insidious behavior at the Virginia university and bringing awareness of the situation to a larger audience, instead had the opposite effect as the story's factual basis was attacked and the magazine backed away from supporting the writer. Any platform that the story could have provided rape victims — particularly those on college campuses — was undone,...

HBO's stranger-than-fiction true crime documentary The Jinx   — about real estate heir Robert Durst — brings the chills and thrills missing since Serial   wrapped up its first season. Serial   obsessives: HBO's latest documentary series is exactly what you've been waiting for.   The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst , like Sarah Koenig's beloved podcast, sifts through old documents, finds new leads from fresh interviews, and seeks to determine just what happened on a fateful day in which the most foul murder was committed. And, also like  Serial  before it,  The Jinx may also hold no ultimate answer to innocence or guilt. But that seems almost beside the point; such investigations often remain murky and unclear, and guilt is not so easy a thing to be judged. Instead, this upcoming six-part tantalizing murder mystery, from director Andrew Jarecki ( Capturing the Friedmans ), is a gripping true crime story that unfolds with all of the speed of a ...

  Farewell, Team Braverman. It couldn't be more fitting that  Parenthood , which wrapped up its six-season run on Jan. 29, ended with a baseball game. The pilot episode of the Jason Katims-created show ( very  loosely based on the 1989 feature film) ended in the same fashion: After a negative experience, Max Braverman (Max Burkholder) doesn't initially want to play in his baseball game, but when he changes his mind, the entire Braverman clan races to get him there in time.  There's a beautiful sense of symmetry, therefore, to how  Parenthood 's final episode ended, with the Bravermans uniting to celebrate one of their own, Zeek (Craig T. Nelson), on the baseball diamond, fulfilling his wishes and bringing each other closer together in the process. With the series bookended both by the most American of sports — Crosby (Dax Shepard) once refers to baseball as the Bravermans' "religion" — and by Sarah (Lauren Graham) finding her true place (moving in with her...

Adult Swim’s surreal satire of sitcoms subverts our expectations of nostalgia. You might be able to go home, but it will never be the same. "Too Many Cooks" began as an Adult Swim parody that aired on Cartoon Network's late-night block for a week or so at the end of October, but since then, the surreal and twisted 11-minute video has gone viral in a way that even its creators,  Chris "Casper" Kelly ( Squidbillies ) and Paul Painter, have been gobsmacked by . What is it about this short that has exerted such a magnetic pull on so many? "Too Many Cooks" is, on the surface, initially a parody of 1970s and 1980s sitcoms that once populated the television landscape. These are the types of shows you might recall watching from the couch of your grandparents' house, shows like  The Brady Bunch ,  Three's Company ,  Family Matters , and  Perfect Strangers  with their familiar theme songs and title sequences, once hallmarks of the sitcom form. They'r...

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 t...

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...

Damn fine news: After 25 years, Twin Peaks is headed to Showtime with a nine-episode limited series. BuzzFeed News spoke to Frost about the revival and what fans can expect. At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, " Twin Peaks Co-Creator Mark Frost On The Series’ Return To Television," in which I talk to Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost about the series' resurrection as a limited series on Showtime in 2016. Earlier this summer, deleted and extended scenes from the Twin Peaks follow-up film Fire Walk With Me were unearthed for the series’ complete Blu-ray release. But that was nothing compared to what happened on Oct. 6, as the impossible suddenly became a reality: Co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost announced that Twin Peaks would be returning to television 25 years after it went off the air, its resolution as hazy and unclear as a fever dream. Nine episodes of a Twin Peaks revival series will air on Showtime in 2016 as a limited series, one that promise...

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 ...

“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 followe...

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 Fr...

Michelle Dockery, Allen Leech, Laura Carmichael, and Joanne Froggatt share details about the new season with BuzzFeed. Warning: SPOILERS ahead if you haven’t finished Season 4. At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "18 Gasp-Worthy Secrets About Downton Abbey Season 5 From The Cast," in which I interview the cast of Downton Abbey about what's coming up on the fifth season of the British costume drama. 1. Reinvention is very big this season. Judging from how often word “reinvention” itself came up among the cast members. “There’s big social change in this season,” Michelle Dockery, who plays Lady Mary, told BuzzFeed. “You can tell by the clothes, it’s very, very modern. And Mary really embraces those changes. Reinvention is a good word.” That spirit of renewal is perhaps nowhere more apparent than within the character of Lady Mary herself. “It’s the new Mary,” she said. “Because she’s through the grief now and she’s moving on with her life and embracing a...

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...

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 ...

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 narrativ...

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...

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 a...

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. Continue reading at BuzzFeed...

Creator Matthew Weiner prepares for the end game with the first of 14 episodes that start to tie up the AMC period drama. Warning: Minor spoilers ahead! At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, " Mad Men Returns With An Intoxicating Beginning Of The End," in which I review the seventh season premiere of AMC's Mad Men , which I loved. The first episode of Mad Men ’s final season is an outstanding installment, offering up new beginnings for several of Sterling Cooper & Partners’ employees while pushing the series inexorably towards its ultimate end. And given the list of potential plot points that critics were forbidden to share with readers about the first episode of the final season of Mad Men, it even feels like a bit of a spoiler to say that much about the Season 7 premiere, which airs on April 13 on AMC. Much discussion has already been made about creator Matthew Weiner’s stern warnings about disclosing information about the plot, characters, setting, a...