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BuzzFeed: "18 Gasp-Worthy Secrets About Downton Abbey Season 5 From The Cast"

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

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

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

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 narrativ

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

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 a

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. Continue reading at BuzzFeed...