The End of The Good Wife
It’s been a turbulent run for CBS legal drama The Good Wife, and after seven long years it’s coming to an end. The series, from creators Robert and Michelle King, was a solid player early on before peaking in a brilliant, chaotic fifth year – but it’s gone steadily downhill ever since, with inelegant character exits and stiff procedural storylines. This seventh season has been all over the place, but some more recent episodes have recaptured some of that early Good Wife magic. Can it stick the landing? We’ll be back with a retrospective on the series in May.
The Americans: Better Than Ever?
The best show currently on television is back this week, with a fourth season that critics are already hailing as yet another step-up. In the vein of Breaking Bad and other pantheon dramas, The Americans seems to get richer, deeper, and more powerful by the year. If it continues on this trajectory – as it appears to be doing – we could have an all-timer on our hands. I’ll be checking in midway through the season, in April.
All the Way and Confirmation: American History on HBO
Every once in awhile, HBO nails the docudrama. Their yearly slate for 2016 is kicking off this April with Confirmation, an Anita Hill biopic starring Kerry Washington, and the Bryan Cranston-as-LBJ epic All the Way (launching in May). We’ve seen Robert Schenkkan’s All the Way on the stage, and it’s a lively, thorny and engrossingly intelligent play; he’s adapting the work himself for director Jay Roach, whose filmography (including his HBO movies) is pretty uneven, but who’s also gathered an all-star supporting cast including Melissa Leo, Anthony Mackie and Frank Langella. And Confirmation, if done right, will be a vital movie for this political climate, which, between the death of Antonin Scalia and the race-related controversies looming over the presidential campaign, could seriously use some artistically-motivated historical context.
The Final Act of The People v. O.J. Simpson
What initially sounded like a misguided attempt at historical melodrama has swiftly proven itself as one of the season’s best – and, Jesus, most well-acted – things on TV. The anthology from Ryan Murphy and Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski has looked at the O.J. Simpson trial with a faithfulness to the facts, while putting a probing spotlight on questions of gender, race and media that feel all the more prescient in 2016. All episodes that were pre-screened for critics have now aired, so while we all know what “happens,” we’ll see how O.J. approaches the case’s endgame – and if it can stick the landing, given how much promise it’s already shown. Look for a review to follow the season finale in April.
Conversation on The Carmichael Show
One of the quieter bright spots of 2015 was The Carmichael Show, Jerrod Carmichael’s Norman Lear-esque NBC sitcom, which quietly came and went over three weeks in the dead heat of summer. It’s back with a Cosby-centric episode as the season premiere. Last year, the family sitcom negotiated topics of gun violence, Black Lives matter and a whole lot else in episodes that kept every element of character, comedy and story in the realm of conversation, and that pattern remains in-tact for season two. The cast is terrific, especially David Alan Grier and Loretta Devine as Carmichael’s parents, and while the writing is still evening out, it’s never less than enthralling to simply watch a family sit around and talk about topics that matter. With politics the way it is right now, there’s as much laughter here as there is therapy.