Category: Television Reviews

(The following review contains spoilers for the first half of Hannibal’s third season. It also contains some very grotesque descriptions of events)

I know that I’ve written about Hannibal a number of times lately, but there’s been a good reason for it. There is not a more beautiful or more grotesque show anywhere on television, and Hannibal’s growing apathy for traditional storytelling and “relatable” characters sets it apart from anything that may otherwise approach its visual prowess. And somehow, at least through the end of the current season, Hannibal airs on network television.

Even if Hannibal’s ratings weren’t in the toilet, it would be easy to see why NBC finally threw in the towel this year. While previous seasons at least pretended to follow a procedural arc, with a number of case-of-the-week murders, the first half of season three completely dropped any pretenses and became a manhunt for Hannibal Lecter. It also threw any concerns about character relatability to the curb. No longer are Hannibal and the weekly killers the lone madmen in a world ruled by the normal. This year, every single character, from Will to Hannibal to the Vergers to Bedalia to Alana to Chiyo, is insane. Hell, even Jack Crawford, the rock that typically holds everything together, eventually meets up with Will Graham and assists in a completely off-record pursuit of Lecter.

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(The following review covers the first two episodes of Rectify’s third season, and contains spoilers. The premiere aired on July 9th, and the second episode is set to premiere on July 16th. Both episodes are available to watch for free, with no cable subscription, at sundance.tv)

Rectify has never played by the same rules that most televised dramas abide by. Its first season, consisting of only six episodes, was largely averse to plot progression. Instead, the show was more interested in how the release of Daniel Holden, a man convicted of raping and murdering his girlfriend at the age of 19, would affect his family and community. It was certainly a slow burn, but there was an attention to character that is rarely matched in any medium, and the slow reveal of Daniel’s character gave the show the sense of growth that it would otherwise be missing.

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Orange Is the New Black was never really intended to be a smash hit. While Netflix threw lots of money into promoting House of Cards, Orange was always positioned as something of an experiment, a low-risk series meant to reach a different section of Netflix’s audience. However, right from its first season, Orange has been a major sleeper hit, continually growing an audience based almost solely on positive word of mouth. At this point it is more successful (and, frankly, better) than House of Cards, and something of a phenomenon for Netflix. It just goes to show that if you write a show driven by empathy for its characters and make it readily available to people, it will find an audience.

But can Orange Is the New Black keep its quality up now that audiences already know what to expect? Personally, I think so, but there are some indications in the recently-released season three that it may have some obstacles to overcome in its transition from sleeper hit to popular institution.

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(This review contains spoilers. Also, too many instances of the name “Phil Miller.” Having two characters with the exact same name makes writing hard!)

I wrote about The Last Man on Earth roughly halfway through its season in my “Deep End” section, which you can read here. At the time, the show’s success or failure was still in question, as it was changing its status quo on a near-weekly basis. Now that the season is complete, it is a little easier to put everything into perspective. The Last Man on Earth may have been built on a high concept (the extinction of the majority of life on Earth), but it ultimately settled for a pretty standard premise.

While many praised the early episodes of the series, focused on Will’s isolation and his forced relationship with Carol, the season started to derail around the time the character of Melissa showed up. From that point on, every episode could be summed up by saying “Phil wants to have sex with _______, but _______ is getting in his way.”

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The most immediately noteworthy thing about Marvel’s new Daredevil series, the first of five planned series for Netflix, is how little it feels like the rest of Marvel’s cinematic universe. Netflix lists Daredevil with a TV-MA rating, and the show earns that rating with nearly every episode, portraying a gritty and violent Hell’s Kitchen. Even the texture of the image, captured with late-Michael-Mann inspired low-light digital photography, creates a gritty canvas for the show to work on. With an emphasis on street-level crime and political corruption, Daredevil never comes across as a series that coexists with colorful Gods and superheroes like Thor and Captain America.

Yet, from a narrative standpoint, they DO coexist. Multiple mentions of the “Battle of New York” make their way into the story, along with some newspaper headlines and plot-points. Much of Hell’s Kitchen’s redevelopment, spearheaded by Wilson Fisk (known as Kingpin in the comics, although never referred to that way here) is supposedly due to the damage that occurred in the first Avengers movie. Even if the characters only make one or two passive references to Captain America and The Hulk, the events that drive Daredevil can be traced back to their actions.

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