(This review contains spoilers)
FX’s Justfified came to a close on Tuesday with a widely-acclaimed finale that defied expectations. Now that we have a complete work to draw from, it is time to look back on a show that was at times great, at times underwhelming, but almost always entertaining.
(This post contains spoilers for the first season of Better Call Saul)
Throughout its first season, Better Call Saul has managed the near-impossible: being an excellent spin-off series. Such a feat requires a very careful balance. If a spin-off simply tries to capture the magic of the original work (Breaking Bad, in this case), then it is doomed to end up a pale imitation of the previous show. On the other hand, if a spin-off goes too far off in the other direction, it risks alienating the very audience that it needs to justify its existence.
Right out the gates, Better Call Saul establishes itself as a spiritual successor to Breaking Bad with its own distinct worldview. Like the previous series, Saul is heavily focused around its central protagonist, and its portrayal of Albuquerque extends from the character. Several plotlines have weaved in and out of each other in these initial ten episodes, but the show has never strayed too far from its central identity. Better Call Saul’s first season displays a confidence that is exceedingly rare in television, and ultimately stronger than the initial season of its parent show.
There is a clear feeling going into the start of Community’s sixth season that the show may have outlived its usefulness. The audience knows it, the cast seems to know it, and the writers most definitely know it. This is a show which has lost its showrunner, reclaimed him, gotten cancelled, been picked up by a channel known primarily as a search engine, and lost three of its seven leads. Abed puts it best when explaining his apprehension to the premiere’s new character, Paget Brewster’s Frankie Dart: “My umbrella concern is that you, as a character, represent the end of what I used to call ‘our show,’ which was once an unlikely family of misfit students, and is now a pretty loose-knit group of students and teachers, none of whom are taking a class together, in a school which, as of your arrival, is becoming increasingly grounded, asking questions like ‘how do any of us get our money, when will we get our degrees, and what happened to that girl I was dating?’ as opposed to questions that I consider more important, such as ‘what is real, what is sanity, is there a god, where’s that Pierce hollogram?’”
Outside of Community, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has had perhaps the strangest road to release of any show this season. Schmidt was ordered as a new sitcom for NBC, riding on the network’s history with creator and writer Tina Fey. However, the NBC of today is quite different than the NBC of 2006-2013, when 30 Rock aired. After the end of The Office and 30 Rock, NBC decided to turn away from their comedies, which had always been critical darlings, in hopes of reaching a much broader and ratings-friendly audience with a focus on dramas. Since then, they have cancelled Community and put an end to Parks and Recreation, and the few broader comedies that they have remaining (such as About a Boy, Undateable, and Marry Me) are almost certain to be cancelled after their current seasons.
This left NBC in a bit of a predicament: here they had a very strange show from a creative team whose past work had never garnered huge ratings, and absolutely nowhere to put it on their schedule. So, instead of cancelling Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt pre-air or leaving it to die in a bad timeslot, they agreed to skip the awkward “will this show get picked up somewhere else?” phase and offer it to Netflix. It was a win-win for everybody…at least until NBC decided to launch a comedy series online subscription service last week with no actual comedies to offer. C’est la vie.
(Spoilers follow for both seasons of Sleepy Hollow)
Season one of Sleepy Hollow was one of the biggest surprises of the 2013-2014 TV season. Before airing, the series looked like one of the most sure-fire misses on Fox’s slate, a modern-day update of the Sleepy Hollow story involving time travel and a machine gun wielding headless horseman. Just watch the trailer below and tell me that it doesn’t look like the stupidest show you’ve ever seen.