Category: Television

Do you remember when everybody was waiting with baited breath for the second season of True Detective? You should: it wasn’t long ago, and the internet was overflowing with casting rumors and #truedetectiveseason2 hashtags. The first season, featuring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, was so engaging and featured such excellent performances that it was difficult to imagine how a follow-up season, utilizing a completely different cast, story, and location, could live up.

The answer was pretty simple: it couldn’t. But it wasn’t for a lack of trying. The cast of the second season, which featured Colin Farrell, Vince Vaughn, Rachel McAdams, and Taylor Kitsch, really poured their heart and souls into their performances. It is clear watching that they all realized both the burden they were taking on and the opportunity that they had been given. On projects like this, actors really have to give in and trust their writer and director completely, even when they can’t personally envision how the end product will work.

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If all your knowledge of television came from internet speculation and hype, Hannibal might seem like one of the most popular shows on TV. There are countless forums, reviews, and think-pieces revolving around the show, an unlikely brilliant re-imagining of a played out franchise (I wrote my piece during season one, which you can find here).

And yet, if you look at the Nielson ratings, Hannibal is one of the least-popular shows on network television. It has survived for three seasons almost entirely because it is a co-production with international production company Gaumont. However, this year, Hannibal slipped to a 0.4 rating and NBC finally cancelled the series. Shortly after, NBC added insult to injury and, apparently at the request of advertisers, moved the remaining episodes of the show to Saturday where it could do no harm.

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Last week, Yahoo posted the final episode of Community’s sixth season, and possibly the final episode of the series. Dan Harmon has whisked himself away from the internet to avoid answering questions, and Yahoo hasn’t made any official decisions on a follow-up season, despite claims that the show has been extremely successful on their platform. This season also fulfilled the first part of the “six seasons and a movie” fan-joke that originated way back in season 2, and ended with a “#andamovie” hashtag, suggesting that perhaps the TV series portion of Community had concluded. Combined with a season finale that actually felt like a series finale, there is a strong reason to believe that Community will soon wrap-up entirely with a movie.

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(This article contains spoilers)

Update: Between the time I wrote this piece and the time that it published, a Hollywood Reporter interview went live in which Matthew Weiner spoke more in-depth about the ending than he had before. That being said, the headline most websites are running with (that Weiner confirms the reason for the Coca-Cola commercial’s inclusion) is wildly misleading, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Weiner clarifying the comment in the near-future. He also pushes back against the pure-cynicism many critics are deriving from the ending, something I talk about below. You can find a link to that interview here. My original piece is below.

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If ever there was a show that trusted its audience to “get” its message, it’s Mad Men. The cast consists largely of characters who constantly say what they don’t mean. They lie to get accounts, they pretend to be people who they are not, and they manipulate their actual feelings to make them marketable and tie them to products. Even when characters say what they mean, like when Don and Peggy proselytize about moving past your problems, the show usually doesn’t stop in its tracks to explicitly agree or disagree. It is up to the audience to discover what the show is about.

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