Justified: Complete Series (2010-2015) – Timothy Olyphant is U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens, a cowboy of a lawman whose brand as cowboy justice gets him demoted from his Miami posting and sent back to Kentucky, the home he thought he’d escaped once and for all. His new boss (Nick Searcy, a sharp leader with a laid-back […]
After helping turn Miami Vice into the defining neon crime show of its era, Michael Mann turned back the clock and put his stamp on Crime Story: Complete Series (1986-1988). Created by former Chicago cop Chuck Adamson with Gustave Reininger, the Mann-produced sixties-era gangster series made for a fabulous mix of genres (old-time gangster thriller, […]
Das Boot (Germany/France, 2019) shares the same title as Wolfgang Petersen’s 1981 film (and is technically a sequel), but familiarity with the original is unnecessary to start the series. Also based on the novel Das Boot by Lothar-Günther Buchheim as well its sequel Die Festung, the 2019 series is set in late 1942, nine months after the film’s finale, […]
We can thank Wonder Woman for the miniseries I Am the Night. Director Patty Jenkins not only connected with her star, Chris Pine, over the project, but Pine’s interest inspired a new character in the screenplay her husband, Sam Sheridan, was writing. The result is an “inspired by a true story” six-part TV-miniseries as dark and lurid as […]
Stargate Universe: Seasons 1-2 (2009-2011) – For a time, the Stargate franchise was the Star Trek universe of the SyFy channel. I confess I was never a fan of the original Stargate SG-1 series (which began on Showtime and then moved to SyFy) and never got past the first episodes of Stargate: Atlantis but Stargate […]
Created for Canadian TV by Chis Haddock, Intelligence: Complete Series (2006-2007) is a smarter and more sophisticated crime drama than the American counterparts of its era, cleverer in its tangle of narratives and less showy in its visual style. Set in Vancouver, B.C., a central hub for shipping between Canada, the U.S., Asia, and points […]
Killing Eve: Season 1 (2018), BBC America’s clever, compelling, mordantly funny spy thriller, is the network’s first must-see original series since Orphan Black and is even more fun. Sandra Oh earned an Emmy nomination for her performance as Eve Polastri, a low-level security agent for MI-5 who has traced a series of unsolved assassination to […]
Firefly: Complete Series, Joss Whedon’s short-lived foray into sci-fi television, was (purposely or not) sabotaged by Fox when it finally premiered on network TV. The 14 episodes (that’s counting the movie-length pilot as a single episode) were rearranged by the network brain trust, completely disrupting the carefully constructed narrative that he wove through the episodes […]
Lifetime Channel original series The Witches of East End (2013-2014) is not a remake of The Witches of Eastwick, mind you (creator Maggie Friedman already tried that) but a femme-centered supernatural series centered on a family of witches beset by a curse. Joanna Beauchamp (Julia Ormond) is immortal and doomed to watch her two daughters […]
“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. I am my own man.” There are those who proclaim The Prisoner: Complete Series (1968), Patrick McGoohan’s cerebral spy show and portrait of personal freedom as an existential prison, the greatest TV show of all time. I won’t argue the point. His insidiously […]
