Drama

From the get-go of Season 4 of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, we are reminded of why there is little else like this on television. It is a nighttime exterior shot, a restaurant in a remote part of America awash in a snowstorm, so lushly designed and framed it might be a Hopper painting. It is just as rich a painting inside, where two cold-eyed types in suits and hats sit at the counter, while a distracted owner listens to barely tuned-in strains of radio. When the bigger, talkier one starts needling the owner, we feel something pointless and violent could happen […]

In “Election Night, Part 1,” the penultimate episode of Season 2 of HBO’s The Newsroom, it is, indeed, election night 2012, the culmination of two largely wasted years of presidential campaigning, with Barack Obama soon to hand Mitt Romney his own ass with a choice of two sides. But that’s not important right now. Because the confounding, long, thorny, pointlessly abusive thing between News Night anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) and his executive producer Mackenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) is coming to a head with what appears to be a whimper versus the firing squad both she and I think the […]

Sunday night’s episode of HBO’s The Newsroom saw Don (Thomas Sadoski) take his turn in front of a high-priced legal team led by Rebecca (Marcia Gay Harden) debriefing the ACN team on what went wrong with their season-long investigation into a U.S. Marine mission called Operation Genoa, wherein chemical weapons were allegedly used. Last week, we finally saw the cardinal sin that poisoned the well, main-chance-pursuing producer Jerry Dantana’s selective editing of a key interview to gird the story, but Episode 7 finally revealed what the these debriefings framing this season have been all about. Throw to Don: “A producer […]