Drama Archives - Page 113 of 200

Elmore Leonard obituary: Legendary author whose work inspired “Justified” dead at 87

August 20, 2013 StayTuned Staff

Elmore Leonard, a towering figure in American crime fiction, has died at 87 after having suffered a stroke earlier this month. Sometimes called the “Dickens of Detroit,” Leonard largely wrote Westerns for the first two decades of his career, which stretched back to 1953’s The Bounty Hunters and included such memorable titles as Hombre, Last Stand at Saber River and Valdez is Coming. He later became known for gritty crime stories rife with snappy, realistic dialogue, many of which were made into films. It was a pair of adaptations in the 1990s, though — 1995’s Get Shorty and Quentin Tarantino’s […]

True Blood Season 6 postmortem: What was good, what was bad, what’s next?

August 19, 2013 StayTuned Staff

Whether it was just a matter of seeing a supernova-hot show cool to also-ran status, or a case of it jumping the shark (and biting it on the neck, draining it of all its vital blood) I couldn’t muster up much excitement for True Blood Season 6. I wasn’t alone, right? There really didn’t seem to be much buzz for the return of Sookie, Bill, Eric, Jason and all the weirdos in Bon Temps, not when winter is coming and all. The truth is, the show strayed far and often from its intriguing start of being about a psychic waitress […]

The Newsroom Season 2 episode 16 recap: One Step Too Many

August 19, 2013 Matthew Grimm

Halfway through Season 2 of HBO’s The Newsroom, we’ve been treated to glimpses of something resembling a season-long arc pegged to the botched investigation into a potential war crime stemming from American troops’ use of sarin gas in the Afghanistan theater. It at least promised to keep us on the rails of a story, but then creator Aaron Sorkin continued to project his ADD and apparently crippling romantic issues into a raft of B-stories, as if the show were the sitcom it might be had it been conceived better, but isn’t. Episode 6, however, kicked off binding up the relevant […]

“The Lady Vanishes” reappears in new version on PBS

August 16, 2013 Jeff Pfeiffer

Alfred Hitchcock famously adapted Ethel Lina White’s 1936 novel The Wheel Spins into the 1938 film The Lady Vanishes, and that has remained the most familiar adaptation (despite a 1979 remake) for decades. But earlier this year, the BBC aired a new version that is now debuting in America on PBS (as part of the Masterpiece Mystery! franchise) that is similarly effective in conveying a sense of mystery and potential madness. The plot follows the lines of the novel and the earlier films. In 1931, a socialite named Iris (Tuppence Middleton) is on holiday in the Balkans. She decides to […]

Fall 2013 New Shows: Drama

August 15, 2013 StayTuned Staff

Almost Human FOX Premieres: Nov. 4 Airs: Mondays at 8pm Who’s In It? Karl Urban, Michael Ealy, Minka Kelly What’s It All About? Set in a future where police are partnered up with highly evolved I, Robot-type androids, the latest from uber-producer J.J. Abrams (Fringe) tries to use the standard buddy-cop formula to explore thorny issues involving artificial intelligence and what makes someone human. Urban (Star Trek) plays John Kennex, an old-school cop recovering from a long coma after being injured in a vicious attack on the police force. He doesn’t much care for the “synthetics,” as he derisively calls […]

“Baby Sellers”: Lifetime movie shines a light on child trafficking

August 13, 2013 StayTuned Staff

Just as it did back in 2005 with the miniseries Human Trafficking, Lifetime is again shining the light on one of the more troubling human-rights issues of our time. Baby Sellers — also produced by Robert Halmi Sr. — follows the hunt to take down an international child-trafficking ring in which newborns are bought or stolen from disadvantaged parents and given to adoptive parents who often have no idea what had to happen for them to get those children. Kirstie Alley plays the head of the U.S.-based adoption agency that seems very innocent and law-abiding, but is in fact brutally ruthless […]

Covert Affairs: Piper Perabo talks Annie and Auggie romance

August 13, 2013 StayTuned Staff

Piper Perabo says she always knew that Annie and Auggie would get together on Covert Affairs. But the long-awaited romance is proving trickier to handle than she thought. For the characters, that is. Being in the spy world necessitates that the popular pair keep a lot of secrets from each other, and not being able to be completely honest will no doubt take its toll. But Perabo says she and costar Christopher Gorham, who plays the blind CIA operative trusted with guiding Annie (Perabo) through her dangerous missions, have been through all this before. “Chris and I have been acting […]

The Newsroom recap: News Night with Will McAvoy

August 12, 2013 Matthew Grimm

Episode five of this season’s The Newsroom proved to be a low-key affair, diverging from Season 2’s framing device of the investigation into the actual investigation of Operation Genoa for a real-time, slice-of-life look at the goings on at Atlantis Cable News during one broadcast – little of it seemingly relevant to creator Aaron Sorkin’s marginal attempts to create a linear story this season. Things have jumped ahead in time in the Newsroom continuum, to 2012. Jim (John Gallagher Jr.) is back in the swing at ACN’s New York office; Maggie (Alison Pill) is back from Africa after being horribly […]

AMC’s ‘Low Winter Sun’ pits cop against cop in a gritty psychological puzzle

August 7, 2013 Lori Acken

For fans of AMC’s addictive brand of “welcome to the dark side” storytelling, the network’s new drama Low Winter Sun has a dead-serious role to fill. The atmospheric character study, starring Mark Strong (Zero Dark Thirty) and Lennie James (The Walking Dead) as Detroit cops bound together by murder, must ease us out of the final episodes of Breaking Bad and into a new season of The Walking Dead without letting us get too bereft about the former or too impatient for the latter. And, says James, who plays Sun’s seminary student turned morally ambiguous cop Joe Geddes, it’s just […]

Bob Odenkirk on ‘Breaking Bad’ and a possible Saul Goodman spin-off

August 7, 2013 Lori Acken

Yes, Bob Odenkirk knows you’ve heard the buzz about Better Call Saul, the rumored Breaking Bad spinoff featuring his fan-favorite character, morally flexible, courtroom-averse lawyer Saul Goodman. But if you think those rumors gave Odenkirk an ounce of security that Saul survives the wrath of Walter White in Bad’s Sept. 29 series finale, you’d be, well, dead wrong. “Knowing [showrunner] Vince [Gilligan] and how seriously he takes the show, he will kill Saul if that is what should happen — so you should know that!” says Odenkirk. “He would not hesitate to do that because there is a gossipy story […]