The Television Critics Association awards were announced on Saturday night. The nation’s TV critics gave awards to Louie for best comedy, Breaking Bad for best drama; the “Program of the Year” award went to Game of Thrones. The event was hosted by Bad‘s Bryan Cranston. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Ursula Coyote/AMC
Before he was in Breaking Bad, Jonathan Banks’ most notable TV work was on Wiseguy, the frequently superb 1987-90 Stephen J. Cannell-Frank Lupo series in which Banks played Frank McPike, a cop who was the primarily handler for Ken Wahl’s undercover agent Vinnie Terranova. Banks’ McPike was a flinty law enforcement officer who tried to be deadpan and aloof, but who was so devoted to his wife, he ended up endangering his career and others’. You might say that in Breaking Bad, Banks is continuing his character, that Mike Ehrmantraut is the disgraced but still skilled version of what Wiseguy‘s McPike might have become after leaving law enforcement. READ FULL STORY »
When the Emmy nominations are announced tomorrow, you can be sure of two things: The noms will be dominated by cable fare, and the howls you’ll hear from fans will be for non-cable network shows that got passed over.
So, if you’re a fan of Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Homeland, and Breaking Bad, you can be sure that your faves will be more than well-represented. But what are some of your favorite network series? Fringe? Community? Person of Interest? Ah, I would bet that you’ll be out of luck. (Not that I don’t hope I’m wrong about that.) This will also hold true in the TV-movie and miniseries categories. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Ursula Coyote/AMC
The fifth season premiere of Breaking Bad, titled “Live Free or Die” and written by show creator Vince Gilligan, was satisfying and tense and funny and witty and ruminative. Plus, magnets! Among other things, the opening hour was a caper film as good as any you can see at the movies.
The new ad campaign for the show positions Bryan Cranston’s Walter White as a king — the king of the hill; the drug kingpin; the Scarface at the height of his paranoia and corrupt power, shortly before he tilts face-down into a mound of cocaine and comes back up looking like a clown. We know the ads are meant to be ironic, but the series itself avoids such easy irony. It’s not letting Walter, or anyone else around him, get off that easily. Breaking Bad is playing it dead earnest; the show, like the characters inside it, is a trap.
Image Credit: Frank Ockenfels 3/AMC
The Emmy nominations are being decided even as I write this. Members of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences must hand in their ballots by June 28; the nominations will be announced on July 19. Why don’t we help out these folks and suggest worthy candidates?
That’s the thinking behind the long, carefully reasoned, highly passionate, sometimes stubbornly flukey list that follows. As EW’s TV critic, I tend to have some opinions not shared by the majority of official Emmy voters. I also suspect, however, that you, the EW.com reader, share some of my passions — such as Fringe, Girls, and Community — that the Academy is unlikely to nominate. Which is one reason to agitate for them, right? READ FULL STORY »
With the last gaspings of season and series finales this week, the 2011-12 season comes to a close. And any season that gave us Homeland, Girls, a great batch of Breaking Bad, Enlightened, and what’s shaping up as a terrific run of Mad Men must be deemed a success, right? Or is the quality outweighed by the soggy awfulness of Free Agents, Two Broke Girls, The Playboy Club, and H8r (oh, let’s face it, everything on the CW except Supernatural and the attempt to bring back Sarah Michelle Gellar, who — much as I like Emily VanCamp — would have been the perfect star for Revenge, not Ringer)? READ FULL STORY »
There was one shot in last week’s episode of The Walking Dead that suggested to me the series was on its way to improvement. It was a quick moment, when dead zombie bodies had been piled into a truck. Director Clark Johnson chose to film it from a slight distance. As the vehicle rumbled along, a stray arm fell off the truck, and Laurie Holden’s Andrea hopped off to toss it back into the pile. A small gesture, to be sure, but so perfectly gross, yet, in the logic set up by the series, in keeping with the casual way this character and others now deal with the walkers. READ FULL STORY »
The TV nominations for the Golden Globes were such a predictable mishmash of well-deserved semi-surprises, the usual suspects, and dismaying disappointments that, like the SAG nominations yesterday and the Emmy nominations perennially, it makes me wonder two things: Why do I — and you; we — get so het up about awards, and is America ever going to reward John Noble? READ FULL STORY »
