Posts by Eric Thurm

  • Some NZT-Powered Ideas for Bradley Cooper’s ‘Limitless’ Pilot

    There just aren’t enough shows about dudes with magical genius abilities solving meticulously planned crimes on a weekly basis.

  • Portrait of the Artist As a Young Stan: Joey Bada$$ and the Anxiety of Influence

    Bada$$ was born in 1995, when most of the music that influences him was being made. But an attempt to simply live up to Biggie and Tupac’s heights is bound to fail.

  • I Get Older, ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ Stays the Same

    “I think we’re just hitting our stride,” Frank says in the sixth episode of this season.

  • Common Would Like to Judge Your Furniture

    Beyond opening the gates to all sorts of other lame reality competition series hosted by rappers, ‘Framework’ gives Common an opportunity to say a bunch of things that might actually function better as satirical commentary on clueless reality tropes.

  • ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ Keeps Fresh by Going Old-School

    This is a series of very deep lightness. ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ might not be a ratings smash, but it’s a decently successful, award-winning, non–‘Big Bang Theory’ sitcom in its second season, and that in itself is a minor miracle.

  • Sticking the Landing: On the Beautiful Finale of ‘The Comeback’

    Sunday’s Season 2 (and possibly series) finale did something remarkable — it gave viewers an entirely different perspective on who the main character was.

  • Nothing Exciting Should Happen on ‘Homeland’ Ever Again

    By ‘Homeland’ standards, pretty much nothing happened in the Season 4 finale that aired on Sunday night. But “Long Time Coming” is one of the best episodes of the last two seasons of the series, precisely because it’s by far the quietest.

  • A Two-Sided Affair With ‘The Affair’

    ‘The Affair’ follows the evolution of the torrid extramarital relationship between Noah (Dominic West) and Alison (Ruth Wilson), and its effect on their spouses, Helen (Maura Tierney) and Cole (Joshua Jackson) … but with a twist: Each episode is split between the accounts of each lover as they are interrogated about a murder. This two-part structure allows ‘The Affair’ to explore the gap between their recollections of events and the fragility of human memory. But ‘The Affair’ has some perceptual issues of its own. This is ‘The Affair,’ reviewed in the style of ‘The Affair.’

  • The ‘Newsroom’ Finale: Why Couldn’t We Have This Version of the Show?

    “What Kind of Day Has It Been” featured several small, genuinely weird, endearing moments, aided by the fact that, no matter the show’s other problems (and there were many), its cast was — and really always was — dynamite.

  • The End of ‘The Newsroom’ Is Bringing Out the Worst in Aaron Sorkin

    With only one episode left before the end of the series, Sorkin managed to produce an episode of The Newsroom that exemplified all of the show’s worst tendencies, to such an extreme that it may make it impossible for me to take anything he writes or has written seriously ever again.

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