[Televisionary]

The creative force behind the period drama talks about where his characters are as his show begins its final episodes. “We left off with everyone’s material needs being met in an extreme way,” says Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner of where we last saw the characters on his critically acclaimed period drama when the show went on hiatus 10 months ago. “Then the issue is, what else is there?” That is the central question with the return to US TV of the AMC hit, one demanding to be answered by both the show’s characters, and its creator whose success is the envy of the television industry. Mad Men has been a defining part of Weiner’s life for the last 15 years. He wrote the pilot script on spec while he was a staff writer on CBS’ Ted Danson sitcom Becker in 1999, using it to land a writing gig on HBO’s The Sopranos in 2002. It would take another five years, filled with multiple rejections, before the first episode of Mad Men would make it on the air. Someone with less determination or vision

Switched at Birth , which kicked off a multi-episode arc last night about campus rape featuring one of its main characters, might just be the bravest show on television. The anger directed at HBO's   The Newsroom   in December in the wake of   an episode that attempted to capitalize on the debate surrounding the scourge of college sexual assault   crystallized the complexity of emotions surrounding the very complicated issue plaguing campuses nationwide. At the time, the   Rolling Stone /UVA debacle was dominating headlines — a magazine story that was meant to serve as crusading journalism, peeling back the lid of insidious behavior at the Virginia university and bringing awareness of the situation to a larger audience, instead had the opposite effect as the story's factual basis was attacked and the magazine backed away from supporting the writer. Any platform that the story could have provided rape victims — particularly those on college campuses — was undone, and the piece i

HBO's stranger-than-fiction true crime documentary The Jinx   — about real estate heir Robert Durst — brings the chills and thrills missing since Serial   wrapped up its first season. Serial   obsessives: HBO's latest documentary series is exactly what you've been waiting for.   The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst , like Sarah Koenig's beloved podcast, sifts through old documents, finds new leads from fresh interviews, and seeks to determine just what happened on a fateful day in which the most foul murder was committed. And, also like  Serial  before it,  The Jinx may also hold no ultimate answer to innocence or guilt. But that seems almost beside the point; such investigations often remain murky and unclear, and guilt is not so easy a thing to be judged. Instead, this upcoming six-part tantalizing murder mystery, from director Andrew Jarecki ( Capturing the Friedmans ), is a gripping true crime story that unfolds with all of the speed of a page-turner; it

  Farewell, Team Braverman. It couldn't be more fitting that  Parenthood , which wrapped up its six-season run on Jan. 29, ended with a baseball game. The pilot episode of the Jason Katims-created show ( very  loosely based on the 1989 feature film) ended in the same fashion: After a negative experience, Max Braverman (Max Burkholder) doesn't initially want to play in his baseball game, but when he changes his mind, the entire Braverman clan races to get him there in time.  There's a beautiful sense of symmetry, therefore, to how  Parenthood 's final episode ended, with the Bravermans uniting to celebrate one of their own, Zeek (Craig T. Nelson), on the baseball diamond, fulfilling his wishes and bringing each other closer together in the process. With the series bookended both by the most American of sports — Crosby (Dax Shepard) once refers to baseball as the Bravermans' "religion" — and by Sarah (Lauren Graham) finding her true place (moving in with her

Adult Swim’s surreal satire of sitcoms subverts our expectations of nostalgia. You might be able to go home, but it will never be the same. "Too Many Cooks" began as an Adult Swim parody that aired on Cartoon Network's late-night block for a week or so at the end of October, but since then, the surreal and twisted 11-minute video has gone viral in a way that even its creators,  Chris "Casper" Kelly ( Squidbillies ) and Paul Painter, have been gobsmacked by . What is it about this short that has exerted such a magnetic pull on so many? "Too Many Cooks" is, on the surface, initially a parody of 1970s and 1980s sitcoms that once populated the television landscape. These are the types of shows you might recall watching from the couch of your grandparents' house, shows like  The Brady Bunch ,  Three's Company ,  Family Matters , and  Perfect Strangers  with their familiar theme songs and title sequences, once hallmarks of the sitcom form. They'r

The CBS legal drama, now in its sixth season, continually shakes up its narrative foundations and proves itself fearless in the process. Spoilers ahead, if you’re not up to date on the show. At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, " The Good Wife Is The Best Show On Television Right Now," in which I praise CBS' The Good Wife and, well, hail it as the best show currently on television. (Yes, you read that right.) There is no need to be delicate here: If you’re not watching The Good Wife, you are missing out on the best show on television. I won’t qualify that statement in the least — I’m not talking about the best show currently airing on broadcast television or outside of cable or on premium or however you want to sandbox this remarkable show. No, the legal drama is the best thing currently airing on any channel on television. That The Good Wife is this perfect in its sixth season is reason to truly celebrate. Few shows embrace complexity and risk-taking in t

The new Showtime drama joins movies Gone Girl and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby in its exploration of gender wars, a topic that’s currently heating up the pop culture landscape. Warning: Minor spoilers for both films and the series ahead. At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, " The Affair Advances Hollywood’s Heated War-Between-The-Sexes Conversation," in which I review Showtime's The Affair and examine it in the context of the similarly themed battle-of-the-sexes dramas Gone Girl and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby . While we can attempt to empathize, it’s impossible to truly ever know every crevice of someone’s psyche, whether it’s the stranger you pass in the street or your own spouse. Other people are innately unknowable. Gone Girl, whose gender politics have been hotly debated, takes this notion to an operatic and hyper-intense place as the audience is forced to contend with the unreliability of two narrators — Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), the