But most of the show was about him trumpeting his virtue. In them, he played multiple characters representing a cross-section of society — including racial minorities and the underclass. Lilley gets points for ambition, and at heart, all of these shows encouraged empathy as much as mockery.
But a comparatively low budget proved too big of a liability, resulting in a show that at best resembled a straight-to-video B-movie … and at worst, an After-School Special. Largely forgotten, this raunchy sketch comedy series consisted of thuddingly obvious parodies of television commercials and talk shows, spiked with profanity and nudity.
Though cheap-looking, Hardcore TV did have moments of inspired bargain-basement madness. Had Entourage ended after one season, this Hollywood bro answer to Sex and the City might have retained some goodwill for the breezy, no-stakes adventures of a dim up-and-comer Adrian Grenier from Queens, his coterie of mooches, and his apoplectic agent Jeremy Piven. Whenever Entourage threatened a more surreal or substantive comment on Hollywood, it retreated into vacant lifestyle porn, populated by men whose unchanging personalities start to whiff like a roomful of stale farts.
With Entourage finally winding down , HBO and producer Mark Wahlberg needed to fill the Axe-scented void with more bro-tastic lifestyle porn. In stepped Dwayne Johnson and the mildly diverting Ballers. Set in the sun-kissed mansions and marinas of tony Miami, the show stars Johnson as an ex-NFL star who tries to use his experience and connections in the league to convince current players to let him manage their finances.
Ballers understands the volatility of the NFL, and how expensive lifestyles can dry up with an injury or the end of a contract. Easy to consume, but mostly empty calories. The duo brought back some of their most popular characters for the new show — an assortment of working-class slobs, middle-class nobodies, upper-class twits, and the quietly hostile customer service representatives who bedevil them all — while adding a few new ones specific to America. Are there southern accents?
My goodness gracious yes, there are southern accents. But the creators seemed to have run out of gas with their U. Gifford and Lynch made the first and third episode, with screenwriter Jay McInerney and director James Signorelli on the second, but all three are stilted tales of sex and violence set during various periods in Room at the Railroad Hotel in New York.
A few Lynch regulars pass through. Harry Dean Stanton and Freddie Jones have a tense reacquaintance in the first, and Crispin Glover talks his wife through a blackout in the third. There are smatterings of Lynchian humor and surrealism, but this set-bound curio is a for-fans-only proposition.
Before Louis C. Filmed in front of a live studio audience, Lucky Louie underscored its raw jokes about marital discord, questionable parenting, and sexual peccadilloes with gales of canned laughter, making the punchlines all the more uncomfortable. And with a masturbation subplot in the very first episode, its connection to C. When her rigid itinerary and Instagrammable moments bumps up against the chaos of the larger group, laughs are supposed to follow.
But Garner is better at triggering discomfort than laughter. Only Juliette Lewis, as the free-spirited chaos agent who ruins all the best-laid plans, offers a glimpse into the anarchic show that might have been. A mockumentary, starring the 3-foot-6 character actor Warwick Davis as a fictionalized version of himself — a fading genre-movie star with a massive ego — the comedy found Gervais and Merchant working a bit on autopilot, following yet another embarrassingly self-deluded but basically well-meaning Englishman.
But while the cast is strong and the special effects impressive, the TV version of His Dark Materials is still too clunky , heavier on explanations than action.
But the hit-to-miss ratio was too off, given the pedigree of the site and its creators. But Run squanders the initial rush of this couple getting together on a train for a needlessly plotty and shallow two-hander, like Before Sunrise without the stimulating conversation and earnest, heartrending passion. But Zach Woods is hilarious as the bedraggled and increasingly hostile customer-relations head.
But True Blood was about the persistence of such ravenous appetites — whether healthily channeled or unabashedly savage — and the show tied them to serious themes about sexual identity, discrimination, and addiction.
But in a way it suggests an alternate history for premium cable TV: one where instead of pumping out top-dollar prestige projects, the networks mostly carry fascinatingly disreputable drive-in fare. As a year-old whose childhood health problems contribute to a cycle of drug addiction and rehab stints, Zendaya does her best to give the series a strong emotional ballast.
But in defining the lives of teenagers through their erratic and aberrant behavior, the show lacks the sensitivity to discover other aspects of their humanity. One of the earliest HBO originals, this anthology series fit into the mold of The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents , adapting stories written by the host, Ray Bradbury who early in his career had penned scripts for both those programs.
Carville and Matalin had already branded themselves as a liberal-conservative he-said-she said couple of partisan firebrands. The show was built around a bipartisan consulting firm in Washington, D. The idea behind K Street was to react quickly to the news events of the day and to turn out episodes within a week. Soderbergh and his cast mostly pulled it off, bringing in all sorts of politicians and celebrities for cameo appearances.
But today, the insidery feel of the show breeds as much contempt as admiration. While the show quite got over its identity crisis, it was nonetheless sharply observed and bitterly funny in tracking the excruciating personal and legal conflict of a marriage falling apart. Not Necessarily the News was one of the first ongoing series that made HBO feel relevant to popular culture. But this show did try to have some fun with the headlines of the day, decades before The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight.
More about stories and moods than gags, Tracey Takes On… is a different kind of sketch show, akin to an anthology. A first-person show about the trials of a put-upon male comedian is about the last thing the world needed, but Crashing seemed to recognize that truth enough to get away with it.
Creator-star Pete Holmes trades on his modest, self-deprecating personality. This affectionate, warts-and-all takes on the stand-up scene and its personalities feels mostly true to life.
Davis challenges the uptight norms of British society by placing a representative example at its center. Sally Catherine Shepherd has resigned herself to a dull, loveless life with her simpering, sexually inadequate, drip-of-the-century boyfriend David Alex Macqueen until she has a fling with a freewheeling lesbian singer Davis.
It turns out the singer is conniving horror show herself, which further puts the squeeze on Sally. A little of this repulsive behavior can go a long way. Blame the lack of a strong, clear premise for the early cancellation of this well-drawn slice of life. A strong cast filled with rising talent led by Bryan Greenberg and Victor Rasuk as well-connected up-and-coming designers helped push the show to two eight-episode seasons.
Mixing wince-inducing dark comedy with moments of winning earnestness, Hello Ladies was ultimately a character study as purposeful as The Office and Extras — and honestly was more focused than either, albeit less hilarious. Hulot, and Mr.
Bean episodes aired sporadically on British TV, because it took time for Atkinson and his collaborators including future rom-com king Richard Curtis to construct all the clockwork gags. In its occasional role as an importer of quality overseas goods, HBO recognized the remarkable comic achievement of Mr.
Bean , airing it as one of its rare all-ages programs. Instead, it had to settle for a slew of CableACE nominations. Two key pieces of the creative team — producer Sydney Pollack and director Anthony Minghella — both died right around the time their pilot movie aired.
The film did well, but when the series finally got rolling a year later, it had lost a lot of its critical momentum. In the first season, Doll works for Em as a personal assistant and finds it hard to treat a pal as a boss; in the second, the pair try to mount a play loosely based on their relationship, starring Olivia Wilde and Evan Rachel Wood.
Each season was roughly the length of an indie film — co-written and directed by the accomplished indie filmmaker Azazel Jacobs — and got its energy from the two leads sharing their natural gift for repartee. Their insights into the nature of close friendships between women and colleagues is remarkable for both its honesty and its optimism. For the Duplass brothers, Jay and Mark , making the transition from the mumblecore of The Puffy Chair and Baghead to an HBO drama was entirely seamless, because their interest in down-to-earth, semi-improvised, character-driven comedy-drama has never really favored one medium over another.
Emerging from the same sketch-comedy laboratory as Mr. Show , Tenacious D now seems like a lo-fi, West Coast precursor to The Flight of the Conchords , another show about a musical duo whose exceedingly marginal presence on the music scene falls short of their aspirations. Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney followed K Street with another unusual, quick-and-dirty improvisational series, which swapped Washington, D.
Krista Allen, Bryan Greenberg, and Jennifer Hall played versions of themselves: all struggling actors who spend their days going through the ritual humiliation of auditions, only to land the occasional bit part. Based on the critically acclaimed video game, The Last of Us takes place 20 years after modern civilization has been destroyed. A hardened survivor is hired to smuggle a year-old girl across the U.
HBO is going back in time for a currently untitled drama series following the professional and personal lives of the s Los Angeles Lakers, one of sports' most revered and dominant dynasties. The story of House Targaryen will be told. And Just Like That Play button link. Watch It All Stream every episode of these recently released series.
Scenes from a Marriage. Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac star in this modern adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's classic Swedish series that explores the complications of marriage through the lens of a contemporary American couple. Based on true events, Laetitia chronicles the disappearance of a teenage girl in western France.
The duo have a kind of Odd Couple dynamic that is bonded in blood and brotherhood, as the series tracks the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire. An ambitious and enthralling series, Rome was also expensive, and an ill-advised sprint through the timeline in Season 2 botched things enough for that to be that.
But going from the story of these simple but compelling soldiers through the betrayal of Caesar and the increasing excess of the Roman elites leading up to Antony and Cleopatra is all incredibly entertaining. This outstanding series explores life in a sideshow caravan full of societal outcasts who have created their own makeshift family, but there are so many interesting, heartbreaking, and even spooky stories that are also broached along the way.
The attention to production design and care taken in telling the stories of these forgotten people is truly something special, if you dare to take a peek behind the curtain. Most of us who watched could not relate to the very specific demographic of women who were showcased. And, for a series whose beating heart was NYC, the show did not do well in its presentation of gay characters or characters of color whenever they showed up.
Hell, even the main character was problematic and difficult to root for at times. Carrie Bradshaw Sarah Jessica Parker was the not-so-eloquent writer who was better at choosing a pair of Manolo Blahniks than making decisions in her love life Team Aiden?
And if Samantha was too much for you, Charlotte York Kristin Davis and Miranda Hobbes Cynthia Nixon offered up their own unique perspectives, giving the foursome an original, entertaining, and important balance of personalities and feminist or anti-feminist outlooks.
This is especially true in a time when shows like True Detective are being accused of putting their women characters in lazy, typical plot positions, without agency. Whatever class issues, or race issues, or gender and sexuality issues Sex and the City might have swept under the rug or addressed in a problematic way , it still functioned as a loud, oft-obscene call for agency among the marginalized. These are the real concerns that make Deadwood a masterpiece.
David Milch created a sprawling, fastidiously detailed world in which to stage his gritty morality plays and with it has come as close as anyone to creating a novel on-screen. Veep satirizes the political world by distilling it down to what the public likes to watch most: the screw-ups. From foot-in-mouth moments and mis-sent documents to squeaky shoes, everything Selina Meyer Julia Louis Dreyfus does is scrutinized, turned into an offense, and spit back at her through the distorted prism of Twitter and never-ending public opinion polling.
Because the main thing Veep stays true to is shining a light on the people more desperate to be near power than to make any real social impact. Is there such a thing as a sober, carefully considered obsession? The plights of our time are all on display in the series—poverty, depression, drug addiction, suicide—and the debilitating effects are handled with masterful subtlety.
As Mare Sheehan, police detective and former high school basketball star, she has suffered, and suffered, and suffered some more in ways that leave her defiant, sarcastic, and cynical, but too tough to be broken. Mare stands out for its realistic depictions of this strength, highlighting not just the impressive resilience of its women, but the ways in which the need for this resilience takes its toll, both over time and in harsh, shattering moments.
When those characters falter, or even break, it only serves to highlight that underlying strength; these are portraits written and directed by human beings with a deep understanding of how life works on the psychological margins. Set aside the recent revival for a a moment: Larry David pulled off the rare successful second act in television comedy. Curb Your Enthusiasm was Seinfeld -ian in its rhythms, with David basically playing the George Costanza version of himself as an eternally perturbed and self-defeating schlemiel who just happens to be fantastically wealthy after creating a show called Seinfeld.
A lot of cringe comedy forgets to actually be funny, but that was never a problem for Curb , which remained as funny and cringeworthy as ever over the eight seasons of its original run. Long before Hamilton captured the cultural consciousness, this eight-part miniseries tackled the same subject matter of the founding of the U. Based on a best-selling biography by David McCullough, the show went deep into this fractious period of our history, covering a lot of ground starting with the Boston Massacre in , and ending with the deaths of Adams and Thomas Jefferson 56 years later.
The breadth of the story is astounding enough, bringing to richly detailed life the key moments that built this messy democracy that we find ourselves in today. Once you embrace that, Succession unlocks as a never-ending battle of power and prestige with medieval royal overtones that is also wonderfully aware of how absurd that kind of story is.
John Oliver has lapped all the other news satire shows by focusing on global issues and devoting up to half of each episode on a single main story. He effortlessly explains complicated issues in hilarious fashion, helping his American viewers learn crucial information from around the world while still entertaining them.
Perhaps he too will burn out in time, but hopefully the once-a-week schedule and periodic season breaks keep him fresh.
Created by: David Benioff, D. The geopolitical drama that unfolds in George R. Highlighting its fantasy elements only sparingly, each of these are very human tales, as inhabitants of Westeros and Essos try to survive in a very cruel world and often, very often, fail. Heroes meet their end as often as villains; children as often as warriors. The show has garnered its fair share of criticism for its gratuitous nudity and its depiction of a couple of brutal rape scenes, but it also has featured some of the strongest female characters on TV.
Maybe this is a good time for a drama about Chernobyl. In April , the reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in present-day Ukraine, exploded, leaving a large number of first-responder widows and a legacy of environmental annihilation. The incident and its aftermath are the subject of a new, five-part drama on HBO.
I had to watch it 10 minutes at a time. Emily Watson rounds it out as Ulana Komyuk, a Byelorussian scientist determined to find out what really happened in order to keep it from ever happening again. The production is HBO-grade excellent. The soundtrack is a testament to the terrifying sound of a chattering Geiger counter. Writer and producer Craig Mazin is relentless in his depiction of human corruption and environmental breakdown, and director Johan Renck gives Lars von Trier a run for his melancholic money.
It is an anatomy of fear and incompetence and hopelessness and baseness and self-destructiveness. It is desolate and desperate and excruciating and horrible. And it should be. Hall, Frances Conroy, Lauren Ambrose. Six Feet Under is a television show that attempts to find reason and order in death, but then every episode totally fails.
Opaquely funny, tender, heartrending and sometimes deeply uncomfortable, Six Feet Under balks, down to the marrow of its bones, at the idea that there is reason in death. Somehow, though, Six Feet Under is never morbid, instead concerned with celebrating the lives of its ensemble however they happen to play out, sensitive to the fact that though they run a funeral home, they have as little insight into the meaning of life as anyone else navigating modernity at the turn of the century.
By the fourth hour he was an emotional wreck, and by the fifth he was starting to sob just at the opening theme. The series also features some of the real heroes talking about their experiences before and after episodes, and when you learn which characters are based off of them it just brings everything together in overwhelming ways.
The careful attention to detail and weaving in of historical moments will ultimately make this series your definitive understanding of the war and everything surrounding it. One that happens to star a massive cast of recognizable young male actors in small roles who almost all became A-list movie stars.
The Sopranos brilliantly and believably explored this dynamic, turning the crime-drama on its head and taking dysfunction to the extreme in the process. As unfathomable as their world was, the characters of this tragic, beautifully arcing modern epic were so real that they became like family to us, too.
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