tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-219736132024-03-23T11:32:19.138-07:00[Televisionary]<center></center>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.comBlogger3816120tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-92189456701103492882021-01-14T13:40:00.002-08:002021-01-14T14:28:57.194-08:00Televisionary<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; orphans: 2; white-space: pre-wrap; widows: 2;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; orphans: 2; white-space: pre-wrap; widows: 2;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUWG-Uen-sk-TIzs3TlSc5QpdkU_kqZW2yHLozWErrigxDRx0706NXFV2SKaAIy9qLCeM-TkAnIFbzatey4MBRYzUM83LIvshFdeDRoJVb21xYoCjTcNguRgPj1Z4FxF5u4QpBeQ/s750/image-asset+%25281%2529.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="563" data-original-width="750" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUWG-Uen-sk-TIzs3TlSc5QpdkU_kqZW2yHLozWErrigxDRx0706NXFV2SKaAIy9qLCeM-TkAnIFbzatey4MBRYzUM83LIvshFdeDRoJVb21xYoCjTcNguRgPj1Z4FxF5u4QpBeQ/s320/image-asset+%25281%2529.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Back in 2006, I founded a television blog called Televisionary (the very one you're reading now). </div></span></span></span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; orphans: 2; white-space: pre-wrap; widows: 2;">At the time, it was a little side-project that I stared while working in television development: something to do during the off-hours or (my infrequent) down-time or at my desk during my lunch breaks. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; orphans: 2; white-space: pre-wrap; widows: 2;"><br /></span>Over the next few years, Televisionary morphed into a full-time job as I watched almost everything on television and cataloged my thoughts, penning reviews, conducting interviews with talent, breaking news, and aggregating the day’s entertainment news headlines and major listings every morning. It got noticed by <em style="overflow-wrap: break-word;">Entertainment Weekly</em> and <em style="overflow-wrap: break-word;">The New York Times</em>, <em style="overflow-wrap: break-word;">The Chicago Tribune </em>and CNN, Deadline and <em style="overflow-wrap: break-word;">Variety</em>.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />Televisionary took on a life of its own. It became discussed in Hollywood and I was always surprised to discover that actors or producers or executives who read my TV blog. It was a secret at first, one that I eventually shared with a few friends before spreading outwards, thanks to the advent of social media. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Eventually, Televisionary led me to opportunities with <em style="overflow-wrap: break-word;">The Los Angeles Times</em> and then The Daily Beast (and a bit later into a joint venture with <em style="overflow-wrap: break-word;">Newsweek</em>) — where I would serve as television critic and later West Coast Deputy Bureau Chief — and eventually to BuzzFeed, where my title was Entertainment Editorial Director.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />Fifteen years ago (!), I had no idea where this blog would take me or the adventures that I would have along the way. The simple act of sitting in front of a computer screen and writing down my thoughts about television led me to some amazing interviews and opportunities. But it all started with an idea.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />This is an archive of all of those Televisionary posts during those years — the prolific years, the quiet years, the years where I was experimenting, the years where people were listening and where my words had an effect, the years where I was excited to jump out of bed at 5:30 a.m. and write before work, and the years where it was all I had professionally. This is a record of those times. A different time on the Internet and a different time for me, as a writer, a person, and a human being.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />Enjoy.</span></p>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-13239219235439018552015-04-05T15:12:00.001-07:002021-01-15T15:16:15.364-08:00BBC Culture: Matthew Weiner: Mad Men’s creator on its final episodes<p><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(77, 77, 73); color: #4d4d49; font-family: ReithSerif, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 26px; letter-spacing: -1.6299999952316284px;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR_B7NPWU7PN9qgTgwYtcT46KBH6UdfSebZWtTtPIBansx-_2D2Ui1Bm8uCrcLvmxiSlR6Yk1oFhsUvvPuCVH2ezBbDAu6PeUQfQ0T2aNWarw7D_TDtcEP6Q54vVs6dJhVJsr1sw/s1600/p02ndtlh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR_B7NPWU7PN9qgTgwYtcT46KBH6UdfSebZWtTtPIBansx-_2D2Ui1Bm8uCrcLvmxiSlR6Yk1oFhsUvvPuCVH2ezBbDAu6PeUQfQ0T2aNWarw7D_TDtcEP6Q54vVs6dJhVJsr1sw/s320/p02ndtlh.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>The creative force behind the period drama talks about where his characters are as his show begins its final episodes.<p></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: ReithSans, Arial, Helvetica, freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 16px;">“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?”</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: ReithSans, Arial, Helvetica, freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 16px;">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.</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: ReithSans, Arial, Helvetica, freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px;">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.</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: ReithSans, Arial, Helvetica, freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: ReithSans, Arial, Helvetica, freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 16px;">Someone with less determination or vision might have given up, or taken an easier path. Fear and regret thread their way through this week’s mid-season premiere of Mad Men, titled Severance, which examines “the life not lived” for several characters, including Don Draper (Jon Hamm), Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) and Ken Cosgrove (Aaron Stanton). It’s only fitting that Peggy Lee’s 1969 song Is That All There Is? provides the soundtrack.</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: ReithSans, Arial, Helvetica, freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 16px;">The leaders of ad agency Sterling Cooper & Partners have received a windfall in the time between last year’s finale and Severance, the result of the firm’s sale to rival McCann Erickson. But that wealth doesn’t mean each of the characters is satisfied with what they have. That conflict between fulfillment and disappointment powers the episode. And it’s a theme that resonates deeply for Weiner, who spoke on the phone to BBC Culture about Severance and shares just how closely the episode, and Mad Men, springs from his personal experience.</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: ReithSans, Arial, Helvetica, freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 16px;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">What could have been</strong></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: ReithSans, Arial, Helvetica, freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px;">In Severance, Don has a vivid dream of his former lover, Rachel Katz (Maggie Siff), and learns that she has died; he then meets a waitress, Diana (Elizabeth Reaser), whom he feels he already knows. Ken is pushed to quit his job and fulfill his long-standing dream to be a novelist; but when he’s fired instead, he can’t let it go. Joan returns to the department store where she once worked but, when recognised, pretends to be someone else. Peggy impulsively decides to fly to Paris with a stranger (Devon Gummersall), but can’t remember where she left her passport. The audience is left to contemplate whether these occurrences are mere coincidences – did Don just happen to dream of Rachel after her death or did he often dream of her? – or signs of something deeper.</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: ReithSans, Arial, Helvetica, freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: ReithSans, Arial, Helvetica, freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px;"><a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20150403-mad-mens-creator-on-the-end" target="_blank">Continue reading at BBC Culture...</a></p>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-89823791964108145942015-02-14T14:56:00.021-08:002021-01-18T18:22:11.059-08:00BuzzFeed: ABC Family’s Campus Rape Storyline Goes Where Scripted Television Hasn’t Gone Before<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKiVpYiNmAY4zzHjs2LgEuRc7HmrIuZwhooW1NLmlLqBPY_aXTDdsRc3eXsmJiaISxHPZ0WMRcKB3m4bgLhHnNOYYvrPOyirWUJD0vZQrf9CzXJhM9PSPrWZeLya9kM5_e1XiI1Q/s1566/150210-linton-campus-rape-tease_llqdwc.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="880" data-original-width="1566" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKiVpYiNmAY4zzHjs2LgEuRc7HmrIuZwhooW1NLmlLqBPY_aXTDdsRc3eXsmJiaISxHPZ0WMRcKB3m4bgLhHnNOYYvrPOyirWUJD0vZQrf9CzXJhM9PSPrWZeLya9kM5_e1XiI1Q/s320/150210-linton-campus-rape-tease_llqdwc.jpeg" width="320" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Switched at Birth<span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;">, </span></b><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: 700;">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.</span></span><p></p><div class="headline__2V6cg6yv2y" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 1.5rem 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div class="container__1xi1X6X2jr " style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><p class="description__1bzzdbaw8q" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;">The anger directed at HBO's</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;"> </span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Newsroom</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;">in December in the wake of</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;">an episode that attempted to capitalize on the debate surrounding the scourge of college sexual assault</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;">crystallized the complexity of emotions surrounding the very complicated issue plaguing campuses nationwide. At the time, the</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;"> </span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Rolling Stone</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;">/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 itself has become a watchword for reckless reporting and a lack of fact-checking. In the months that followed, the conversation continued, especially when two 2015 Sundance Film Festival projects dealt with campus rape: Kirby Dick's</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;"> </span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Hunting Ground</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;">and Morris May and Rose Troche's interactive</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;"> </span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Perspective</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;">. There is something in the air at the moment — the discourse and epidemic are reaching a boiling point.</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;"> </span></p></div></div><div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div class=" " style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div class="js-subbuzz-wrapper" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div class="subbuzz subbuzz-text
xs-mb4 xs-relative " data-keywords="fast fashion" data-module="subbuzz-text" id="mod-subbuzz-text-1" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: 26px; margin: 0px 0px 3rem; padding: 0px; position: relative; vertical-align: baseline;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The latest entrée into the conversation is, on the surface, a surprising one: A teen television show waded into the murky waters of campus rape narratives in its Feb. 3 episode. But that teen series, ABC Family's groundbreaking <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Switched at Birth</span>, has never been one to shy away from potentially explosive issues of race, class, or the hearing/deaf divide (many of its main characters are deaf or hard-of-hearing and the show has embraced the use of American Sign Language and closed captioning). The teen drama, created by Lizzy Weiss, might have initially been about the ramifications of two families — one white and wealthy, the other Latina and struggling to get by — learning that their daughters had been switched at the hospital as babies. But in the four seasons since, it's evolved into a canny exploration of communication, expression, and identity.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: 1.375; margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/abc-family-switched-at-birth-campus-rape" target="_blank">Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a></span></p></div></div></div></div></div>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-91723418034209592742015-02-02T15:04:00.020-08:002021-01-15T15:16:42.567-08:00BuzzFeed: Meet The TV Successor To "Serial"<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-weight: 700;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc3p7NIGAuRk_wwllfQywQzlNfX9mkmGA6k0nnv0BTf0UjeVCKnkG_fiYo3lQe7LLWT7wilh9-vkcGQEe3p6GXX2LyyXuMFLaveDNnS597Yrhs-hNkH05FJnyUKXaxF3hv9Px7YQ/s700/original-10486-1422913607-5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="554" data-original-width="700" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc3p7NIGAuRk_wwllfQywQzlNfX9mkmGA6k0nnv0BTf0UjeVCKnkG_fiYo3lQe7LLWT7wilh9-vkcGQEe3p6GXX2LyyXuMFLaveDNnS597Yrhs-hNkH05FJnyUKXaxF3hv9Px7YQ/s320/original-10486-1422913607-5.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>HBO's stranger-than-fiction true crime documentary <i>The Jinx</i></span><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-weight: 700;"> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-weight: 700;">— about real estate heir Robert Durst — brings the chills and thrills missing since <i>Serial</i></span><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-weight: 700;"> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-weight: 700;">wrapped up its first season.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;"><i>Serial</i> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">obsessives: HBO's latest documentary series is exactly what you've been waiting for.</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;"><br /></span></div><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.375; margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst</span>, 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 <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Serial</span> before it, <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Jinx</span>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.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.375; margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Instead, this upcoming six-part tantalizing murder mystery, from director Andrew Jarecki (<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Capturing the Friedmans</span>), is a gripping true crime story that unfolds with all of the speed of a page-turner; it's breathless and terrifying and obsession-inducing.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.375; margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you grew up in New York at a certain point in time (or saw Jarecki's 2010 feature film <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">All Good Things</span>), you may be familiar with Robert Durst, the shark-eyed heir to a vast Manhattan real estate empire and the prime suspect in the disappearance of his socialite wife, Kathleen, who went missing in 1982 and whose body was never recovered. (Durst maintains his innocence to this day.) And yet that's not the strangest facet of <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Jinx</span>, which begins not with the sensational disappearance of Kathleen but, rather, the 2001 murder and dismemberment of an elderly man in Galveston, Texas. The person accused of this crime? His neighbor, Robert Durst, who was later captured in Pennsylvania after trying to steal a hoagie from a Wegmans supermarket, despite the fact that he had $500 in cash on him and more than $30,000 in his car. </p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.375; margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Jinx</span> opens as most murder mysteries do: with the discovery of a body. But, in this case, it's actually a body <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">part</span>. A local young Texan finds an unidentified torso floating in Galveston Bay and contacts law enforcement officials, who later recover several bags of mutilated body parts belonging to the same body — that of an elderly man. The victim's head is missing, but police are able to piece together his identity, thanks to a newspaper found among the carnage addressed to a Morris Black. What follows next is nothing less than perplexing — a crumbling apartment building, blood spatter concealed under kitchen linoleum, and the discovery of Morris' "deaf-mute" neighbor, a woman who, supposedly, is frequently away traveling. Though the landlord of Morris' building claims to have met this woman, describing her as "flat-chested" and "ugly," her meager apartment is largely devoid of anything that would indicate a female presence. As the police quickly discover, that is because "she" is merely a cover for the true occupant, Robert Durst, who, in spite of his real estate fortune, has been living in a cheap Galveston apartment for reasons unknown.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.375; margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The confounding and remarkable mysteries of <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Jinx</span> bring to mind not only <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Serial</span>, but other crime documentaries, such as Jean-Xavier de Lestrade's gripping true crime masterpiece <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Staircase</span>. But what sets this one apart is its stunning aesthetic. <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Jinx</span> is gorgeously filmed, with an auteur's eye for staging — there are some truly haunting images that thread their way through the series, visuals that are captured in the evocative title sequence, which evokes the wildly popular HBO crime thriller <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">True Detective</span> and is set to Eels' throbbing song "Fresh Blood." We see a woman fall from a roof in slow-motion, her hair a Magritte-like shroud around her; a line of perfect mannequins stare outward, their wigs situated just so; and then there's the title itself, <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Jinx</span>, its X lingering onscreen after the other letters have faded away. Like the title sequence, the series is essentially the search for meaning among events that seem so unlikely, so impossible, that they beg credulity. And yet that's the crazy thing: Truth can sometimes be so much stranger, so much scarier, than anything invented or imagined.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.375; margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/serial-the-jinx-hbo-review" target="_blank">Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a></p>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-42881395204074767112015-01-30T15:08:00.010-08:002021-01-15T15:17:07.625-08:00BuzzFeed: “Parenthood” Came Full Circle In Its Perfect Series Finale<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidAbNUGgUhWBialsd7ngqs55XgmVLMOKYHWhAyTZS3tmFZZ9rm6PaPbmZ8McsvkkKoFgQI7GRv69rgyA8dNQG40aW-egj2E7UWTsno1f_zk9RZE2SBh-waoxQkAaQIGJ4uvZL7Bw/s1000/B8kWZGaCMAAQSJQ.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidAbNUGgUhWBialsd7ngqs55XgmVLMOKYHWhAyTZS3tmFZZ9rm6PaPbmZ8McsvkkKoFgQI7GRv69rgyA8dNQG40aW-egj2E7UWTsno1f_zk9RZE2SBh-waoxQkAaQIGJ4uvZL7Bw/s320/B8kWZGaCMAAQSJQ.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-weight: 700;">Farewell, Team Braverman.</span><p></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.375; margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">It couldn't be more fitting that <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Parenthood</span>, which wrapped up its six-season run on Jan. 29, ended with a baseball game. The pilot episode of the Jason Katims-created show (<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">very</span> 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. </p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.375; margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">There's a beautiful sense of symmetry, therefore, to how <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Parenthood</span>'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 parents in the pilot and finally getting the happy ending she deserves), <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Parenthood</span> gave its audience the narrative equivalent of a home run with all the bases loaded.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.375; margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">And that final six-minute sequence at the end of <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Parenthood</span>'s series finale (called, fittingly, "May God Bless and Keep You Always," the first lyric of Bob Dylan's "Forever Young," the show's theme song) might just be one of the most gorgeous scenes ever to air on television. As the family gathers to pay their last respects to Zeek, felled by a Chekhovian heart attack in the final 10 minutes of the series, they do exactly as he once asked — to have his ashes scattered over center field of Marine Park and to have his family play a game of baseball over him. It's a somber but also joyous scene of connection in a series that has ultimately been about the ways in which we forge bonds with our loved ones and about how love grows and changes and is tested over time.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.375; margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Parenthood</span> has always been about taking small moments and making them instantly indelible — there's a reason why this drama affects many of us the way that it does, how it can violently yank on our heartstrings by transforming the most insignificant moment into something profound and poignant. Think of Kristina (Monica Potter) dancing with Max or climbing in that backseat to comfort her son. Or Zeek, standing over the wreckage of a car, telling Amber (Mae Whitman) that she's destroying his dream, the dream that he fought for. Or any of the family dinners in which the Bravermans came together, bickered, drank, and danced. We see this Berkeley clan at their best and worst, but these are the moments that add up to capturing a certain American family experience today.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.375; margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/parenthood-series-finale-review" target="_blank">Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a></p>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-89773427430941726742014-11-08T15:01:00.005-08:002021-01-15T15:17:21.164-08:00BuzzFeed: What’s Behind Our Obsession With “Too Many Cooks” <p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc6_MxLNUEegd0WQKyvtf-IprYG4TFoUxJbAqixNi5sCkGNasKVhXbipWo2vl51Ye8DkIn7EglC44r6JdpW18NDZCMMt8OC-lbkgUH2C0MfT8jvmKAzyT1IqAJ4MyeQYuLqKQutw/s421/Too_Many_Cooks.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="236" data-original-width="421" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc6_MxLNUEegd0WQKyvtf-IprYG4TFoUxJbAqixNi5sCkGNasKVhXbipWo2vl51Ye8DkIn7EglC44r6JdpW18NDZCMMt8OC-lbkgUH2C0MfT8jvmKAzyT1IqAJ4MyeQYuLqKQutw/s320/Too_Many_Cooks.png" width="320" /></a></b></div><b>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.</b><p></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Pensum, "Times New Roman", times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 1.7rem; padding: 0px;">"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, <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2lm9se/we_are_the_gobsmacked_creators_behind_too_many/" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #222222; text-decoration-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-style: solid;" target="_blank">Chris "Casper" Kelly (<span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: italic;">Squidbillies</span>) and Paul Painter, have been gobsmacked by</a>. What is it about this short that has exerted such a magnetic pull on so many?</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Pensum, "Times New Roman", times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 1.7rem; padding: 0px;">"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 <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: italic;">The Brady Bunch</span>, <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: italic;">Three's Company</span>, <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: italic;">Family Matters</span>, and <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: italic;">Perfect Strangers</span> with their familiar theme songs and title sequences, once hallmarks of the sitcom form. They're insidiously comfortable in a way; it's often impossible to watch just one of these. Networks wisely capitalized on this, building entire programming blocks around anodyne shows — many of which were family comedies — that were, in their ways, almost identical to one another. There's a setup, a beat, a punch line. Cue the laugh track and pause. There's a cheer when a beloved character enters the room, an audible and predictable reaction whenever a character kisses another or when a character gets in trouble or puts another in their place. </p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Pensum, "Times New Roman", times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 1.7rem; padding: 0px;">This is the communal language of television; we all know and understand these cues instinctively — know when to laugh, when to grimace, when to cheer. On "Too Many Cooks," it may not be exactly <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: italic;">Family Matters</span> or <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: italic;">Perfect Strangers</span> that you're reminded of, but an infinite number of other, similarly structured sitcoms that are recognizable callbacks to a very different time in comedies. It's a conceptual lure, rather than a specific one, that "Too Many Cooks" casts out, capturing an era before the rise of single-cams and the eradication of theme songs and title sequences. It was still a time where everybody knew your name and, as the song tells us, they were always glad you came. Where the actors would stop what they were doing and look up and smile at the camera, a literal welcome to the viewer, a psychological semaphore waving <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: italic;">right at you</span>, the actor's name emblazoned in yellow beneath their toothy glare. Because it's part of our pop culture DNA, we know instinctively what this signals and what it represents. It is pure bubble gum nostalgia, saccharine and devoid of calories, and that look of false acknowledgement toward the viewer makes us complicit in what it's selling.</p><p><b><a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jacelacob/whats-behind-our-obsession-with-too-many-cooks" target="_blank">Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a></b></p>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-35886986738232624922014-10-13T16:31:00.003-07:002014-10-13T17:21:28.590-07:00BuzzFeed: "The Good Wife Is The Best Show On Television Right Now"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjC611IHpEIZOXVHWbApnWuK1f4kOuRBRjg1ubS1NIhcAsrOXsSolK6_zXQGbmfgxoiyobCP_gYFVrRWpPvRm715U2NuYiQczKcQVA9xh6EolaZY0y_Z7DzdTEthXazeljD31KS1Q/s1600/105213-59b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjC611IHpEIZOXVHWbApnWuK1f4kOuRBRjg1ubS1NIhcAsrOXsSolK6_zXQGbmfgxoiyobCP_gYFVrRWpPvRm715U2NuYiQczKcQVA9xh6EolaZY0y_Z7DzdTEthXazeljD31KS1Q/s640/105213-59b.jpg" /></a></div><b>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.</b><br />
<br />
At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/the-good-wife-is-the-best-show-on-television-right-now#1xj1gaf">"<i>The Good Wife</i> Is The Best Show On Television Right Now,"</a> in which I praise CBS' <i>The Good Wife</i> and, well, hail it as the best show currently on television. (Yes, you read that right.)<br />
<br />
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.<br />
That The Good Wife is this perfect in its sixth season is reason to truly celebrate. Few shows embrace complexity and risk-taking in the way that this show has done and, even after last year’s stellar season — which saw Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) and Cary Agos (Matt Czuchry) leave their mentors and start their own law firm and which shocked us with the death of Will Gardner (Josh Charles) — the show has pushed itself into even more challenging territory more than 100 episodes into its run.<br />
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Created by husband-and-wife team Robert and Michelle King, The Good Wife has always looked to test the plasticity of its concept. Initially a legal procedural with serialized elements, the show balanced a case-of-the-week format for Alicia with ongoing domestic issues. The first season followed Alicia as she struggled with the decision to stand by her husband, incarcerated Illinois State’s Attorney Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), even after he admitted to sleeping with prostitutes. How would she care for their two teenage children, Zach (Graham Phillips) and Grace (Makenzie Vega), while juggling a demanding career and competing with associates 20 years younger than her? And what of her unresolved feelings for her employer, Will?<br />
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But these basic queries soon became further tempered by the deep themes that the show has enjoyed exploring over the years, issues of morality, marriage, technology, and legality. The Good Wife incisively probes our collective cultural institutions to find spots of vulnerability and exposes these potential weaknesses, prodding them with a well-sharpened blade. If the show has been about, as the Kings have suggested in interviews numerous times, the “education of Alicia Florrick,” viewers have been able to see how Margulies’ Alicia has had to compromise her ethical integrity in pursuit of other goals, some lofty and idealistic and others personal and perhaps selfish. Alicia has had to exist in the harsh glare of the public spotlight and make choices that others, living lives of quiet privacy, have not. Every one of her actions has been under scrutiny, both that of the public within the show’s narrative and that of the viewer.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/the-good-wife-is-the-best-show-on-television-right-now#1xj1gaf">Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-78721550027431817682014-10-09T15:00:00.000-07:002014-10-13T17:21:21.844-07:00BuzzFeed: "The Affair Advances Hollywood’s Heated War-Between-The-Sexes Conversation"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPjBli6YGMuAKLmwBZwWbS7dj8W4dejfndY2Iarzhz5pn8RjfYxSjdPuBA5fNNoNf0M8BBRcuN2TtUGIoOAhOz5n0aZ2_jjUiPyTtU0Pgs6rDwQKgCKTPpEsC-5C6SGhEoYBSgFw/s1600/enhanced-buzz-wide-16909-1412883107-7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPjBli6YGMuAKLmwBZwWbS7dj8W4dejfndY2Iarzhz5pn8RjfYxSjdPuBA5fNNoNf0M8BBRcuN2TtUGIoOAhOz5n0aZ2_jjUiPyTtU0Pgs6rDwQKgCKTPpEsC-5C6SGhEoYBSgFw/s1600/enhanced-buzz-wide-16909-1412883107-7.jpg" /></a></div><b>The new Showtime drama joins movies <i>Gone Girl</i> and <i>The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby</i> 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.</b><br />
<br />
At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/the-affair-gone-girl-and-the-disappearance-of-eleanor-rigby#1xj1gaf">"<i>The Affair</i> Advances Hollywood’s Heated War-Between-The-Sexes Conversation,"</a> in which I review Showtime's <i>The Affair</i> and examine it in the context of the similarly themed battle-of-the-sexes dramas <i>Gone Girl</i> and <i>The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby</i>.<br />
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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.<br />
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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 seemingly perfect husband with a quick and easy smile, and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), a Cool Girl with her sharp nails very much intact. The plot of Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl and the subsequent film adaptation, also written by Flynn and directed by David Fincher, toys with the preconceptions of the viewer, jumping back and forth between male and female perspective, between past and present, between fact and fiction, in a tantalizing and telling way, though it never attempts to capture the realities of everyday marriage. The more realistic film The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them presents the complete breakdown of the marriage between Eleanor Rigby (Jessica Chastain) and Connor Ludlow (James McAvoy), flitting between his and her viewpoints as they attempt to regain their equilibrium in the face of searing loss. It’s the grounded and ultimately gut-wrenching counterpoint to Gone Girl, depicting both sides of their struggle with poignancy and grit. If Gone Girl is the cinematic equivalent of a head-on collision, Eleanor Rigby is more like a glancing blow that nonetheless ends up destroying you.<br />
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In their own ways, neither film is easy to watch as they portray the vast chasm of perception between the male and female characters — and each is structured in a way that borrows from the mystery format: Did Nick kill Amy? Just what are Eleanor and Connor running from? They achieve their ends in very different ways, however: Gone Girl builds to a Grand Guignol crescendo of horror, while Eleanor Rigby ultimately parcels out the central issue between the estranged couple, posing the question of whether two people, having fallen apart, can ever grow back together. Eleanor Rigby, as a result, becomes a film of two halves — his and hers — as it shifts between the female and male views of the couple. The couple here is far more reliable than Amy and Nick, and Eleanor Rigby director Ned Benson goes to lengths so that neither appears wholly responsible for the breakdown in their marriage — they’re both relatable and relatably flawed. The director actually created three films out of the material that he shot on the project: Them and Him and Her, which are being released in select theaters this weekend, showing the extremes of perspective that unfold over the course of their plots.<br />
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<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/the-affair-gone-girl-and-the-disappearance-of-eleanor-rigby#1xj1gaf"><br />
Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-74609111748707932014-10-06T12:00:00.000-07:002014-10-13T17:21:13.439-07:00BuzzFeed: "Twin Peaks Co-Creator Mark Frost On The Series’ Return To Television"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ8BIneTbSqcXVWC8HvcQ8I9Zjw9JQ5JqyoMoLmldjv5daFpGCAB7-GGMRfgoB8q9WFJcSduxngwMoDp4y0vRz_l6bNI8ptjFpoJK4NcKt8RBKc1WjE29OU6rK7dS0u_fNpB7RLA/s1600/grid-cell-22962-1412619262-7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ8BIneTbSqcXVWC8HvcQ8I9Zjw9JQ5JqyoMoLmldjv5daFpGCAB7-GGMRfgoB8q9WFJcSduxngwMoDp4y0vRz_l6bNI8ptjFpoJK4NcKt8RBKc1WjE29OU6rK7dS0u_fNpB7RLA/s1600/grid-cell-22962-1412619262-7.jpg" /></a></div><b>Damn fine news: After 25 years, <i>Twin Peaks</i> is headed to Showtime with a nine-episode limited series. BuzzFeed News spoke to Frost about the revival and what fans can expect.</b><br />
<br />
At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/twin-peaks-co-creator-mark-frost-on-the-series-return#1xj1gaf">"<i>Twin Peaks</i> Co-Creator Mark Frost On The Series’ Return To Television,"</a> in which I talk to <i>Twin Peaks</i> co-creator Mark Frost about the series' resurrection as a limited series on Showtime in 2016.<br />
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Earlier this summer, deleted and extended scenes from the Twin Peaks follow-up film Fire Walk With Me were unearthed for the series’ complete Blu-ray release. But that was nothing compared to what happened on Oct. 6, as the impossible suddenly became a reality: Co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost announced that Twin Peaks would be returning to television 25 years after it went off the air, its resolution as hazy and unclear as a fever dream.<br />
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Nine episodes of a Twin Peaks revival series will air on Showtime in 2016 as a limited series, one that promises a resolution of sorts for FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) and one that signals a reunion of Lynch and Frost, who will write every episode, with Lynch set to direct as well. For Frost, it’s a unique position to be in, one that has been three years in the making.<br />
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“It’s a very rich feeling, to finally be able to tell the world about it, because we’ve been living with it for three years,” Frost told BuzzFeed News shortly after the limited series announcement was made. “People’s reactions are so fantastic. The thought that something like this could make so many people excited and hopefully happy fills you with the kind of joy you don’t get most days. So it’s a wonderful opportunity to close the circle.”<br />
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Frost also talked about Showtime’s announcement, why there are exactly nine episodes planned for the resurrected Twin Peaks, whether composer Angelo Badalamenti will return with another iconic score, and what fans can expect from this most unlikely news. In the words of the Little Man From Another Place, let’s rock.<br />
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<b>Very few artists ever get the opportunity to return to a work 25 years later, particularly those working in television. What does it feel like to have the chance to make this journey and specifically with David?</b><br />
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Well, you know, the heart of this whole experience, from the beginning, has been this friendship that we share. Everything that we’ve done has started and flowed from that. In a way, it’s a wonderful way to continue the friendship, and deepen the experience for both of us, as friends, as collaborators, and as people, working to tell a story together. Neither of us has ever collaborated with anybody else in this way, and it’s a very special relationship. I guess you can say it’s like the U.S. and Great Britain, in diplomatic terms. It’s the special relationship in my life, creatively, and I think in his in the same way. First and foremost, it’s a wonderful chance to work together with a very good, dear friend.<br />
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<b>Given that this is the only collaboration that both of you have done, what is the process for co-writing these episodes, and how has your relationship with David changed in the more than two decades since you last worked together?</b><br />
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I think that the main thing is — you’re different people 20 years later. You’re older and hopefully wiser, and you’ve had a lot more life experience. You’re bringing all that to the table. That’s certainly been our experience; that’s what it feels like to me. We’re not just trying to bring back the show because we can bring back the show; we’re doing it because we feel there’s something more to say with it, and it’s the perfect vehicle for expressing those thoughts and feelings.<br />
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<b>Why specifically is the revival nine episodes?<br />
</b><br />
Well, if you think back about the first season, if you put the pilot together with the seven that we did, you get nine hours. It just felt like the right number. I’ve always felt the story should take as long as the story takes to tell. That’s what felt right to us.<br />
There are still a lot of details that are coming together. In terms of the general thrust of this, is this being envisioned as a strict continuation of those plots that were left dangling when the show was canceled, or is it something altogether different?<br />
It’s kind of all of those things. It’s different and yet the same. It’s reassuring, and yet, I hope, equally startling and unsettling. And, more than anything it does, Twin Peaks is kind of a way to look at the world. And this is a chance to refine that vision, so many years later. As you say, it’s a very unique opportunity.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/twin-peaks-co-creator-mark-frost-on-the-series-return#1xj1gaf">Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-25029404864835658272014-10-04T12:20:00.000-07:002014-10-13T17:21:04.349-07:00BuzzFeed: "How To Get Away With Murder Doesn’t Quite Get Away With Its Framing Device"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZj24xJYHvEZqjnOo-EowMiMrIojHESJGARMAMlDA-Z29ycXFd-nSkt76nRftD-4r0uv4sfVaychBHO1yjhKksfrj_-mDjeYN5IUml6gdlB-j-mUDfYZz93XibbbGaGEY42hi5uQ/s1600/viola2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZj24xJYHvEZqjnOo-EowMiMrIojHESJGARMAMlDA-Z29ycXFd-nSkt76nRftD-4r0uv4sfVaychBHO1yjhKksfrj_-mDjeYN5IUml6gdlB-j-mUDfYZz93XibbbGaGEY42hi5uQ/s1600/viola2.jpg" /></a></div><b>The Shonda Rhimes-executive produced legal thriller might be pushing some boundaries, but its over-reliance on a wonky narrative device is leaving something to be desired. Warning: Contains spoilers if you are not up to date on the show.</b><br />
<br />
At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/how-to-get-away-with-murder-framework-device#1xj1gaf">"<i>How To Get Away With Murder</i> Doesn’t Quite Get Away With Its Framing Device,"</a> in which I examine the Shonda Rhimes-executive produced thriller and look at the way in which the show constructs its framing device... and falls short as a result.<br />
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There are many things for which How to Get Away With Murder — from creator Peter Nowalk and executive producer Shonda Rhimes — ought to be celebrated. ABC’s new legal thriller, which has aired two episodes to date, follows the Rhimes-ian ideals of its forebears, resulting in a show that is thoroughly modern and diverse, brimming with complicated characters who are inherently flawed and yet innately watchable.<br />
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Likewise, the show has already challenged several conventions of television, potentially depicting the first broadcast use of analingus (surely, this hasn’t happened on network television before) and positioning a middle-aged black woman front and center while reveling in its depictions of her sexuality. In the pilot episode, Viola Davis’ Annalise Keating is shown receiving oral sex from a man who is most definitely not her husband. It’s a brave and bold start, intended to shock, and it announces that Annalise is not going to be powerful but desexualized, nor is she going to be the one merely doling out pleasure to someone else. The show’s second episode followed up by having Annalise beg her cop boyfriend for help only to go home and engage in sex with her husband — whom she now suspects of murdering one of his students — only to roll over, a single tear falling from her left eye.<br />
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It’s a telling moment about Annalise’s complexity and further jumpstarts the sexual politics on display within the show, and it’s a milestone in terms of representation that it’s Davis who is so far engaged in these bedroom gymnastics; it’s rare to find a dark-skinned black woman on television who is presented as a sexual being in a positive or even neutral way.<br />
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But despite the impressive themes at work within How to Get Away With Murder, there are two narratives within the show that continue to jostle, rather unsuccessfully, against once another, even this early on in the series’ run. There’s the overarching narrative, one in which Annalise has put together a team of young law students — including Alfred Enoch’s naïve Wes, Aja Naomi King’s ambitious Michaela, Matt McGorry’s slimy Asher, Karla Souza’s timid Laurel, and Jack Falahee’s sly Connor — and has them assist her with a case of the week, Good Wife-style. In the second episode, they were tasked with undermining the prosecution’s case against Annalise’s client, an eccentric Colin Sweeney-esque millionaire (Steven Weber) who may have murdered his wife. The students flounder, they figure things out, they learn, and they end up helping Annalise. It’s a pretty precise formula, one that has worked for The Good Wife and countless other legal procedural dramas.<br />
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Then there’s the other narrative at play here, one that is set several months in the future and which finds the aforementioned law students attempting to — you guessed it! — get away with murder, in this case the murder of Annalise’s possibly-no-good husband Sam (Tom Verica), revealed to be the body at the end of the pilot. The students conspire, using information gleaned from Annalise’s law class — whose nickname is the title of the show — in order to seemingly cover up a killing committed by… Well, it’s not entirely clear just yet whodunnit or why. Or even if Sam is an innocent victim or something more.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/how-to-get-away-with-murder-framework-device#1xj1gaf">Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-7607549551215910212014-09-22T12:30:00.000-07:002014-10-13T17:20:56.854-07:00BuzzFeed: "Lost Changed My Life In More Ways Than I Can Count"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZkNlZkjCdoTigd739hhqq9UkhP2iD9ZYNDK60Wt5M7J6Mc8Jzo87n82YWtOhrb7DGmBh6wT-hD9WvJX4fzn-Ee-9Ih908qXJv7wsxTjNlBOKVHhQTY56_HNvc7OqVx1bbvnli8A/s1600/lost+credits.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZkNlZkjCdoTigd739hhqq9UkhP2iD9ZYNDK60Wt5M7J6Mc8Jzo87n82YWtOhrb7DGmBh6wT-hD9WvJX4fzn-Ee-9Ih908qXJv7wsxTjNlBOKVHhQTY56_HNvc7OqVx1bbvnli8A/s1600/lost+credits.gif" /></a></div><b>“Guys, where are we?”</b><br />
<br />
At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/lost-changed-my-life-in-more-ways-than-i-can-count#1xj1gaf">"<i>Lost</i> Changed My Life In More Ways Than I Can Count,"</a> in which I revisit the 10th anniversary of <i>Lost</i>'s premiere and look at how my life has changed in the time since the show first began.<br />
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I saw the pilot episode of Lost a few months before it premiered on ABC exactly 10 years ago today — on Sept. 22, 2004.<br />
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I was working in television development at the time, and a box of pilots — they may have even been on VHS tapes — had just arrived from a talent agency. My co-workers and I gathered in a tiny, cramped office to sort through the 30–40 screeners, most with titles and premises now forgotten, to find our copy of Lost. Damon Lindelof was an unknown name to us then, but we were addicted to Alias, the trippy espionage drama from Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams, who had also won our hearts with the wistful Felicity.<br />
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Twitter and social media as we now know them did not yet exist and, while we had followed the development of the super-expensive pilot in the Hollywood trades (when people still read printed trade publications), we knew nothing of the plot beyond the seemingly simple strangers-survive-a-plane-crash premise. We had no idea just what was in store for us as we dimmed the lights and hit “play.”<br />
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The 90-minute pilot was full of scares, surprises, and even a few laughs (that wonky polar bear!), and, most importantly, it introduced mysteries that had us immediately talking and questioning. And it’s the latter that became a trademark effect of the show, one that would be closely associated with Lost until its finale in 2010 and well beyond, and one that was instrumental in helping to cement the show’s massive success. (Almost 20 million people tuned in to the pilot when it aired.) What was this island? What was a crazed polar bear doing in the jungle? What was going to happen to these survivors and, to borrow the words of rocker Charlie (Dominic Monaghan), “Where are we?”<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/lost-changed-my-life-in-more-ways-than-i-can-count#1xj1gaf">Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-72950863539777391632014-09-18T10:00:00.000-07:002014-10-13T17:20:49.738-07:00BuzzFeed: "Downton Abbey Season 5 Begins With A Jolt"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI5TUW8glfjM3iUz_DVIH-6NVa4mTauLM9I0ippkj3QhEqawGMAqyeQDf-_uOgnzTw0kVsiMT4RtWNJokHrhJlblj082BsRydOXrf_Sb9EzOF_yKwY2cCo7hgVqVXOQTXD4_vuBA/s1600/enhanced-buzz-wide-11843-1411053968-7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI5TUW8glfjM3iUz_DVIH-6NVa4mTauLM9I0ippkj3QhEqawGMAqyeQDf-_uOgnzTw0kVsiMT4RtWNJokHrhJlblj082BsRydOXrf_Sb9EzOF_yKwY2cCo7hgVqVXOQTXD4_vuBA/s640/enhanced-buzz-wide-11843-1411053968-7.jpg" /></a></div><b>Julian Fellowes’ costume drama begins its fifth year with a slew of domestic intrigues in place, as well as some new tensions. WARNING: Minor spoilers ahead!</b><br />
<br />
At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/downton-abbey-season-5-premiere-review#1xj1gaf">"<i>Downton Abbey</i> Season 5 Begins With A Jolt,"</a> in which I review the fifth season premiere of <i>Downton Abbey</i>, which launches on ITV in the U.K. (Sorry, U.S. readers!)<br />
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Period drama Downton Abbey had begun to show signs of wear and tear, particularly in its fourth season, where the creakiness of the subplots began to match that of the house’s ancient stairs.<br />
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It was, simply put, not the best year for the drama, which had come off the narrative highs of its third season, including the highly emotional deaths of two linchpin characters, Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) and Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay). But, in its fourth, Downton sagged into overt melodrama with storylines involving murder, blackmail, and the shocking and highly controversial rape of Anna Bates (Joanne Froggatt). For a series that once had such great promise and potential, it felt like the life had been sucked out of the show somewhat as it was forced to restructure in light of those two high-profile departures.<br />
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Resurrecting my crackpot theory that odd-numbered seasons of Downton Abbey are far superior to their even-numbered counterparts (I’m looking at you, Season 2!), the fifth season opener of Julian Fellowes’ period drama — which airs Sept. 21 on ITV in the U.K. and Jan. 4, 2015, on PBS’s Masterpiece in the U.S. — offers a reinvigorated Downton, one full of downstairs intrigues and domestic drama. The first episode back is a bit of a whirling dervish: There are so many subplots that it’s almost impossible to account for all of them.<br />
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But rather than feel overwhelming, there’s a particularly pleasing rhythm to all of this narrative dance work, with scenes that are short on time but long on significance. Long-simmering plots come to the boil. The ongoing love triangle between Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), Lord Gillingham (Tom Cullen), and Charles Blake (Julian Ovenden) twists in a most unexpected direction, at least by the standards of the time. (It’s 1924, after all.) The relationship between James (Ed Speleers) and Lady Anstruther (a particularly aptly cast Anna Chancellor) is explored with clarity, humor, and a potential resolution. Isobel (Penelope Wilton) and Violet (Maggie Smith) are once again at odds — their temporary cease-fire marred by a new twist in their rivalry, this time over Isobel’s romantic prospects.<br />
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<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/downton-abbey-season-5-premiere-review#1xj1gaf">Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-66880365925656792582014-08-21T16:34:00.000-07:002014-10-13T17:20:36.266-07:00BuzzFeed: "18 Gasp-Worthy Secrets About Downton Abbey Season 5 From The Cast"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid_27678QkxFaQdN4kuNb_OylhW-2z1mMYFfyuFVCz42LWgsdBE47eA4_BjKpHy4IKmwW0dAWMWIvZ0WGCH5sjeFtXMMBAb5xreUIRhKpgAgP-PRLx0KQpMJ3lTyEiyn3dCSLifw/s1600/enhanced-buzz-wide-11843-1411053968-7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid_27678QkxFaQdN4kuNb_OylhW-2z1mMYFfyuFVCz42LWgsdBE47eA4_BjKpHy4IKmwW0dAWMWIvZ0WGCH5sjeFtXMMBAb5xreUIRhKpgAgP-PRLx0KQpMJ3lTyEiyn3dCSLifw/s640/enhanced-buzz-wide-11843-1411053968-7.jpg" /></a></div><b>Michelle Dockery, Allen Leech, Laura Carmichael, and Joanne Froggatt share details about the new season with BuzzFeed. Warning: SPOILERS ahead if you haven’t finished Season 4.</b><br />
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At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/downton-abbey-season-5-cast-secrets#1xj1gaf">"18 Gasp-Worthy Secrets About <i>Downton Abbey</i> Season 5 From The Cast,"</a> in which I interview the cast of <i>Downton Abbey</i> about what's coming up on the fifth season of the British costume drama.<br />
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<b>1. Reinvention is very big this season.</b><br />
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Judging from how often word “reinvention” itself came up among the cast members.<br />
“There’s big social change in this season,” Michelle Dockery, who plays Lady Mary, told BuzzFeed. “You can tell by the clothes, it’s very, very modern. And Mary really embraces those changes. Reinvention is a good word.”<br />
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That spirit of renewal is perhaps nowhere more apparent than within the character of Lady Mary herself. “It’s the new Mary,” she said. “Because she’s through the grief now and she’s moving on with her life and embracing a social life again, and exploring things romantically and also taking on more responsibility with the estate. She’s really kind of growing up and growing into a different person this time.”<br />
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<b>2. But that doesn’t mean Lady Mary will be choosing a new husband any time soon.</b><br />
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Yes, that means that the love triangle is still in full force and both Charles Blake (Julian Ovenden) and Anthony Gillingham (Tom Cullen) are back in Season 5. “They are on the scene,” Dockery said. “Mary doesn’t settle with anyone any time soon; she was never going to. That’s important, not just for the story, but for the audience, because Matthew [Dan Stevens] was such a well-loved character, and Dan, of course, so you can’t really have Mary marry someone immediately. She’s just feeling her way through things, really. She’s still being very impulsive. I love that about her, that she doesn’t always think things through. She’ll make a decision and she goes with it, and then often, she’ll regret it afterwards or think, in hindsight, she could have dealt with it better. I love that about her. It’s a very human quality.”<br />
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<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/downton-abbey-season-5-cast-secrets#1xj1gaf"><br />
Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-3558741808770252252014-07-17T19:03:00.000-07:002014-07-17T19:03:25.765-07:00BuzzFeed: "Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces Makes You See Fire Walk With Me In A Different Way"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkfCjo4MIwGZCskHOUH1k-VvKOlRrTyAk8-JZwVzY_TSYUCjiEpcJ-KYYqZNIoTGrLizERJttvYOhPYvsQ0V5vorIJN2CTX14nW-3qKukorUhJ-RrHXp6_hQCIuByP4lD6LYy9yg/s1600/twinpeaksbluray.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkfCjo4MIwGZCskHOUH1k-VvKOlRrTyAk8-JZwVzY_TSYUCjiEpcJ-KYYqZNIoTGrLizERJttvYOhPYvsQ0V5vorIJN2CTX14nW-3qKukorUhJ-RrHXp6_hQCIuByP4lD6LYy9yg/s640/twinpeaksbluray.jpg" /></a></div><b>David Lynch unveiled nearly 90 minutes of deleted and extended scenes to his 1992 film <i>Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me</i> at a Los Angeles theater last night. It was intense and weird.</b><br />
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At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/twin-peaks-the-missing-pieces-fire-walk-with-me">"<i>Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces</i> Makes You See <i>Fire Walk With Me</i> In A Different Way,"</a> in which I look at the so-called <i>Missing Pieces</i> from <i>Twin Peaks</i> — the deleted scenes from David Lynch's <I>Fire Walk with Me</i> — unveiled by Lynch last night at the world premiere in Los Angeles.<br />
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<b>WARNING: The following contains information about the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer. If, by some chance, you are reading this and haven’t finished the more than two decades-old series, stop reading before you are spoiled.</b><br />
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<i>Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me</i>, David Lynch’s follow-up prequel to cult classic television series <i>Twin Peaks</i>, has always been an odd beast. It recounts the final seven days of the life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), whose inexplicable and brutal murder is the impetus for the short-lived drama that riveted viewers when it aired between 1990 and 1991. It is also about the similarly brutal murder of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley), a woman killed a year before Laura in a similarly ritualistic manner whose death puts FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) on alert, following the disappearance of one of his colleagues investigating her murder.<br />
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One would expect that the film is a strict prequel, but it is not: <i>Fire Walk With Me</i> plays with time in a unique and nonlinear fashion, making it both prequel and sequel in an odd, contradictory sense. Like <i>Twin Peaks</i>, it is both dreamy and nightmarish, making the conflation of time make sense slightly more. There are visions and sigils, haunted rings and groves of trees, whirring ceiling fans and rustling curtains. The film itself is cryptic and strange, embracing a full-tilt Lynchian mode that the director successfully curtailed in the ethereal <i>Mulholland Drive</i>. <i>Fire Walk With Me</i> is about dreams, desire, and death. It is about answers and more questions. And it is also an unflinching look at the horrors of incest.<br />
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<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/twin-peaks-the-missing-pieces-fire-walk-with-me">Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-76445071214217957382014-06-11T11:10:00.000-07:002014-06-11T11:11:46.591-07:00BuzzFeed: "The Whole Of Orange Is the New Black Season 2 Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBru7-F_IzIym0dPr12d4UzoaGil1yDFZWsL273VLNBnOEVR3c_ySL7mHqvU2kEfBgl1KJ04Icl88jbsRGIThVi8iVjrFxgfDqbdrixPkmLHpIOVg-5bdapm2cTSooKbI1u2YN6Q/s1600/tumblr_n6ek9fjNIu1scwqxqo1_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBru7-F_IzIym0dPr12d4UzoaGil1yDFZWsL273VLNBnOEVR3c_ySL7mHqvU2kEfBgl1KJ04Icl88jbsRGIThVi8iVjrFxgfDqbdrixPkmLHpIOVg-5bdapm2cTSooKbI1u2YN6Q/s400/tumblr_n6ek9fjNIu1scwqxqo1_1280.jpg" /></a></div><b>After a sterling first season, expectations were high for the sophomore season of Jenji Kohan’s female prison drama. Fortunately, Season 2 proved to be just as juicy, sweet, and tart as you’d want it to be. (MAJOR SPOILERS ahead.)</b><br />
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At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/orange-is-the-new-black-season-2-full-review">"The Whole Of <i>Orange Is the New Black</i> Season 2 Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts,"</a> in which I review the entirety of the incredible second season of Netflix's <i>Orange Is the New Black</i>.<br />
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<i>Orange Is the New Black</i>’s stunning second season manages to be ambitiously large and somehow intimate. It’s the equivalent of a pointillist painting: from up close each dash and dot has its own individual identity and meaning, but when viewed at a distance, they coalesce into something altogether different and dependent on its parts.<br />
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In its deeply complex and magnificent sophomore year, Jenji Kohan’s <i>Orange Is the New Black</i> offers a scathing indictment of a broken system, using Litchfield Penitentiary as a stand-in for the failings of society as a whole. As the season progresses and conditions at Litchfield become worse and worse — because of venal officials, embezzlement schemes, force majeure, and general lack of empathy or interest — it becomes clear that these inmates have permanently slipped through the cracks as the most basic requirements of the prison system (keeping these women “safe and clean”) are not even being met. (The bubbling up of sewage from the toilets becomes an emblem of the corruption and rot at work here.)<br />
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The freedom of choice within the non-Litchfield lives of the corrections officers — even Fig (Alysia Reiner), the mercenary assistant warden, gets some deeper shading this season as her life implodes —appears to be wholly at odds with that of the women they’re sworn to protect. Healey (Michael J. Harney), who’s in a miserable marriage to a Russian mail-order bride, enters therapy to deal with his anger issues and creates a “Safe Place” for the inmates to open up as a way of compensating, perhaps, for his ineffectualness. Joe Caputo (Nick Sandow), the masturbatory administrator, becomes a hero of sorts over the course of the season until he too is seduced by power, opting not to do the right thing or even listen to it, such as when Matt McGorry’s Bennett confesses that he got inmate Daya (Dascha Polanco) pregnant. The truth becomes an inconvenience, something to be shrugged off and compartmentalized. It’s far easier, then, just to put a Band-Aid on matters, to drag out a nun (Beth Fowler’s Sister Jane Ingalls) to make a pre-scripted statement. Caputo sees himself as a savior of these women, but he chooses ultimately to perpetuate the broken system that surrounds them. The prison officials are, in actuality, also just as trapped — by red tape, by bureaucracy, by personal desire, by anger issues — as the inmates.<br />
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<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/orange-is-the-new-black-season-2-full-review">Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-53858816831934373912014-05-30T14:26:00.002-07:002014-05-30T14:26:56.960-07:00BuzzFeed: "Orange Is the New Black Continues The Dickensian Tradition Of The Wire"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwRt_MVso5wb0SHJY561yqJGwZIsV_amAHLd5bwVe8mcg8__O7KUm9tJ4nznttKSUui0nUXay1yXXv6TCqSmodhjNYaQmGpjvTVOIw1-g6OWKZX_PbwvdVUKDIvalOUjfA_3fNMg/s1600/oitnb_ps2_023_h.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwRt_MVso5wb0SHJY561yqJGwZIsV_amAHLd5bwVe8mcg8__O7KUm9tJ4nznttKSUui0nUXay1yXXv6TCqSmodhjNYaQmGpjvTVOIw1-g6OWKZX_PbwvdVUKDIvalOUjfA_3fNMg/s400/oitnb_ps2_023_h.jpg" /></a></div><b>The second season of the Netflix prison drama is a gripping, beautiful, majestic thing. Warning: Spoilers for Season 2 ahead!</b><br />
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At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/orange-is-the-new-black-season-2-review">"<i>Orange Is the New Black</i> Continues The Dickensian Tradition Of <i>The Wire</i>,"</a> in which I review Season 2 of Netflix's <i>Orange Is the New Black</i>, which returns June 6 on the streaming platform.<br />
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There are the television shows that you love to watch but that drift from powerful and provocative to comforting background noise, and then there are those that arrive with the momentous force of a revolution, issuing a clarion cry that is impossible to resist.<br />
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Women’s prison drama <i>Orange Is the New Black</i>, which returns for its second season on June 6, is most definitely the latter, a groundbreaking and deeply layered series that explores crime and punishment, poor circumstance, and bad luck. (At its heart, it is about both the choices we make and those that are made for us.) It constructs a gripping narrative that owes a great deal to the work of Charles Dickens, a social-minded and sprawling story that captures essential truths about those at both ends of the economic continuum. Just as in the Victorian era, within the world of Litchfield Penitentiary, everything is in its place and in its place is everything: Each of the characters is a cog in a larger machine.<br />
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The literary tradition of Dickens — so notably captured in HBO’s 2002–2008 crime drama <i>The Wire</i> — is keenly felt within <i>Orange</i>, as the action shifts between disparate characters in each episode, exploring their inner lives and hidden pasts. There is a strong sense of righteous indignation in the face of a broken and corrupt system, the failures of Litchfield a microcosm for the breakdown within the larger society. In the sixth episode of Season 2, Officer Susan Fischer (Lauren Lapkus) — perhaps one of the more genuinely sympathetic of the corrections officers — goes so far as to make the comparison, as she eavesdrops on the inmates’ telephone conversation recordings. “It’s so interesting, all these lives,” she says, her eyes gleaming with unrestrained excitement. “It’s like Dickens.”<br />
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<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/orange-is-the-new-black-season-2-review">Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-71718440969759686212014-05-29T14:17:00.000-07:002014-05-29T14:17:48.352-07:00BuzzFeed: "Halt and Catch Fire: AMC Has Found A New Don Draper And He’s Ginsberg’s Worst Nightmare"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHvJub5lBWOW0aoZ_hOCKplUdmaCpsPu4jsmFko1PgfFFUmjJbckunbaRfzuL9Fiu2tGjVtkbBtfCqNlIri4PV9gQY0CFA8RuaeOxc01n1DeU0ifRIsHbHAQraqeRd5AIdt_rbiw/s1600/1ccbf1dd-737d-390d-58ff-4570d039b872_06-refelction-0783_RET_AS_V1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHvJub5lBWOW0aoZ_hOCKplUdmaCpsPu4jsmFko1PgfFFUmjJbckunbaRfzuL9Fiu2tGjVtkbBtfCqNlIri4PV9gQY0CFA8RuaeOxc01n1DeU0ifRIsHbHAQraqeRd5AIdt_rbiw/s400/1ccbf1dd-737d-390d-58ff-4570d039b872_06-refelction-0783_RET_AS_V1.jpg" /></a></div><b>The Lee Pace–led <i>Halt and Catch Fire</i>, set in 1983 Dallas, offers up a pitch-perfect pilot about ambition, greed, and visionary dreamers at the heart of the tech revolution.</b><br />
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At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/halt-and-catch-fire-amc-lee-pace-review">"AMC Has Found A New Don Draper And He’s Ginsberg’s Worst Nightmare,"</a> in which I review the pilot episode of AMC's new period drama <i>Halt and Catch Fire</i>, which begins Sunday at 10 p.m.<br />
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Mad Men has made the world safe for period dramas: Nearly every cable network seems to be launching a time capsule program (and quite a few broadcasters have tried and failed) designed to penetrate our cynicism and trap a bygone era in amber. As Mad Men, the blue chip iteration of the period drama, wraps up its seven-season run, Showtime’s Masters of Sex and even Penny Dreadful, HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, and AMC’s Turn have sprung up in its shadow.<br />
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Which brings us to AMC’s latest deep dive back in time, the ’80s–set computer drama Halt and Catch Fire (which begins June 1 in Mad Men’s 10 p.m. Sunday time slot). The title is a reference to a line of code about self-destruction and that impulse carries over into the insidious behavior patterns of the show’s lead character, mysterious ex-IBM salesman Joe McMillan.<br />
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Played with precise intensity by Lee Pace, Joe looks like a Patrick Nagel illustration come to life, all hard angles, jutting shoulders, and slick eyebrows, who turns up in Texas and launches a complex game against his former employers by cloning an IBM computer. He is a riddle in more ways than one: a charming confident man who conceals some dark secrets that are only touched upon in the pilot episode.<br />
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Though his mysterious past remains as such throughout the episode, we know that Joe is a dark and potentially malevolent figure. For one, there are the scars on his chest, which point toward… well, I’m not sure what yet. And then there’s the fact that he wrecks his brand-new apartment early on, picking up a baseball bat that holds a telling inscription from his father (daddy issues!) and connecting it with a ball thrown in the air. Smash. Boom. Crash. As the ball careens around the glass-enclosed apartment, we see the damage Joe is doing, not just to his surroundings, but to the people he’s encountering on his curious mission. It’s no coincidence that Joe is introduced to the audience as he runs over an armadillo, trailing destruction in his wake, wherever he goes, not unlike Mad Men’s Don Draper before him.<br />
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<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/halt-and-catch-fire-amc-lee-pace-review">Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-34446849000594251512014-05-26T10:18:00.002-07:002014-05-26T10:18:40.208-07:00BuzzFeed: "The Midseason Finale Of Mad Men Is One Giant Leap Forward"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2MjRw4pQmUX5Mlmm654oa5Wt5wlhoELxcWS5ueRVfLPtsxs3rcgSM9KBqptaxNJ95x6NSLqyZv5ah4LBknOuoQOqS3VmBIqlyYaXZhZ34KxDW1DsQF1CRgz2-7_z9x3i9FuJJBg/s1600/5fedf389-2ed7-ac62-59e2-f165e5b7e77f_MM_707_JM_0207_0285.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2MjRw4pQmUX5Mlmm654oa5Wt5wlhoELxcWS5ueRVfLPtsxs3rcgSM9KBqptaxNJ95x6NSLqyZv5ah4LBknOuoQOqS3VmBIqlyYaXZhZ34KxDW1DsQF1CRgz2-7_z9x3i9FuJJBg/s400/5fedf389-2ed7-ac62-59e2-f165e5b7e77f_MM_707_JM_0207_0285.jpg" /></a></div><b>Don’t be fooled: Matthew Weiner’s period drama has always been about the future. Warning: contains spoilers for “Waterloo.”</b><br />
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At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/mad-men-season-7-midseason-finale-waterloo">"The Midseason Finale Of <i>Mad Men</i> Is One Giant Leap Forward,"</a> in which I review the midseason finale of AMC's <i>Mad Men</i> ("Waterloo"), which represents a giant leap forward for the characters and for the show itself.<br />
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For a show about the past, <i>Mad Men</i> has always been about the desperate pressing of the future against the figurative glass. In looking back to the 1960s, the show has held up a tarnished mirror to our own society, our own failings, our own future. A moon landing is full of promise; an old man lives just long enough to see the impossible made possible. Old ways — and the literal old guard — slip away. Companies perish and new ones are formed. Alliances, once fractured, are renewed.<br />
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This dance is eternal, the combustive pressure between the past and the future, between cynicism and hope. That embrace that occurs towards the end of the episode, between Don (Jon Hamm) and Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), is more than just a hug: it’s a willing and proud acceptance of a new order.<br />
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The midseason finale of <i>Mad Men</i> (“Waterloo”), written by Carly Wray and Matthew Weiner and directed by Weiner, potentially revealed the series’ endgame as the countdown to the show’s finale began. (Unfortunately for us, Mad Men’s seven final episodes won’t air until sometime in 2015.) It is a superlative piece of television that captures the hope and beauty (and awe) of the 1969 moon landing and juxtaposes against the potential collapse of Sterling Cooper and Partners, as the struggle between disintegration and cohesion takes place behind the scenes.<br />
Much discussion is made of how people react to the future, whether it’s with cynicism (Sally, initially) or fear (Ginsberg, alarmed to the point of insanity by the IMB 360 computer), resignation (Kevin Rahm’s Ted Chaough) or acceptance. Influenced by a cute boy, Sally (Kiernan Shipka) initially recoils against the possibilities that the future offers, seeing only a cynical view of the cost of the moon landing, rather than what it means for mankind, sitting on the shoulders of giants. The cost of all things weighs heavily on the show; the characters after all are always selling something: a product, the false lure of a happy life, the emblems of happy hearths and childhoods. (Christina Hendricks’ Joan even sold herself at one point.) And the moon landing was an expensive, if seismic, moment in the history of humankind: As we’re reminded, it cost $25 billion, though that seems a small amount for such a monumental leap forward.<br />
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<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/mad-men-season-7-midseason-finale-waterloo">Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-68893428250404915142014-05-05T11:50:00.000-07:002014-05-05T11:50:44.163-07:00BuzzFeed: "16 New And Returning TV Shows Worth Watching This Summer"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJA-UjZCLD8vgOg5kOUP8c2Fu5MVIJfcsZtPPNUv5zPH65tpTnG2MxxGuiGT3cHds68cmUJYfECJuxP8tJQ4tR7toOkl5W5qTI-EwC0YrnmX939dKWxYhclAIL7sjhMVm-e2KpFA/s1600/62c6afb2-a4ae-7254-05b8-f3275cfe5c36_HCF_101_TR_0422_0069.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJA-UjZCLD8vgOg5kOUP8c2Fu5MVIJfcsZtPPNUv5zPH65tpTnG2MxxGuiGT3cHds68cmUJYfECJuxP8tJQ4tR7toOkl5W5qTI-EwC0YrnmX939dKWxYhclAIL7sjhMVm-e2KpFA/s320/62c6afb2-a4ae-7254-05b8-f3275cfe5c36_HCF_101_TR_0422_0069.jpg" /></a></div><b>Lee Pace in an ’80s computer-programming drama, a Victorian horror mash-up, sex researchers, Jack Bauer, Louie, and female prisoners? Check, check, check, check, check, and check.</b><br />
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At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/summer-2014-new-and-returning-tv-shows-worth-watching">"16 New And Returning TV Shows Worth Watching This Summer,"</a> in which I round up 16 new and returning shows that are worth watching (or at least checking out) this summer, including <i>Penny Dreadful, Halt and Catch Fire, 24: Live Another Day, Rectify, Last Tango in Halifax</i>, and more.<br />
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<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/summer-2014-new-and-returning-tv-shows-worth-watching">Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21973613.post-40385394157874632252014-04-11T12:41:00.002-07:002014-04-11T12:41:56.522-07:00BuzzFeed: "Mad Men Returns With An Intoxicating Beginning Of The End"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnXjTYwGxUI3OyE3o7x0JG4ybvhnBsbQQur4D5Y9x7EU4iSqPtfAsiv3EJGwsZWZM0EKTXCkPQcRH-yDikskwY_L06S_q6zl34Crccz5Bplrc8eUFio2BERAm8Vwhq0id15tUepw/s1600/929b038a-6373-8d48-531a-7b863025428f_Mad+Men_Staircase_Group_0488_V3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnXjTYwGxUI3OyE3o7x0JG4ybvhnBsbQQur4D5Y9x7EU4iSqPtfAsiv3EJGwsZWZM0EKTXCkPQcRH-yDikskwY_L06S_q6zl34Crccz5Bplrc8eUFio2BERAm8Vwhq0id15tUepw/s320/929b038a-6373-8d48-531a-7b863025428f_Mad+Men_Staircase_Group_0488_V3.jpg" /></a></div><b>Creator Matthew Weiner prepares for the end game with the first of 14 episodes that start to tie up the AMC period drama. Warning: Minor spoilers ahead!</b><br />
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At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/mad-men-season-7-review-don-draper">"<i>Mad Men</i> Returns With An Intoxicating Beginning Of The End,"</a> in which I review the seventh season premiere of AMC's <i>Mad Men</i>, which I loved.<br />
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The first episode of <i>Mad Men</i>’s final season is an outstanding installment, offering up new beginnings for several of Sterling Cooper & Partners’ employees while pushing the series inexorably towards its ultimate end. And given the list of potential plot points that critics were forbidden to share with readers about the first episode of the final season of Mad Men, it even feels like a bit of a spoiler to say that much about the Season 7 premiere, which airs on April 13 on AMC.<br />
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Much discussion has already been made about creator Matthew Weiner’s stern warnings about disclosing information about the plot, characters, setting, and even year in which the new season is set. It’s challenging, therefore, to discuss the actual content of the show itself, but not impossible: There are simply more fiery hoops for critics to squeeze through ahead of broadcast.<br />
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It is, of course, Weiner’s prerogative as a show creator, to set these guidelines and boundaries. As the visionary behind Mad Men, he is looking to create an atmosphere in which the viewer comes to each episode without preconceptions formed on dreaded spoilers. Each episode — and season — is therefore a blank slate; episode previews are long on atmosphere and decidedly short on hooks. A phone rings, someone downs a drink, a glance is delivered across a smoke-filled room.<br />
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In the age of Spoiler Culture, it’s refreshing for the viewer experience, allowing for the audience to be unencumbered by information that could either derail one’s enjoyment or curtail the pleasure of the unknown. In a more philosophical sense, pre-knowledge of something forces you into a set of circumstance in which your opinion is altered by dint of expectations. And without those, anything and everything is possible: A plot twist can surprise or shock, elicit glee or panic. The universe of the show is closed off and therefore unknowable.<br />
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For a show — and a showrunner — that is determined to capture the ebb and flow of life itself, that’s something to be cherished and, well, treasured. And Mad Men prides itself both on the details and on the bigger, sweeping themes of its narrative, serving up a world of flawed individuals from whom it’s impossible to turn away. They make mistakes, fall, and get up again. They’re trapped in amber, existing in a different time period that feels in ways eons from the present day, but Mad Men captures what it means to be alive and how that feels. And it does so with a slick style and pulsing sensitivity that sets the show apart from the slew of copycats that followed in its wake. Weiner has created a modern bildungsroman in the narrative art style of the today; it’s tethered both to the past and the present and to the future. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, it whispers. (Thank you, George Santayana.)<br />
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<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/mad-men-season-7-review-don-draper">Continue reading at BuzzFeed...</a>Jace Lacobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00363262167315655610noreply@blogger.com0