0 comments by Matt Zemek on 4/21/2016
When season three of The Americans ended, the FX drama had earned the highest place in the pantheon of great television shows. Did the first six episodes of season four (roughly half of the 13-episode journey) live up to that newfound status? Since this is an FX Networks show, let’s frame the matter in ways an […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 12/10/2015
It’s easy to pass judgment on other people instead of remaining focused on the power of ideas. Keep that thought in mind — we’ll revisit it later in this piece. For now, though, remember this: Dalton Trumbo followed the road less traveled, sticking to the substance of his cause and not taking resistance personally. That central […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 8/19/2015
Nothing about the achingly beautiful television series Rectify needs to be rectified. The product doesn’t need any improvement; only the viewership totals do. What follows is more than just a review of season three of Rectify, which concluded this past Thursday; it’s an appreciation of a show which deserves (and, one could legitimately argue, demands) a far […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 8/4/2015
No one needs to know my politics or the politics of any other person who writes about sports and entertainment for a living. That said, I feel compelled to say that after once being a rabid political partisan, I stepped out of a dualistic “Democrat-or-Republican” mindset at the start of this century. I dropped out […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 5/20/2015
What follows is less a television critique than a personal expression of what Mad Men has meant to me and others. It’s partly an appreciation of this show, whose first-run existence is now over, but it’s more an attempt to explain why this show can continue to be such a meaningful vehicle for conveying important […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 5/18/2015
We start with a prelude of sorts, in this review of a finale: Is it possible to think too much about Mad Men? I’ve never thought so. Yet, as I began to think about how to shape the review of the final episode of this series, it dawned on me that I might have become part […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 4/24/2015
Any television viewer who wants to be captured by a great dramatic series remembers the moment. What is the moment? It’s the point in time when a show makes that leap from “merely” being tremendously entertaining and well-crafted to something much more. The moment refers to an episode or a sequence when you realize that […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/31/2015
The central and most defining feature of Mad Men — not just as a show in itself, but as a transformative and highly important program in the history of American television — is that it is complicated. Everything about Mad Men is complicated… even the aspects of the show which are obvious. One familiar complaint about […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 1/21/2015
Cold War spy drama? U.S.-Soviet tensions? Really? That’s so past-tense. At least, that’s what I thought when I first found out about The Americans and its basic premise. I was a little boy — younger than the son of Philip and Elizabeth Jennings — at the start of the Reagan presidency, when the story in […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 5/27/2014
The full story of Mad Men, whose Breaking Bad-inspired “midseason finale” aired Sunday night on AMC, won’t be written for another year. Seven more episodes will close the book on a remarkable television series… and give rise to many books by those who have chronicled the show from the start. Looking back at the first […]
