Narcos, Netflix’s new drug-war docudrama, is nearly as ambitious as its central character, Pablo Escobar. Over the course of 10 dense, sprawling episodes, the series tells the 20-year history of the narcotrafficker’s rise and fall in relation to Colombia’s blood-soaked history and the U.S.’s escalating drug war, from Richard Nixon…

Less than a generation ago, Yonkers, New York became the face of segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation in my backyard. A federal court order to construct 200 units of low-income residences east of the Saw Mill Parkway, i.e., in the white part of town, led to riots and bombings, death…

BoJack Horseman lurched out of the gate last year with a whole lotta animal puns and one uncomplicated thesis: Old sitcoms suck. An aggressively stupid and mawkish show from the late Eighties called Horsin’ Around, about an equine-human hybrid in Cosby sweaters who adopts three adorable orphans, made its star,…

After twelve years on the air, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart became required viewing during the Dubya years, when much of the nation was desperate to look to almost anyone else for political leadership. The Comedy Central series offered nightly catharsis in five- or eight-minute bursts, voicing the anger…

Prison life is reliably repetitive, but conditions can be frighteningly unstable, too. Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, which returns for its third season on June 12, reflects that paradoxical state of affairs by delivering more of the same — heartfelt but complicated relationships, inspired capers, compelling personalities, stomach-twisting flips…

iZombie is about as sunny and optimistic as the zombie genre gets, which of course isn’t all that much. Even by supernatural standards, it’s a bloodthirsty canon, demanding regular sacrifices of innocents and grisly feats of skull splitting and cerebellum cannibalizing. The CW’s Seattle neo-noir boasts plenty of both to…

During “Compliments,” a first-season sketch on Inside Amy Schumer, a group of female friends respond to every bit of praise with a verbal self-maiming: “I tried to look like Kate Hudson but ended up looking like a golden retriever’s dingleberry,” says one. Sighs another, “Of course I see everyone when…

Blues legend Bessie Smith was arguably America’s most powerful black woman during her heyday in the 1920s and ’30s. Her reign wasn’t just based on being the highest-paid African-American entertainer of her generation, but, according to the new HBO movie Bessie…

No show wears its love for language and land more proudly than FX’s Justified, which ended its six-year run this week. Based on a novella by Elmore Leonard and starring squinty-eyed sex symbol Timothy Olyphant, the hillbilly noir never received the critical adulation or the audience one might expect for…

It may be hard to remember now, but there once was a time when Daenerys was the most exciting character on Game of Thrones. Played by Emilia Clarke, the exiled royal best embodied the HBO drama’s paradoxical appeal: its mix of historical authenticity and rousing fantasy. Reduced to currency by…

Mad Men has always been, among many other things, about the exit of the old guard and the entrance of the new — and the acceleration of that transition by the mood and the movements of the Sixties. The pilot, set in 1960, finds the Sterling Cooper higher-ups scrambling to…

The world is a terrible place. That’s the uncompromising truth with which Tina Fey and Robert Carlock begin Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix), their follow-up to the under-seen but culturally monumental 30 Rock. The very first scenes of Unbreakable’s first season, which will be released in its binge-able entirety on March…

Empire most certainly wasn’t built in a day, but its reputation as a breakout hit has been made in virtually no time at all. Since the series debuted six weeks ago, every episode has drawn more viewers than the one before it. Buoyed by positive reviews and especially word of…

(Heavy spoilers for the pilot; very light spoilers for the second and third episodes.) There’s more than one way to start a revolution. You can get high off your own sense of righteousness and authenticity, as celebrity chef and Fresh Off the Boat memoirist Eddie Huang recently did by calling…

The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore’s great misfortune isn’t that it replaces The Colbert Report, but that it premieres after Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. The Colbert Report was sui generis, and will likely remain so, because such a series makes leviathan demands on its host: crackerjack comedic skills,…

Among many other things, Girls has always been great satire, lampooning with scolding empathy the callowness, narcissism, and insufferableness of early-to-mid twentysomethings who are privileged enough to spend their post-grad years making mistake after mistake with no serious consequences. But the HBO dramedy’s fourth season, in which Hannah (Lena Dunham)…

TV continued to unmoor from its origins and transform into something else this year. No longer tethered to a specific appliance, a particular kind of storytelling, or even commercial concerns, “television” now feels like an increasingly obsolete word. But that’s a discussion for another time, for we’ve come to celebrate…

TV continued to unmoor from its origins and transform into something else this year. No longer tethered to a specific appliance, a particular kind of storytelling, or even commercial concerns, “television” now feels like an increasingly obsolete word. But that’s a discussion for another time, for we’ve come to celebrate…

Despite its sumptuous displays of feudal opulence — cavalries, silk gowns, all the naked female extras money can buy — Netflix’s Marco Polo feels distinctly like scraps. Turgid, fatuous, and humorless, the streaming site’s newest series is a grave miscalculation of what has made Game of Thrones, its obvious model,…

Hospitals are depressing. Until recently, medical shows glossed over this basic fact of life by focusing on the most glamorous clique within them: doctors. For the past two decades, the upwardly mobile audience identification integral to most TV shows taught us to look away from the bedpans and sheaves of…

Bill Cosby’s present is secure. Despite the 17 women (so far) who have publicly come forward with notably similar allegations of drug-enabled sexual assault, the comedian received standing ovations for his stand-up performances in the Bahamas and in Florida recently. His comeback tour will likely continue over the next few…