Best served cold: Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons are in the midst of bad stuff in Season 2 of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, now on iFlix.
Winter is coming.
That’s the recurring phrase of doom on HBO’s Game of Thrones, and it applies to our late-season TV viewing as well. We wait a whole year to catch up with Jon Snow, Khaleesi and The Imp, and quick as a wink, the season is over. We plunge into Silicon Valley, Veep and other HBO series, and they wrap up by end of August as well.
What’s the avid TV viewer to do when winter comes?
Fortunately, there’s still plenty to watch in the “ber” months leading to Christmas. With returning series from HBO, as well as must-watch shows on AMC and FX returning for a second helping, the winter months won’t seem as bleak as the White Walkers would have us believe.
• Those who tuned into Season 1 of The Knick (which premiered Season 2 on HBO’s Cinemax Oct. 17 and HBO on Oct. 21) will be eager to pick up the thread of the Steven Soderbergh-directed period drama about a truly bizarro hospital called The Knickerbocker in New York City, circa 1900. You think healthcare is troublesome for Americans today? Just drop into The Knick, where last season, Clive Owen’s Dr. John Thackery was still trying to develop a system for safe blood transfusion, all the while battling a cocaine addiction (a common self-medicating option for sleep-deprived doctors at the time, and also legal; unfortunately, they treated his addiction by substituting heroin.).
Returning to The Knick are pugilistic black surgeon Dr. Algernon Edwards (Andre Holland) struggling to hold on to his job as chief surgeon — and his eyesight — as Thackery recovers; there’s Herman Barrow (Jeremy Bobb), scheming manager of The Knick who’s in debt to gangsters; not to mention Nurse Lucy Elkins (Eve Hawson) who has a thing for Thackery, and Sister Harriet (Cara Seymour), a Catholic nun who secretly performs abortions for unwed mothers. Owen is a standout as the brilliant but flawed Dr. Thackery, but the whole series is character-rich, delving into the politics and history of New York City, the struggle for funding a hospital that is losing wealthy patients and turning more often to helping the indigent (never a profitable proposition).
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• Also returning for seconds is HBO’s The Leftovers, Damon Lindelof’s series adaptation of the Tom Perrotta novel about what happens when 140 million people on earth are suddenly raptured, leaving behind a puzzled and frightened populace of survivors, or “leftovers.” Developed with Perrotta, season one stuck closely to the novel, while the second season picks up on the lives in a small Texas town called Jarden, immune to the sudden shift in the human population. Those who think they were left behind for their sins call themselves the Guilty Remnant, and it’s the subtle shades of paranoia and suspicion driving the characters in The Leftovers that make it such a bizarre television experience. You thought Lindelof’s Lost was a surreal experience? The Leftovers specializes in unexplainable moments and images that would have been hard to insert even into a brain-fracking show like Lost: in the second season opener, a woman casually waters her lawn wearing a wedding dress; teenage girls run naked through a forest in slow motion, for reasons unknown; firefighters arrive to burn down the home of a man who claims he can “read” people’s futures (shades of the fire department in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451). A disquieting mood of fear drives the series: even the name of the New York town in Season 1 — Mapleton —suggested that classic paranoid Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” Season 2 opens in Jarden, Texas: a town with a population of 9,261 and “zero departures.”
• Viewers turned out in droves for the return of AMC’s sixth season of The Walking Dead — not unlike the zombies surrounding the idyllic fortress of Alexandria, where Rick, Michonne, Morgan, Carol and the rest of the hardened survivors are struggling to battle-train the sheltered populace even as a new apocalyptic threat looms: the “W” people are on the move, trying to storm the gated community. The Walking Dead has so often risen above its pulpy horror origins to mirror modern society that we’ve run out of things to say it’s a metaphor for: the gated fortress of Alexandria is not unlike America in the Donald Trump era, calling for a wall to keep out invaders; the zombies are not unlike the demands of the modern world, constantly depleting our resources and attention in a barrage of multi-tasking; and Rick and his people are the world’s true noble survivors, but this smart, literate show continues to question the cost of that quest for survival. Yes, and a lot of zombies get splattered, too.
• Speaking of winter, fans of perpetually ice-bound Fargo (the TV series executive produced — and endorsed — by Joel and Ethan Coen and developed by Noah Hawley) have been psyched for Season 2 — this time with a whole new set of characters and a new tale of murder and escalating mayhem set in 1979 Minnesota and involving Kirsten Dunst, Ted Danson and a crew of character actors ready to lift the television bar beyond even Twin Peaks levels. Last season, we watched bland serial killer Billy Bob Thornton battle for the soul of milquetoast insurance salesman Martin Freeman; this time around, the FX series turns back the clock to a few decades earlier, and though we’re not sure yet how the whole drama will connect to the Coen Brothers’ dark classic from 1996, you can sure that it will be equally dark, twisted, poetic and more substantively addictive than most TV viewing out there. Stream Season 2 on iFlix.
• When Ben Affleck and Matt Damon started Project Greenlight for HBO back in 2001, the mission was to spot raw talent and create breakout directors. Like most reality TV shows (I’m looking at you, American Idol), the results are often spotty, with winners often falling short of the mark of expected smash success. Project Greenlight was a worthy endeavor, though, and this season, original creators Damon and Affleck are onboard again, this time trying to find the next great comic director. With a premiere that focused on a (typically diverse) batch of would-be directors and director tandems, the first task was having each contestant craft a short film out of a script scene cooked up by the Farrelly Brothers. So far, so Something About Mary. That Damon, Affleck and the rest chose as the winner of the first challenge the most pretentious and contentious would-be director (a guy who actually considered the Farrelly script kinda “meh”) only adds to the reality show tension. How well will their pick do in making a “ha-ha” comedy that merits a $2 million budget prize and a win on season four of Project Greenlight? Catch the new season on HBO now to find out.
