Fear not, fellow mathematics morons - although Showtime's Billions is set among the high-stakes, high-money firms of Wall Street, peering inside the day-to-day battles of its most savagely savvy bulls and bears, it's also something of a Trojan horse. With New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin credited as a co-creator and its premium-network pedigree, no one would have been shocked to see the series invest heavily in numbers-nerd jargon and stock-market-driven storytelling unintelligible to those of us without a Harvard diploma; but as brought to life by Sorkin and Ocean's Thirteen co-writers Brian Koppleman and David Levien (all three on board as co-creators as well as exec-producers), Billions is much more concerned with having a good time than it is with providing an economics lesson.
Like a damnably tenacious demon climbing out of hell, Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments has risen from the ashes of a very bad big-screen take on Cassandra Clare's YA novels that bombed in theaters just three years ago, shapeshifting and shoehorning the same story of ridiculously attractive monster slayers in modern-day New York into a TV show format.
I'll be honest - there was a time when USA, with its blithely blue-skies formula for original programming (if you don't know what I mean, try to find one conflict in all of Royal Pains or Satisfaction that can't be summarized as a first-world problem), barely cut it as a footnote in discussions of dramatic television. But then along came Mr. Robot last year to completely change the game, demonstrating more conceptual daring and narrative innovation in its 10-episode first season than most series on higher-brow networks manage in their entire runs.
Lamb is a deeply uncomfortable drama in the icy vein of Lolita - a sublimely acted but inherently disturbing meditation on virtue and vice, and the blurred lines between them that present themselves over the course of one 45-year-old man's spur-of-the-moment camping trip with an 11-year-old girl he befriended in a burned-out Chicago parking lot.
The excellent first season of ABC's American Crime explored the murder of a war veteran and, in the process, conducted a deeply thoughtful and fruitful probe into questions of class, race, guilt and national identity. With its astute writing and cinematic direction, not to mention a cadre of Emmy-caliber performances, the series - from 12 Years a Slave writer John Ridley - unfolded as a saga in miniature, deftly weaving weighty issues into a compelling crime narrative. Simply put, it was breathtaking.
It may be a new year, but a trio of 2015 horror releases are still out to get you. Universal Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing M. Night Shyamalan's found-footage chiller The Visit, Ciaran Foy's spine-tingling sequel Sinister 2, and Eli Roth's long-delayed cannibal picture The Green Inferno to Blu-Ray this month, and to celebrate the occasion, We Got This Covered is giving away one hell of a prize pack to a lucky, horror-loving reader.
I have absolutely no qualms about calling 2015 a pretty great year for cinema. Across the board, Hollywood brought its A-game. Indie-circuit auteurs like David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) and Miroslav Slaboshpitsky (The Tribe) upended genres and created some new ones; big-studio blockbusters like Magic Mike XXL and Star Wars: The Force Awakens betrayed real heart and heft, Pixar returned with a vengeance, most of the requisite remakes were actually good (and some of them - *cough* *cough* Creed *cough* - were downright great), and action cinema in particular flourished like it has during only a few years before, delivering some legendary characters and instantly iconic sequences (and not just in Mad Max: Fury Road).
In a television landscape increasingly marked by dramatic transformations, from Netflix's unprecedented rise on the awards circuit to FX's rebranding as a top-tier network, MTV has been fairly (and disappointingly) uniform in its expectations for scripted originals: impossibly photogenic stars, dialogue specifically geared toward teen audiences, and soapy storytelling short on subtlety.
When Bordertown was first ordered over two years ago, with Family Guy veterans Mark Hentemann and Seth MacFarlane holding the reins, the idea of a cartoon dedicated to satirizing immigration issues along the U.S.-Mexico border seemed far from promising. After all, Family Guy has garnered a fair share of (deserved) criticism for its offensive stereotyping of minorities, and there was no reason to expect that the duo's next small-screen effort would veer away from comparable racism and xenophobia.
