In an apparent effort to quickly make itself very popular with the sort of people who read The A.V. Club (and only those people), Verizon’s video streaming service Go90 will soon have all of Veronica Mars, Almost Human, Babylon 5, Believe, Fringe, Stalker, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles for free. This…

Previously on Fringe…

In Under The Influence, The A.V. Club asks a musician to pair three of their songs with a non-musical influence.

This one’s a tradition:

Thanksgiving weekend in the United States is a four-day festival of overindulgence: Giant meals, giant balloons representing pop-culture favorites, giant savings at the big box store on Friday morning. As we did in 2013, The A.V. Club aims to contribute to this tradition of extreme consumption with a guide to some TV…

Fringe and Sleepy Hollow star John Noble will be joining the cast of CBS’s Elementary as a series regular for the show’s fourth season. The veteran genre actor will play Sherlock Holmes’ often-mentioned but never-seen father, whose choice to hire Lucy Liu’s Joan Watson to serve as a sober companion for his son kicked…

Blair Brown—best known ’round here for playing the devious (or was it ultimately helpful?) Nina Sharp on Fringe—will appear on the next season of Orange Is The New Black, according to TV Guide. There’s no information on what sort of character she’ll play, though there does seem to be a vacancy in the administration at…

Oliver: Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. exists in the world of gods and superheroes built by the Marvel Studios films, and this pilot goes out of its way to show how the fantastic bleeds into the lives of human beings in this universe. Whether it’s the government agent who seemingly fakes his death to bring a team…

How do you say goodbye? Not to a person. Saying goodbye to a person is easy, especially if one of you is moving. But how do you say goodbye to a show? Sometimes it hurts, like when a series is canceled before it has a chance to live up to its potential; sometimes it’s embarrassing, like when a show has lost any shred…

With network upfronts just next week, this would normally be the time when said networks started picking up new shows and canceling old ones willy-nilly. Except… that’s not really happening just yet, as NBC seems intent on continuing the sweet agony of fans of such diverse programming as Parks & Recreation (expected…

As his one-year sober anniversary approaches, Sherlock explains that he abhors the idea of a chip being bestowed to honor the occasion. He suggests that soberness is not something we celebrate, but rather a state of being: “One is either in it or out of it.”

NOT OPTIONAL takes a quick weekly look at five essential releases, some recent, some not.

Arrow reaches a moment of truth about midway through “Unfinished Business,” as Detective Lance and what appears to be an entire battalion of Starling City’s finest stand in front of the door of the Hood’s secret headquarters, demanding Oliver let them in. The show has maneuvered Oliver into an impossible situation,…

Ah, it’s fun to watch The Good Wife show off. This isn’t the first time it’s done an episode like this, set in real time at a party as a million different things go on. And it doesn’t go off perfectly—there are plot threads that dangle annoyingly, and there’s a mystery that gets resolved half-heartedly. But it’s so…

Justified’s mix of short cases, full-season stories, and series-long arcs is one of its special qualities, and one I never want to see go away, especially given that so many of my favorite recently defunct TV shows (Lost, Fringe, and Terriers all come to mind) have done the same. I prefer long-form storytelling when…

It’s Old Home Week on Justified, as characters from the past come back to set a spell: everyone from Constable Bob to FBI Agent Jeremy Barkley. Yet the most significant returner may be Winona Hawkins, the mother of Raylan’s unborn child, who arrives early in “Kin,” in a scene that—on the surface at least—has little to…

Your pop-culture resolutions for 2013 focused on stuff you finally plan on getting around to this year, which made me wonder, are there any cultural touchstones you’d like to get into, but that seem too extensive to even start? For me, this includes Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and the Comedy Bang! Bang! podcasts. I’m sure…

As we officially pass the midway point of Arrow’s 22-episode first season, it’s worth taking stock of what the show has accomplished and what it still has left to prove. The first two episodes of 2013, “Burned” and last week’s “Trust But Verify”, were entertaining, competent hours of television, but they didn’t…

1. Big Love
It’s fairly common for television series to tweak their opening credits as the seasons progress, updating old character images with more recent ones, adding new actors to the roster, or jettisoning an opening voiceover to tighten up the run time. But some series go further, swapping out major elements in…

Certain characters bring out the best in certain writers. Back when I worked my way through Buffy The Vampire Slayer, I always knew that Willow Rosenberg would be extra funny/adorable/heartbreaking in the hands of Jane Espenson. On Cougar Town, if I see co-creator Kevin Biegel’s name on the main writing credit, I make…