Oh how I wish I could say that the final seconds of “Ask Him About Stella” were enough to carry the entire episode. After teasing a How To Get Away With Murder/Scandal crossover for a while now—something I thought was only possible in my wildest of dreams and fanfiction—we get our first brief glimpse at what a world…

“He’s A Bad Father” unravels plenty of thread for How To Get Away With Murder season four’s murder board, managing to connect Annalise’s class action, Wes’ death, Laurel’s fucked up family drama, and even Isaac’s once seemingly random backstory with more coherence than the show has exhibited in a while. Look, I get…

You know that feeling when you jolt awake after a nap you didn’t mean to take or a nap that lasted longer than intended? That’s exactly what a midseason premiere of How To Get Away With feels like. It’s a dizzying inhale. It knocks you out of time. It sends a powerful tension through your entire body. That’s all…

How To Get Away With Murder dedicates its midseason finale to Laurel and company’s ill-devised plan to bring down her father and Antares. In typical How To Get Away With Murder fashion, it unspools the story in a nonlinear fashion, starting with a big tease and then jumping back 24 hours and then repeatedly jumping…

TV drama royalty Jimmy Smits has decided to grace Shondaland with his Emmy-anointed presence, with Deadline reporting that Smits is set for a recurring role on the upcoming season of Viola Davis’ How To Get Away With Murder. Smits will appear as a mysterious figure from Annalise Keating’s past, and will apparently be…

When I first heard Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland” as a ten-year-old, it sounded gritty. It sounded real. It sounded like the heart of youth, an accurate portrayal of what it was like to be young, in love, and obsessed with music.

In film and television, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” almost always spells trouble. And why shouldn’t it? Despite its upbeat and swampy boogie-woogie, the lyrics are explicitly foreboding. There’s a reason why it was used to such iconic effect in An American Werewolf In London, right before the…

When reviewing The Get Down, many critics (myself included) have focused on the show’s criminal element—its gangsters, its drug dealers, its button men—never congealing with its musical element, even though the two worlds would naturally intersect in late-’70s New York.

Early on in “The Beat Says, This Is The Way,” Marrakech Star’s Roy Asheton insists that, if Mylene wants to be taken seriously as an artist, she needs to start crafting high-quality albums instead of just singles. While he’s right, it’s somewhat odd to hear a powerful executive of a disco label—a non-AOR musical genre…

When reviewing the front half of The Get Down’s first season, most of my criticisms revolved around the series’ tonal inconsistency—how the near-parodical villains and politicians clashed with the more authentic portrayals of inner-city youth and, of course, hip-hop and disco music in the 1970s.

Signalling that the show has now well and truly “arrived,” the producers of Brooklyn Nine-Nine have announced that long-time TV mainstay and living seal of quality Jimmy Smits has signed on for a guest role in an upcoming episode. Smits will appear on the show’s “Thanksgiving” edition, scheduled for November 22, where…

At times, The Get Down has deftly connected people from different backgrounds by showing them go through similar struggles. That was certainly the case in the fifth episode, where each character found themselves at an artistic, personal, or professional crossroads. Maybe that’s what the writers were going for with the…

Many of The Get Down’s characters have the opportunity to go down a single path in “You Have Wings, Learn To Fly.” Ezekiel can be creative or be an intern. Jackie and Mylene can go disco or go secular with their music. Ramon can admit to his past sins or continue as a (somewhat false) holy man. And Shaolin can commit…

Because it doesn’t have a musical sequence as stunning as any of the episodes that came before it, “Forget Safety, Be Notorious” is easily the most boring episode of The Get Down so far. The most exhilarating instances of song-craft are Kool Herc’s set and Jackie trying to plunk out a new disco hit for Mylene. But the…

Ever since the series was announced, The Get Down has described itself as tracing the birth of hip-hop, punk, and disco. So far, the show has leaned heavily on the first third of that equation, mostly because, in the summer of 1977, disco and punk were considerably further along in their respective origin stories. As…

In 2016, the musical drama has a gangster problem. HBO’s Vinyl suffered from it, and Netflix’s The Get Down suffers from it, too. Both series have (or had) captivating central stories that center around the music industry in 1970s New York City, with Vinyl focusing on the turbulent changes at a record label and The…

Binge-friendly. Binge-worthy. Bingeable. The words are used frequently, but what exactly do they mean? After all, this is the age of auto-play streaming, in which someone could easily mainline half a season of Rizzoli And Isles just because the remote is too far away, and “TV binge” is often a euphemism for “gradual…

As we learned earlier this summer, beloved space villain Darth Vader will be making an appearance in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story to oversee the construction of the Death Star and intimidate Ben Mendelsohn’s Director Krennic into doing a good job. (That’s the Empire’s management style.) Now, it looks like another…

It was Jane Austen who once wrote, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a TV drama in possession of several seasons must be in want of a Jimmy Smits.” (We might be paraphrasing, to be fair.) As such, it’s kind of shocking that 24 has gone off-and-on for 15 years now without the NYPD Blue (and L.A. Law, and The…