Matthew Grimm | Channel Guide Magazine

Boardwalk Empire Season 3 finale recap: “Margate Sands”

December 3, 2012 | By Matthew Grimm
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Terence Winter wound the spring tight in Season 3 of Boardwalk Empire, each violent twist seeing a piece of Nucky Thompson’s East Coast criminal syndicate fall away and leaving the Atlantic City boss seemingly alone, friendless and on the lam from his enemies. It took all of his residual wheeling and dealing, and a conspicuously rainbow-esque coalition, not just to save his life, but, in Sunday night’s finale, to turn the tables on ever-ticking-timebomb-psychotic New York hood Gyp Rosetti in a dizzying, elegiac menagerie of graphic violence on par with HBO’s equally awesome Band of Brothers. Which, to hammer the point, [...]

HBO’s Treme Season 3 recap of premiere, Episode 1

September 24, 2012 | By Matthew Grimm
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HBO’s Treme season 3 premiere opens at night, a redlining neighborhood, a crowd forming at an intersection, “25 months after the storm.” Struggling, cab-fare-haggling onetime bandleader and freelance trombonist Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce) joins musicians gathering to play a street memorial to a late compatriot of the city’s vibrant music scene. As they’re revving up a number, NOPD prowlers cruise up, rollers lit. Cops say there has been a noise complaint and order them to disperse. The musicians protest that this is something they should not even have to protest, that even cops should know this is how they send [...]

“Treme” Season 3 preview

September 21, 2012 | By Matthew Grimm
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Perhaps the most pointed scene in the final episode of Treme’s second season saw Young Turk Texas real estate developer Nelson Hidalgo (Jon Seda) stewing in a bar with his blue-collar cousin Arnie. Hidalgo came to New Orleans because, subscribing to a conspicuously American purview (disaster=opportunity), he sees gold in redevelopment of the Crescent City’s redlining properties and has greased certain cogs in the machine to mine it. But one of those cogs, a city councilman, has turned up under indictment, meaning all connected to him are abruptly out of favor, and all Nelson has done, he ruminates, may be [...]

“Boardwalk Empire” Season 3 premiere recap

September 16, 2012 | By Matthew Grimm
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In spite of its tendency to be rendered down to facile, generally wrong cartoons to protect children’s and patriots’ delicate sensibilities, history poses a filthy canvas. Those who choose to paint on it can hew to its boring conventions, as Hollywood largely did for the first 45 years of its existence, or they can do what David Milch did with HBO’s elegiac and violent Western series Deadwood and Terrence Winter does with Boardwalk Empire, whose third season kicked off tonight on the same network: paint with the filth on the canvas and let the stark snapshot of time speak for [...]

“Boardwalk Empire” Season 3 preview

September 15, 2012 | By Matthew Grimm
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So many razor-edged bad people swagger about Terence Winter’s Boardwalk Empire that, even having shed one of its primary POV characters, it is instantly, retoxifyingly addictive as the epic criminal sojourn of Nucky Thompson and Atlantic City resumes. Boardwalk Empire’s third season kicks off this Sunday, Sept. 16, on HBO with all the kaleidoscopic shifts of alliance, de rigueur corruption and entrancing sepia-inflected period production design that first wowed critics and audiences in the fall of 2010 and drew 18 Emmy nominations the next summer. Winter and fellow executive producers Martin Scorsese, Mark Wahlberg, Stephen Levinson and Tim Van Patten [...]

“Breaking Bad” Season 5.1 recap: Gliding Over … and out

September 4, 2012 | By Matthew Grimm
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Mike is gone. It seemed inevitable given the collision course he and Walter White were on from Episode 1 of Breaking Bad’s fifth season. It sucks because Jonathan Banks played Mike, the fixer’s fixer, with such brilliant rough-concrete surety as to be the compass of the ad hoc crime syndicate White (Bryan Cranston) presumed to create after assassinating their meth-kingpin boss, Gus, with jaw-dropping horror at Season 4’s end. Yet it is par for Breaking Bad because creator Vince Gilligan has a similar surety when it comes to finding those nerve-nexuses in narrative tension and seemingly following his characters’ natural [...]

“The Newsroom” episode 10 recap: The Greater Fool

August 28, 2012 | By Matthew Grimm
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What have we learned from Season 1 of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom? What we were supposed to learn was that some things matter and some things don’t. We know from the Real Life The Newsroom mirrors that America has been ushered off the rails by information gatekeepers who have undertaken a slow-creep away from measuring the truth of cartoonish official stories and toward prioritization of superfluous wank. This yields an apostasy from reason wherein society loses the capacity to solve problems because it actively prevents too many people from understanding what the problem, in fact, is. An important thing, for [...]

“The Newsroom” episode 9 recap: Tea (Party) for 2(.0)

August 21, 2012 | By Matthew Grimm
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MacKenzie McHale, executive producer of News Night dealing with a blackout that has shut down power to the Atlantis Cable News studios, drops this week’s Capra Moment™ early to muster the troops for a remote broadcast. They have been battered and grumbly in Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom because so-called News Night 2.0 has been compromising its 2.0ness because news consumers have been demanding Casey Anthony murder trial coverage even though Tea Party suicide bombers are playing chicken with the U.S. debt ceiling. But the blackout can bring them all together, McHale says, because they are plucky professionals with skills. “I [...]

“The Newsroom” recap: The Blackout, Part One: Tragedy Porn

August 14, 2012 | By Matthew Grimm
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In case you haven’t been following Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, here’s some backstory: America put itself in the hands of corporate charlatans who lied a lot about everything to justify sociopathic behavior, and enough people thought that was OK because institutions they count on to be watchdogs of bad intentions, lying and horrible outcomes stopped watchdogging after being consolidated into media conglomerates who prioritize the will of advertisers who much prefer a citizenry stupid enough to be advertised to. That established, Olivia Munn, who plays Sloan on The Newsroom, needs to be better at what people supposedly do on HBO [...]

HBO’s “The Newsroom” Episode 7 recap: “5/1″

August 7, 2012 | By Matthew Grimm
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Ep. 7: Preview Some disclosure before I recap Episode 7 of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom: I had lived in Brooklyn, NY, for 12 years as of Sept. 11, 2001, lived under the plume, share with most New Yorkers a disinclination to gab overly about it and, entitled to or not, tend to look sideways at anyone who waxes glib or maudlin about it. So when I look sideways at the The Newsroom’s glib- and maudlin-impregnated coverage of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, it should be understood that I damn well get the gravitas of the event. The borrowed [...]