HBO | 2/11 | 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, [...]

“Crossfire Hurricane” on HBO documents the rise of The Rolling Stones

November 7, 2012 | By Ryan Berenz
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Crossfire Hurricane on HBO Nov. 15 documents the rise of The Rolling Stones from “the band everybody hated to the band everybody loves.” The Rolling Stones were the bad boys of the 1960s British Invasion, the sexually charged, rebellious foil to the clean-cut, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” Beatles. The Beatles lasted only 10 years together. The Stones have been at it for 50 years. The Stones’ golden anniversary is celebrated with the new documentary Crossfire Hurricane (HBO, Nov. 15 at 9pm ET), which chronicles the band’s evolution from, as Mick Jagger puts it, “the band everybody hated to [...]

Tippi Hedren and a stellar cast talk HBO’s “The Girl”

September 28, 2012 | By Lori Acken
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Tippi Hedren sits on a sofa in a Beverly Hills hotel suite on a warm August day. Still exquisitely beautiful at age 82, she wears a dress of the same soft gray-green as her eyes. On her right lapel is an intricate gold and diamond brooch in the shape of three birds in flight. Behind her left shoulder is a lamp, on which is perched a faux raven. If you’re familiar with the promotional stills from Hedren’s legendary 1963 acting debut, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, the effect is stunning. That she is here to promote the absorbing new HBO film [...]

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 [...]

“Don’t Divorce Me!” premieres tonight on HBO

September 20, 2012 | By Lori Acken
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I am not a child of divorce. My birth child is. My three step-kids are, obviously, too. This has given me a broad, but common, perspective on marriage and parenting. My own mother and father have been wed 51 years and have lived in exactly two houses in the same town for the entirety of their union — the one I lived in until I left for college and the one they moved into after. My daughter has lived in multiple apartments and houses in multiple cities and states in her 24 years, dividing her time — only some of [...]

“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 [...]

“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 [...]