HBO

You know, I miss James Gandolfini. I know that HBO misses him as well. When The Sopranos finished, Gandolfini signed a development deal with HBO. He would not only work in front of the camera but help find and produce material for the network. We all know what happened next. Gandolfini passed suddenly, just when it seems he was breaking out of his Tony Soprano typecast, and one gets the feeling that he was going to do great things. One solid indication of that promise comes in the HBO series The Night Of... which was one of those passion projects that the man never got to see through. It's one of the best things to come out of HBO in a few years, and that is saying something when you consider the strong programming that can be found there now. Game Of Thrones is a great show. The Night Of..., well... that's something special all to its own.

It all starts out with our introduction to Nasir "Naz" Kahn, played by Riz Ahmed. He's a straight-A college student from a solid working class Pakistani family. His family is Muslim and very conservative. He tutors basketball players but otherwise keeps to himself. He doesn't date, do drugs, or pretty much anything else fun. That is until he's invited to a team party and he wants to let loose just a little bit. He sneaks out of the house and borrows the taxi that his father owns with two other partners when he's stood up by his friend for a ride. The problem is that he does not know how to turn off the "On Duty" sign, and a young, troubled girl gets into his back seat. Andrea, played by Sofia Black-D'Elia, strikes a chord with Naz, and instead of making her leave the cab he drives her around and finally takes her home. What starts as a bizarre encounter ends up changing his life forever. Naz wakes to find that Andrea has been murdered savagely in her bed. What he does next is begin a chain of events that will ultimately lead to him virtually framing himself for her murder.

"Did I miss anything while I was gone?"

Did you ever. Banshee came to an end with this, the fourth season, and it did not go quietly, to be sure. But it's not how it ends, but how this final season begins that's a bit of a mystery. There is a time jump of a little over 18 months that will cause you to feel like you might have missed something. If that doesn't confuse you, the season's constant tripping around in time will turn this season into a show very different from the Banshee we've come to know and love. It's not just one or two timelines that are presented here. The time can shift by any number of days, weeks, or months. Still the "current" story takes place nearly two years in the future. Fans appear to be divided on the season's dramatic departure from the show's style. The question has to be whether the team knew it was their final season from the beginning and felt the need to cover more ground to tell what story they had left to tell.

“Accidental president...that's what they'll say.”

Lyndon Baines Johnson became the 36th President of the United States under the most tumultuous circumstances imaginable. Besides being thrust into office after the shattering assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Johnson had to immediately contend with multiple political crises. Most notably, LBJ faced pressure from several different fronts as he worked to pass what eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. All The Way, buoyed by a funny and ferocious lead performance, offers a thought-provoking and entertaining look at a truly complex figure.

There has been no shortage of medical dramas dating back to the infancy of television. Many have become classics. Most have dealt with the use of modern (at least for that time) advances and cutting-edge science. That's exactly what you get with The Knick. You get cutting-edge medical advancement... for 1902. The Knick is the fictional Knickerbocker hotel in 1900's New York. The hospital exists in a poverty-stricken neighborhood where few of the patients can pay for their care. This has been a problem the board has been trying to turn around. Now ground is being broken on a new location in a much more affluent part of New York City. It'll be an opportunity to finally turn a profit and also one of corruption for the man handling the new construction. But what of Dr. Thackery, played by Clive Owens?

We left Thackery in a rehab facility. While he is attempting to recover from his addiction, Dr. Algernon Edwards (Holland) is the acting chief of surgery. He hopes to make it permanent and continues to report pessimistically on Thackery's recovery. But it's going to be a struggle for a black doctor to be hired in such a position, particularly when the hospital is about to make its move in the hopes of attracting a more elite clientele. Edwards isn't the only one with schemes. Dr. Everett Gallinger (Johnson) does not want to serve under a black boss. In fact, he's joined a group of doctors who believe that "inferior" people should be sterilized in a twisted form of eugenics. His only hope is for Thackery to return, so he kidnaps him from the facility and keeps him on his sailboat, where he hopes to cure the addiction by making him focus on tying nautical knots. The process works so well that it pushes Thackery to change his thoughts on addiction and consider it a disease and dedicate his research to finding the cause and cure of addiction. This leads to all manner of brain experiments and a chance for the guys who do the incredible makeup effects to deliver the goods again. I even had a chance to talk with Justin Raleigh, who does many of these marvelous creations. You can check out that interview Here.