Reviews of the Bosch

“Space… the Final Frontier.” It’s a provocative phrase, isn’t it? The Final Frontier, the last great mystery of exploration. In 1966, one of the most popular television genres was western adventure - Gunsmoke , Bonanza , Rawhide , episodic stories about life on this particular romanticized frontier were everywhere. What’s a competitive show to do but take it a step further? Where do you go once the west has been thoroughly demystified? How about a Wagon Train to the Stars? That was the phrase that one Gene Roddenberry used when pitching a series concept to Desilu Productions that would go on to be Star Trek , the basis of a sixty year television franchise (and occasionally film too ) , that would have one of the greatest out-sized impacts of a cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century. Desilu green-lit the idea (founder Lucille Ball specifically) and the rest is history. Three seasons that struggled in the ratings but gained an enormous fan following, a short-lived animated follow...

Nobody is more certain of anything than conservatives are that the whole world thinks exactly as them. We’ve seen it on so many fronts of political issues and idiotic culture wars over this last decade -conservatives, or those of a like reactive mindset, declaring with confidence any outcome that suits their prejudices. The rise of Trumpism taught them that fringe positions and complaints were a lot more popular than the mainstream expected -which was true but clearly not to the extent that they believe. There are so many other factors and nuances that have little to do with broader conservative grievances and the picture painted isn’t actually as accurate as they like to claim either (remembering that Trump only won a popular vote once and by the slimmest of margins). It is exhausting, yet it is an exhaustion that has long spread to my space of interest, the movie space -an area where conservatives, for as much as they decry Hollywood’s ‘liberal elites’ at every opportunity, are despe...

For the first time that I can remember, there is no late night talk show on CBS. With the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert , an era has come to an end –not just the existence of the Late Show brand, which began in 1993 with David Letterman, but the era of competing talk shows itself. For a couple decades there, the talk show format was strong enough that it could support several variations with distinctions based on the character and personality of its host and their writers. But a few years back James Corden’s incarnation of The Late Late Show ended and CBS chose not to continue the franchise (leaving Late Night with Seth Meyers unopposed in its timeslot).   And now that they’ve forced the end of The Late Show –the most popular of the recent talk show iterations- with Jimmy Kimmel Live also likely to wrap up in the near future, NBC’s pair of shows will be the only ones standing –as they had been in the 1980s though without anywhere near the cultural footprint...