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...

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...

Live-action sitcoms about kids tend to not be very good. I grew up in arguably the golden age of this genre on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon (and their awkward Canadian cousin, The Family Channel), and I certainly enjoyed my fair share of them - Drake & Josh , Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide , and even That’s So Raven being particular favourites. But their appeal was in their pre-teen to teenage representation and the sense of fun they extolled while still being somewhat relatable to the ordinary kid’s life and patterns. They were never of high mark when it came to the writing, directing, humour, and acting, and you would have to be very generous to argue that point as an adult bereft of nostalgia or cherry-picked examples to the contrary.  I feel like I was somewhat aware of this at the time, but didn’t care. Kids need to see these kind of stories from their perspective on-screen. That alone matters. These shows were sequestered away on TV networks designed for a...