Yes, there are a few season finales to go, but with the rush of surprise twists, cliffhangers, and exits behind us, it’s now time for EW.com’s fourth annual reader-voted Season Finale Awards. After taking your suggestions under advisement — and extending the cutoff date to March 31, because so many of you wanted to (dis)honor the passing of The Walking Dead‘s Andrea — here are this year’s nominees. UPDATE: Polls are now closed. Winners will be announced Friday. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Joseph Lederer/A&E
Small towns are so much more interesting on television. Their quirks are quirkier, their drama is more dramatic and their faults somehow make them more endearing. But there’s another feature we’ve spotted in the hit small town dramas we’re currently obsessed with: The cops in these series aren’t all that skilled at, well, being cops.
Case in point: Bates Motel. Sure, the cops of White Pine Bay, Ore. are corrupt, but they also don’t even seem to know how to work a crime scene. The first thing that the Sheriff did upon arriving at a murder scene in this Monday’s episode was touch the murder weapon and then the dead body … with his bare hands. Surely even small town peacekeepers know about latex gloves, right? Assuming they have cable, I’m betting they’ve at least seen Law & Order: SVU and could have learned a thing or two about contaminating a crime scene.
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Image Credit: Barbara Nitke/Fox Spoiler Alert: Do not read any further if you haven’t already watched the season finale of The Following.
I don’t know which was more of a surprise: that Ryan’s sidekick Agent Mike is actually alive at the end of the season or that Claire very possibly isn’t. The last scene of the night shouldn’t have truly been a surprise, what with the tension ratcheted so far up after the big confrontation between Joe and Ryan, but I had managed to forget all about Ryan’s sleeper agent neighbor/ex-girlfriend until she popped up in the kitchen. (I was, however, yelling at the TV for Ryan not to leave the knife on the table to answer the door because that just seemed like a bad idea.)
For a show that specializes in violence, last night felt particularly horrific. Maybe it was because in his desire to save Agent Parker, Ryan just lost it. He dug his fingers into that cult member’s eye to get him to talk!! And then very deliberately put a bullet into the culty’s head once they realized Parker was dead. Even for Ryan, that was crossing a line. Meanwhile, we witnessed one of Joe’s rare murders, as he coldly, repeatedly stabbed a hostage just to prove a point to Claire.
For all of us who were wondering how they could plausibly set up a second season, this is how: we’ve yet to confirm that the remains found in the debris of that most excellent explosion are actually Joe’s (I’m not trusting that bit about the dental records and early DNA). There’s a distraught crazypants Emma running around in a red wig. And we need to find out what happens to Ryan and Claire after they’re attacked in the kitchen. Now that’s a cliffhanger. And for a show that hooked me from the first episode and stayed overall strong throughout despite some bumps, it was a satisfying finale.
How about you? Did you like the fake-out ending? Did you enjoy watching Joe unravel at the end? Was it a good payoff?
Here we are again, season finale time is kicking off. It seems like just yesterday that we were anticipating Revolution, excited for season 2 of Once Upon a Time, and wondering what Lena Dunham would bring us on new episodes of Girls. Oh, the passing of time. Now’s the time to catch up on The Following, Happy Endings, and The Americans (before their season finales this week)! Here’s how else to fill your pop culture desires this week: READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Helen Sloan/HBO
Early April is one of entertainment’s awkwardly quiet down times, in which the summer blockbusters aren’t out yet, television shows are winding down but not quite at their finales, and most new albums are awaiting a release. But that doesn’t mean that your week has to be boring. You still have some great options. Unless, of course, you don’t think that the premiere of Game of Thrones, the return of New Kids on the Block, and the re-release of Jurassic Park in 3-D are great …
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Image Credit: Neil Jacobs/NBC
We’ve reached pilot season, the time of year when the networks start looking at candidates for this fall’s schedules. Thus, it is also the time of year when armchair quarterbacks like me say “You’re doing it wrong!” to which network executives usually reply “You think you could do better?” My answer: I watched 666 Park Avenue and Animal Practice and The Mob Doctor and Made in Jersey, and I hope you think you can do better. Every year, networks look at their pilots and ask the same questions. And every year, they’re the wrong questions. Here are the three that do real damage:
• ARE THE CHARACTERS LIKABLE OR RELATABLE?
There is exactly one TV-viewing demographic that still cares about this: development executives laboring under the delusion that they’ll eventually find the next Cheers or Friends (both of which, by the way, were full of characters who often behaved terribly). You know who doesn’t care about likability? People who watch Game of Thrones, or Breaking Bad, or Mad Men, or Archer. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Cate Cameron/The CW
The CW’s new meta-mystery Cult brings us into a world that most visitors to this website happen to know pretty well: The realm of overly obsessive pop culture fandom. It’s a sometimes fun, sometimes scary, always interesting shadowland where enthusiasm for fantasy takes the most peculiar forms: Ardent ‘shipping, colorful cosplay, mad theorizing by know-it-all bloggers who give themselves fake PhDs and are rarely correct about anything. (Such hacks! Such frauds!) Created by Farscape’s Rockne S. O’Bannon, a scribe with genre smarts who clearly knows much about the benefits and beautiful weirdness of fandom, Cult imagines a culture where a show called “Cult” airs on The CW and seems to be having a seriously adverse if not deadly affect on its most ardent viewers. (Like we said: Meta.) READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Frank Masi
We made it through the blizzard! That means it’s time to warm up and dry off with a week of musical performances and Bruce Willis blowing things up.
That and several other post-disater to-dos for this week’s planner. Don’t forget to tell us what we missed.
The Following features a lot of scary imagery — the word “NEVERMORE” scrawled in blood on a wall, those creepy Edgar Allan Poe masks, oodles and oodles of gouged-out eyeballs. But the spookiest thing about the show may be its star — whose face in 2013 is almost as boyish as it was when he starred in Footloose nearly three decades ago.
What can explain Bacon’s immortal looks — good genes? An all-kale diet? Is he secretly a vampire, maybe? Whatever the cause, he’s not alone — Hollywood is filled with folks who never seem to age. Here’s a list of the top 11; let’s hope they share the secret to eternal life with the rest of us someday.
Immortal star: Kevin Bacon
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