Reviews

The internet is dark and full of spoilers, so if you are reading this review I consider your eyes permission to write about what happened in the outstanding ‘The Lion & the Rose.’ “The viewers send their regards.” It was always going to be a well-received event; the pent up blood lust of every single…

This is the beginning of something – do you have time to improve your life? Would we ever have expected this kind of speech ad pitch Freddy Rumsen? His brilliant opening monologue (impeccably delivered by Joel Murray, in what was his work of the series thus far) belies every notion we’ve had of his character….

It’s finally back! The long and torturous wait between seasons is a testament to how deeply involved the world has become in the Game of Thrones universe. The series’ fourth season kicked off with the mostly excellent ‘Two Swords,’ doing a nice job of making sure we’re up to speed while also setting up some…

This week was the final episode of RAKE Season Three and it is well worth seeing if you suspect, as I do, that a fourth season might not happen. It’s not necessarily that the show should end, but that this finale leaves so few questions unanswered that if it did, nobody would feel cheated. That’s…

All that character development wasn’t building up to any big, heartbreaking deaths as many expected. Instead, the Walking Dead crew decided that Season 4’s finale was best used to further the nuanced character arcs and set up a terrifying Season 5. ‘A’ led us through two big sequences, and took it’s time getting through each….

As we near the end of season three of Rake, let’s take a look back and admire the personal accomplishments that Cleaver Greene has made in the past seven weeks. After prison, Cleaver re-entered the world to find that every facet of his life was in disarray: His career was at a standstill, his family was…

‘Us’ had one job and it was to put at least some of the splintered survivors onto the same trajectory. As such, we were given a mildly touching reunion with Glenn and Maggie, preceded by a showing of just how desperate Glenn can get; desperate enough to wander into a dark cave with an unknown…

Opening a potentially very heavy week of nightly evening news with a lighter story is a wise move- and that’s certainly what the team at The Feed appeared to be doing by having a story about cane toad licking addicted dogs kick off its Addiction Week. As cartoonish as this story may sound on paper…

The final four episodes of the new wave HBO crime drama, True Detective, pushed closer to solving the 17 year running investigation into heinous crimes and further explored the personas at the centre of the double barrelled story, Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey). Episode 5, “The Secret Fate of All Life”…

It had to be done, right? ‘The Grove’ didn’t move the plot along at all, opting again for a stand-alone type episode in similar fashion to Beth and Daryl’s alcohol-driven journey in ‘Still.’ The third to last episode of season four took it’s time to slowly crush us with one of the most intense episodes…

This week marked the end of the ‘Sister’ trilogy and the end of Abby’s time on the show, although I’m hoping to see her cameo down the track like Jess’ parents sometimes do. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the episode was that every character had some sort of development, or lesson learned – and…

This week’s episode is crammed with about thirty different and not visibly interwoven plot-lines, but let’s put all that aside for now and focus on the most sensational moment in the show: Fuzz (Keegan Joyce) has come home from Africa and he has turned into his dad! A scotch swilling, Tin Tin coif-sporting, loosened skinny…

So Maggie wants to go one way; Sasha wants to go the other way; and Bob is just happy that he isn’t left alone – as he has been two times prior to joining the group. ‘Alone’ presents us with a group that has less ties to each other than the other groups; splintered together…

With Jess’ sister thrown into the mix, we were expecting only one thing from this episode: trouble. New Girl did not fail us, kicking off immediately with a game of “Sky Knife”, in which knives are thrown into the ceiling. From there, the crux of the episode was gotten to quite quickly: Abby wants to…

RAKE goes into courtroom procedural overdrive this week when Cleaver Greene agrees to represent no less than four men at four separate hearings in one day. Sydney is in a legal frenzy: there are five royal commissions and seven ICAC hearings taking place at the same time. Every other lawyer in town is tied up,…

It looks like things are slowly but surely returning to their natural state of comical disequilibrium in the world of Cleaver Greene. His career is given a boost when he receives his first personal request for counsel, and he finally has his bachelor pad to himself, now that Nicole and her crazy mother have taken…

With five episodes left, ‘Still’ took a bit of a time-out to redefine two characters we never expected would interact on anything more than a superficial level. When the prison walls came tumbling down and everyone split up, Daryl and Beth was the least likely duo. Fans worried that the writers were messing up; pairing…

Whilst it’s not exactly ‘already done news’, it certainly feels like you could be accurate in reporting each night that there’s “more tragedy from Ukraine”, and unfortunately this evening was no exception. With the backing of SBS’s new team, The Feed is able to regularly show some harrowing and awful footage from Ukraine- this time…

At last! Cleaver Greene is back in the legal saddle with a case we can all get excited about. Scarlet has been promoted to Senior Counsel and now has an enormous workload, so at Barney’s suggestion, she agrees to take Cleaver on as one of her juniors. It seems like a pretty illogical decision for…

And so the arc that will take us through to the end of the season begins. The title “Sister”, predictably, means the introduction of Abby (Linda Cardellini), Jess’ younger sister. Imagine Jess, but hard-core and confident – oh, and needing picking up from jail. This, of course, means trouble, leading to sibling guilt, leading to…

Certainly the most noteworthy of The Feed’s headlines for its February 25 episode was the proposed fatwa being put on a mission to Mars by the United Arab Emirates. Whilst this sounds like an Onion article or a bizarre pulpy science fiction plot, this is actually the situation many Muslims may find themselves in. Not…

‘Claimed’ wasn’t all about our three new characters as most would have expected; instead, Rick’s plight was the highlight of this episode The Walking Dead. In continuing the bleak prospects that come with separation – and both the human and zombie threat that doesn’t allow for any sort of rest – we were split between…

Thursdays come around so quick eh? And with it comes the week’s last episode of The Feed. This episode took a slightly different approach – with a core focus on the third anniversary of the Christchurch earthquake (yes that was somehow three years ago). Before that though- we were treated, if that is the right…

Well, that was surprising. Not the fact that Rake is back on the streets— that was to be expected— but the fact that everything in his outside life has become so egregiously shithouse in such a short amount of jail-time. This is the episode where Cleaver Greene gets thrown into a landfill-sized hole, so that…

With the writers seemingly placing character development first, ‘Inmates’ continues the artful slow-burn that worked so well in ‘Alive,’ but this time they have four disparate storylines to play around with. Despite multiple arcs not working so well in previous seasons, ‘Inmates’ handles the situation quite nicely, patching each tale together with not-so-subtle easter eggs,…

It was one of the most anticipated episodes of the series and for one enormous reason: Prince. All right, maybe two: the “l word” was in there as well. The episode started out strong, laughs right from the get go before Jess and Cece regaled the boys with a curious anecdote, ending in an invitation…

For those of you who haven’t yet hopped on board with Sleepy Hollow I’m here to once again regale you with a recap of episodes to give you a chance to check the series out now that it’s completed all 13 episodes. Episodes 1-5 of Season One introduced us to Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) and…

The Feed kicked off the second week of its second season with what seemed like a cruel tease of Back to the Future technology only to lead us into decidedly heavier news. The riots and breakouts on the Manus Island detention centre are troubling and depressing realities to our current asylum seeker policy are always…

What was probably the heaviest (and last) episode of the week saw the crew from The Feed tackling pig hunting, sexual abuse, Olympic hanky panky and nudist churches. Just another evening on SBS2! The lead headlines are always the least fascinating part of the show, yet Marc Fennell manages to get the show cooking with…

When Cleaver Greene was sent to prison at the end of Season 2 of Rake, I have to admit that I was pretty dubious about how the next season would play out. Surely they’d have to think of some legal fandangle that would have Cleaver waking up to find it was all a bad dream— a…