Sunday Prestige TV Thread
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It’s Sunday, which means at 9 a great show will be airing:
Slow-moving, methodical storytelling plagues far too many TV shows in the streaming era. How many Netflix dramas slow to a crawl in the middle of the season, simply because they’re trying to stretch a single storyline out to more episodes?
Modern TV is skewed toward viewers who will watch everything in one big gulp, in ways that often preclude the pleasures of a single, beautifully constructed episode. But weak episodes all too often create a weak season. You can’t build a great house with crumbling bricks.
Thank God, then, for Showtime’s Billions, in which every episode is a box of chocolates, and some of them are just a little bit poisonous. You never know what you’re going to get, but it will probably be wildly entertaining.
Also, Game of Thrones will be on. The big winner of Season 7 was George R. R. R. R. R. R. R. Martin, as the more the show apparently gets beyond the books the worse the writing gets (and the more the show depends on boring, interminable fight sequences), so I’m not super-optimistic about the final episodes. (In fairness, given the structural difficulties inherent in the sprawling expansion of storylines Martin probably wouldn’t be able to produce a satisfying conclusion either.) But maybe the showrunners will prove me wrong.