My wife and I just binged Reckoning, an outstanding psychological thriller about a serial killer and the detective bent on nabbing him that's been on Netflix since May. The ten episodes are each little masterpieces in themselves, and there's more than enough room for a second season, which I'd put at the top of any list to watch.
Aden Young from Rectify plays Detective Mike Serrato. In fact, Sertato is so much like Daniel Holden from Rectify that I could easily believe it's same character, a little older and a little less tormented. Whether that's a limitation of the actor or not, I don't care. Young does such a memorably effective job in both roles.
Serrato, as I said, is a little less tormented. But not much. He's vexed to the point of his own sanity about not catching this serial killer, played, also to perfection, by Sam Trammell from True Blood. And indeed Trammell's Leo Doyle is the most difficult kind of serial killer to catch. He doesn't want to be a serial killer. He's constantly fighting his basest instinct. He wants to let his victim go - he wants to save them, from himself - and sometimes he does.
The wives of these two men are complex characters, too - not just throwaway players, as wives of cops and killers often are in these kinds of stories. Simone Kessell does a great job as Paige, a psychologist who can't rid her husband of his demons, as intelligent and empathetic and tough as she is. And Laura Gordon is excellent as Leo's wife, but I can't tell you more about her story without giving a little too much away.
How good is Reckoning? Even the kids are standouts, especially Pax (Leo's son) and Sam (Mike's younger daughter), well played by Ed Oxenbould and Milly Alcock. And I'll also throw in a plaudit for Gloria Garayua as Cyd Ramos who is Mike's partner, and, like everyone else, gives more than you usually get from detective partners in these tales. There in fact is not an off note in the acting, plot, or dialogue. Back to what I said at the beginning - bring on a second season.
Hard to keep a dry eye at the end of Rectify's finale, in fact, throughout most of this superbly wrought (and wrote) final episode.
Well, I couldn't resist watching the first episode of The Affair
Hey, it's not easy to do time-travel, even pretty well, without being trite, too easy, on the one hand, or original and true to the intensity of paradox to the point of incomprehensibility, on the other. If your characters are traveling to the past, do you allow them to change it? If so, with what consequences for the present - what consequences that allow the travelers to go to the past in the first place, to change what their change of history has now already changed? And, if nothing changes, or not much, you better make the story of how this happened still riveting enough to make it worth the viewing or the read.
Well, my number-one television guilty pleasure this summer was "Mr. Robot" on the USA Network - though it was so good, easily the best new show on TV this summer, indeed of the year, maybe even the past year or two, that there's nothing whatsoever to feel guilty about watching it. It was just a pleasure, rare, keenly intelligent, and provocative. I saw most of it in the past few weeks, and the finale tonight.
A superb Rectify 3.5 on Thursday night - a great night for television, what with the 