May 22, 2013 – After two years of rumors, fan agitation, everyone getting older, and a whole mess of “Final Countdown” references on social-media platforms that barely existed when it went off the air in 2006, the now much-adored Arrested Development will debut its fourth season, in its entirety, via Netflix on May 26.The punch line, of course, is that Arrested Development always struggled mightily in the ratings. Perhaps it was a victim of Fox’s chronic disinterest in interesting programming (see also Firefly, Undeclared, John Doe, Futurama, the list is long), or perhaps it just couldn’t find its audience. But for the fans who loved it, there was absolutely nothing else like it.

September 4, 2012 – Based on the previous performance of certain 21st century qualities dramas (The Wire, Battlestar: Galactica, The West Wing), you would be perfectly within your rights to worry that the fifth season of Breaking Bad would join their disappointing ranks. Sometimes the center just doesn't hold for longer than a Presidential term, if that. Fortunately, it very much did. Starting with a pulse-quickening time jump and ending with the soft mental click of a puzzle piece sliding into place for Hank, who has been pursuing the remains of Gus Fring's crew like a Southwestern, geode-obsessed Javert, the fifth season of Breaking Bad was a mind-blower, the most ridiculously intense hour of television the summer had to offer. A quick summary of the finale: With Mike dead, Walt is now free to shake down Lydia for the list of Mike’s men.

July 31, 2012 – We may have mad love for Mike (Jonathan Banks) on Breaking Bad, but let's not kid ourselves: Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) is the oven that bakes the meth, one of the most absurdly appealing characters on television right now. He is also one of the all-time great television sidekicks. His loyalty in unswerving — last week, Mike's alarms were going off all over the place about Walt (Bryan Cranston), but Jesse's were not, and he has become the show's unlikely moral center. The sidekick (a.k.a. the partner, the best friend, the second banana) is a crucial job, and a tough one. A good sidekick can elevate a series, a bad one is an annoying distraction. Here are the 10 best sidekicks who aren't Spock, because we just talked about him here. 10.

July 13, 2012 – Let's put it on the table now: If Breaking Bad can sustain the extraordinary momentum of this season's first two episodes — there are six more this year, eight the next — it will have had zero bad seasons. Not even the almighty Wire can claim that. Now, as it stands,Breaking Bad is the best television noir ever aired, the complete story of a man destroying himself for reasons he is convinced are right, totally unaware of—or at least ambivalent about—the fact that he has become the villain of his own life. When we last left Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and his hat, he was, for all intents and purposes, the last man standing, his enemies destroyed.

July 5, 2012 – It seems as though Netflix has gone from the best DVD service ever, radically changing our lives by sending us movies OVERNIGHT through the mail, to suddenly making everyone think it is just so dang tough to wait for DVDs in the mail. Why can't they just stream everything? As much as this complaint makes you and me and everyone we know sound like the subject of that Louis C.K. joke about how everything is awesome and nobody is happy, we certainly agree that TV streamed into your home is pretty much one of the best things about our entertainment age. You know a lot of the big guns on Netflix streaming (Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Parks and Recreation), but here are 10 excellent series that you might not know are available right this very second. 1.

June 28, 2012 – For those of us who paid to sit through (and genuinely loved) Pootie Tang, seeing Louis C.K. come to dominate both the stand-up scene and the sitcom is legitimately fantastic. We remember the "waving a peach" and "BAND THING!" punchlines. We endured Lucky Louie, a show that didn't work even if you understood his neo-Honeymooners mindset. And there's a reason he made so much money from selling his own comedy special and that people go to his website to buy tickets to his tour: People believe in this dude's art. Sometimes the good guys win. A lot of people think Our Hero abandoned the casual surrealism that informed such lunacy as Pootie Tang in favor of a more autobiographical style, both more conversational and more intense, more sexual and more personal.

June 18, 2012 – Guess who we met last night in the second half of the season finale of The Killing? Rosie Larsen. There she was with her folks the morning before her death. Then there she was at the casino hearing something She Should Not Have Heard. There she was, being beaten to death, as far from Laura Palmer as Laura Palmer is from Ophelia. Is there a better example of too little, too late? Virtually anyone who once cared about this monumentally frustrating program certainly couldn't care anymore. If it takes a big man to admit that he is wrong, then I am Hulk-sized. I contain multitudes, like Walt Whitman. A few months ago in this space, I discussed the AMC series, and I defended it: the acting, the characterizations, the vibe. I have never been more incorrect about anything. This includes not thinking, back in 1993, that the Dave Matthews Band was going to be particularly famous.

June 11, 2012 – Nobody knows how they will react in a crisis, we all say dumb things under pressure. When — as the siege of Blackwater was underway — the increasingly malevolent Cersei Lannister, voice dripping with scorn, tells Sansa Stark that "Tears aren't a woman's only weapon, the best one is between your legs," fans rolled their eyes. The fuck-me feminism was not worthy of the show. But she had a point, if only this: Both Game of Thrones, which ended the Sunday before last, and Mad Men, which drew to a close less than 24 hours ago, preoccupied their seasons with women revising their relationships to power: figuring out how to get it, how to use it, and what it means. Take Thrones' Arya Stark (played brilliantly by young Maisie Williams). When the first season concluded, she was a scared little girl on the run.

May 29, 2012 – In all of the chatter about HBO's Girls — Is it racist? Are they annoying? — there hasn't been all that much discussion about the half of the cast not referenced in the title. This might be because they all kind of suck, except for maybe Hannah's dad (and he has his own problems). Hannah and her cohorts' baggage would not fit comfortably in the overhead compartment, and they have demonstrated almost dazzlingly crap taste in men. Rarely has a sitcom assembled such a depressingly spot-on collection of male stereotypes. This is, of course, as it should be. The girls of Girls may serve as a reminder to older viewers that there is little romantic about life as it is being lived, but the boys of Girls remind you that if anything else, man alive, people are bad at sex when they are in their 20s (and after 50, they gotta be careful in the shower).

May 7, 2012 – To see Julia Louis-Dreyfus in HBO's hope-it-stays-hysterical Veep is to think: How did they know? How did they — first Larry David, then the rest of Team Seinfeld — know that she was so funny? And HOW she was so funny, with her knack for making genuinely strange women seem perfectly normal? There's little evidence of it on her brief Saturday Night Live tenure.