“What’s with all the missing pieces? Grandma?”

“It was that damned dog,” Ruth Deaver laments to her son in the aftermath of her leap from the bridge—from the Pangborn Bridge, dedicated seconds before her leap. “That damned dog” isn’t a St. Bernard like Cujo, but his bark is enough to rouse memories of the terrible siege in the Camber’s dooryard. Or maybe Ruth…

“There’s a lot of history in this town, and not all of it good,” Molly Strand straight-talks her out-of-town buyers when they discover the home they’re touring belonged to the warden of a notorious prison, who performed an even more notorious suicide just days ago. With that line, “The Box” seems determined to…

“Has it begun?”

“Remember the dog? The strangler? Sure you do.” Early in Castle Rock’s second episode, Dale Lacy’s voice-over sets the tone for “Habeas Corpus.” In the title sequence (introduced in this episode), torn pages from Stephen King’s oeuvre allude to horrors he’s written over the decades. The Shining. It. Misery. The Green…

Castle Rock opens in flashback, showing Alan Pangborn (the quietly capable, deceptively adept sheriff of Stephen King’s Needful Things and The Dark Half) trudging alone through the bleak Maine winter, wind howling around him as he plunges a stick into mounds of snow. This is no longer a rescue operation, but a…

“Nobody leaves until we celebrate this place!”

One day is almost never enough time to resolve a longstanding problem. But sometimes, a sitcom half-hour—or that paltry 22-minute stretch we politely call a sitcom half-hour—has to be enough. In the case of tonight’s back-to-back episodes of New Girl, that’s two paltry 22-minute stretches to resolve some sticky…

Real friends will help you bury the body

“Ruth’s gonna do what Ruth’s gonna do.”

Last week, I described Cece and Schmidt’s daughter as more of an adorable plot device than a full-fledged character, and as charming as Danielle and Rhiannon Rockoff’s performances as Ruth have been, I would have been perfectly happy for her to continue as a li’l cutie pie…

“You get one story. Take it away, Nick.”

There’s a lot going on under the surface in “Tuesday Meeting.” Last week, New Girl’s seventh and final season opened with a heartening sense of achievement and expansion for this ever-widening group of friends: of a broader world they’re exploring, of careers thriving, and of a…

“Don’t make it about the mustache!”

As New Girl hurtled toward the end of its sixth-season—and, at the time, the possible series conclusion—its last seconds showed Jessica Day and Nick Miller yelling, “Stay right there!” as they frantically raced toward each other. They didn’t stay put, though, and that’s how they…

Just four episodes in, Here And Now has succumbed to a too-familiar pattern: another speech, another family gathering, another vision. “Hide And Seek” stands out only by limiting itself to one formal speech, one assembled audience, one room full of folding chairs, where previous episodes have given speeches to two or…

“Maybe it’s just a continuing journey of successes and failures.”

“It looks like you’ve got something that could maybe become a cloud.”

“That means something, right?”

The A.V. Club’s picks for the top TV of 2017 carry with them a hint of escapism: otherworldly settings, larger-than-life characters, lavish costumes, talking horses, kitchens straight out of an interior designer’s wildest fantasies. Whatever could we be trying to escape from? And could we reasonably expect our glowing…

In The A.V. Club’s attempt to carve the mountain of TV released in 2017 into a monument commemorating the year’s best programming, we took a slightly different tack than in years past: Ballots were limited to 10 shows apiece, separating the absolute favorites from the fondly remembered and the honorable mentions. Once…

It’s Saturday night—Sunday morning, almost. I’ve just left my neighborhood bar after a night out with friends (rarer than it used to be, but just as fun). I convince my husband to walk the long way home, past the 24-hour gas station. There I grab a plain cheese pizza from the picked-over freezer section.

“What kind of freaky creep built this mixed-up jumble of jambalaya?”