Month: December 2024

It’s been almost a year since the last episode aired of season five of Fargo, the best crime drama on television since Breaking Bad, and I miss it every day. While Breaking Bad still stands as my favorite show of all time, Fargo has rapidly risen to be among my all-time faves, with season after season of crime-filled dramatic brilliance from creator Noah Hawley.

While there can be no true substitute for Fargo, I am always looking for something to scratch that itch between seasons—which take way too long to come—and right now there is The Sticky, a light, somewhat silly but certainly entertaining Fargo wannabe that doesn’t come anywhere close to the gravitas or quality of its illustrious inspiration, but is just charming enough to win me over.

Starring the great Margo Martindale, The Sticky is a new short-and-sweet (pun intended) 6-episode series on Prime Video about a maple syrup farmer who schemes to steal syrup from the Canadian Syrup Association, who she feels is ripping off the small-town farmers in their rural Quebec town. Martindale’s character, Ruth, teams up with a bumbling security guard and a small-time mobster to try to pull off the heist, which, of course, hits multiple obstacles, including the cops, who are just a step behind them.

The series is funny and fast-paced—it has to be, when the whole story is told in six half-hour episodes—and dark when it needs to be. There’s nothing original here and everything feels ripped off from something else, whether it’s Fargo or Breaking Bad or every heist film ever, but that’s totally not the point. This is brisk and silly, a crime drama almost mocking itself, yet never reaching over too far into campiness (except when one specific famous guest star goes over the top, but that’s not the show’s fault).

So, if you’re looking for a show that won’t require a long investment, will engage you ever so slightly, will amuse you and keep you entertained and not force you to think too much—or really at all–I recommend The Sticky, aka Coens, Canadian style.

Law & Order, the original, AKA Mother Ship, uber producer Dick Wolf’s first and best series that birthed an entire genre and hundreds of spinoff and copycats, is FINALLY available to stream. It may seem strange that I’m so excited about this, but, trust me, this is news.

Two years ago, when I wanted to compile a list of my Top 10 favorite Law & Order episodes from the show’s first 20 seasons in honor of it returning for a new season in 2022 after having been off the air for twelve years, I thought it would be easy to quickly blitz through the seasons to find the episodes I liked best, as I assumed it was streaming SOMEWHERE. I mean, after all, every time I turn on the TV, it’s airing on some channel. BBC America, Sundance, WETV, and Pop all have the show on heavy rotation. And that’s, of course, in addition to the new episodes airing on NBC.

Because Law & Order is an NBC staple, I assumed all seasons would be on Peacock, but I was sorely mistaken. It turns out, only the later seasons were on Peacock. If I wanted to re-watch any episode prior to season 15, I was out of luck. So what did I do? I literally set my DVR to record every episode that aired on every channel to catch all the earlier episodes, so I could cull through all the older episodes. Yes, it took a lot of time and a really large DVR capacity to finally put together my list, and it was a huge ordeal.

But now, just a scant two years later, the world is a MUCH better place. As of TODAY, December 16, 2024, every episode of the original run of Law & Order—all 20 seasons, every one of the 456 episodes—are now available to stream on Hulu. And there is much celebrating.

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When Southland ended in 2013, I thought I would never see another L.A. cop show that good ever again. While I was partially right—nothing, for me, still has come close to Southland as a street beat cop show—the next year, Bosch started its run, and I have to say, it comes pretty darn close. Bosch is the best set-in-Los Angeles-detective show ever, and I dare you to challenge me.

Bosch, available on Prime Video, ran for seven seasons, from 2014 to 2021, and was one of the first Amazon Original television series. It stars Titus Welliver as an LAPD homicide detective who plays by his own rules, has trouble with authority, is a loner and is, of course, the best. He’s also got a troubled past, a complicated history with his ex-wife and a daughter he’s trying to figure out how to communicate with. All of this is tailor-made for Welliver, an actor who is clearly from the wrong decade, as is this show. This is such a ‘70s throwback, in all the right ways, minus the misogyny and racism. It’s all action and nitty gritty detective work, with Bosch hunting down the bad guys through good old detective work. This show is seriously catnip for all of us who miss shows like Magnum P.I. and Simon & Simon and Cagney & Lacey, where cops and detectives bantered and did real police work out in the field.

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Justified was one of those shows that was on our list forever. We had heard people talk about it, we knew we would get to it, but it just never happened. Then the pandemic came and we needed a show to binge that had a lot of episodes. We said, ok, now’s the time.

Six seasons have never flown by so quickly.

Justified was one of the most enjoyable discoveries we’ve had in a long time. The series aired from 2010 to 2015 on FX and is now available to stream on Hulu, and was created by Graham Yost, who went on to executive produce The Americans and Slow Horses. It stars Timothy Olyphant as a U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, who goes back home to the Appalachian Mountain area of eastern Kentucky to try to keep the peace. It is based on a series of stories by Elmore Leonard.

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