Until April

SPOILER ALERT

This has a been a generally terrific second season of Boardwalk Empire, with slow first episode (again) but picking up a lot faster than the first season did. The Sunday night season finale was gutsy in the sense that they ended the Jimmy Darmody story, but the really tripped out episode was the penultimate one, where Jimmy finally got his origin story and we got all the back story we could have ever wanted, and more. It's not just Game of Thrones, it's not TV; it's HBO: The Incest Channel.

It's a mistake to kill off Jimmy in the sense that Michael Pitt played the most riveting of the four main characters (Nucky, Margaret, Agent Van Alden being the other three top billed leads) to a large degree because he has been just so riveting to watch, so easily period, with a silent film star's profile, always lit beautifully. It'll be interesting to see if the show can recover. My bet is on Michael Shannon -- the little hint of things to come is his moving with au pair and infant to Cicero, IL, which is where Al Capone kept his home base. Maybe the disgraced agent uses that cover to infiltrate and take a shot at redemption as a Fed?

I diligently watched two other HBO shows, comedies, starting with Hung's third season. By the end of the first season the show had found its feet (and other body parts), a great conceit that showed America in recession, the growth of man who's just starting to find his feminine side, and a very smart, funny cast with Jane Adams possibly the funniest character on TV -- her Tanya always so needy, so ready to compromise morally to fulfill her needs, so transparent. Season two was peak Hung but this season, with Thomas Jane's Ray and Tanya finding some success (and still more farce), some terrific comic sex scenes, and a tender start to rapprochement with his wife, Jessica, a career highlight for Anne Heche. It wasn't quite as necessary overall as season two but always put a smile on my face from start to finish.

Then there's the Best Television Show of 2011 You Aren't Watching, Enlightened. Written by Mike White and Executive Produced by White and star Laura Dean. The story is of a female corporate exec who has a meltdown when she's fired essentially for having an affair with a married boss, then comes back from a meditation retreat in Hawaii all "enlightened" only to struggle as all those she returns to are not. Diane Ladd (her real life mother and the false Mrs. Mulwray in Chinatown) plays her uptight, loner mother, Luke Wilson does he own career highlight work as her drug-addicted ex-husband with whom she's also trying to connect, and Mike White plays her co-worker, a nebbish who's also trapped in the new basement division doing data entry on an ominous 1% vs. 99% computer program.

While often inducing cringes over Dern's character's innocence and spiritual/political activism in situations where her corporate colleagues and former friends think she's a freak, the highs of the story are huge, and Dern turns in yet another brilliant performance. She's David Lynch's muse, alright, and did a blowaway Katherine Harris also on HBO, and her level of commitment and specificity is wonderous.

Then there was this preview, and all the other shows, well, they just didn't seem quite so critical:

Let's hope Mad Men in January is enough to keep me happy until April. Otherwise it's just a wait.

Anticipation

The first HBO series from Executive Producer Martin Scorsese, who also directed the pilot, is arriving on HBO this fall. The new trailer looks like something we haven't seen before, at least not with this theatrical level of casting, detail and intensity:

Preview Trailer #3

Looks like Steve Buscemi has his leading role of a lifetime, a Tony Soprano-type bad guy boss role but of an entirely different flavor, including the historical setting. It's a logical connection, as the writing Executive Producer is Terence Winter of The Sopranos fame. Michael Shannon as his FBI nemesis looks like he's got his breakout role. And Michael Kenneth Williams, beloved as Omar on The Wire, is also back in a completely different role for him, as a crime boss rather than a fugitive Robin Hood. Michael Pitt, Kelly MacDonald, Gretchen Mol are all theatrical-level actors, with Pitt and MacDonald particularly early in their careers, and they're in it as well. Michael Stuhlbarg, indelible in the Coen Bros A Serious Man plays Jewish crime figure Arnold Rothstein, the "man who fixed the 1919 World Series."

More info, including synopsis, at Geeks of Doom.

I don't know that I can name an upcoming movie, with the exception of Christopher Nolan's Inception, that I'm now looking forward to as much as this series. I can name another TV series -- the Season Four premiere of Mad Men later next month -- but there's no Scorsese movie left to come out this year, maybe the Eastwood with Matt Damon although that's still way under wraps, maybe The White Stripes documentary...

But with this trailer playing just before Sunday night's True Blood Season Three premiere, I'm betting that anticipation is going to shoot through the roof.

Ka-bam.