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Madam Secretary, Ep. 1.12-17 builds on good stories with a great cast

Madam Secretary’s first season has been built on the backbone of the mysterious murder of the former Secretary of State and the question of what he was involved in that would cause him to be murdered. The answers have been coming in slowly throughout the season, as Elizabeth McCord’s list of suspects are cut shorter and shorter. One of the main suspects that McCord had under investigation in the first half of the season was White House Chief of Staff Russell Jackson, whom she confronted with her suspicions in the mid season finale “Game On”, concluding that arc in away that fell in line with the tone of the series.

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Madam Secretary’s Fall Finale gives interesting development to an underwhelming showdown

The first half of Madam Secretary Season one has come to a close with ‘Game On,’ the fall finale, where we get some momentum in the investigation of former Secretary of the State’s murder. The season has been very consistently well paced offering interesting characters and political drama with an underlying intrigue of a murder conspiracy that has been building throughout the season, which included the possible involvement of White House Chief of Staff Russell Jackson and the President of the United States, which has now resolved within this last episode. The resolution is indicative of the type of series that Madam Secretary is trying to be, a show that addresses political issues with idealism rather than pessimism.

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Madam Secretary is a well crafted and entertaining political procedural drama

Madam Secretary has progressed impressively within its first handful of episodes, continuing to display a great lead character along with a supporting cast that has slowly, but increasingly, shown interesting development. The pilot set the stage with its strong writing and talented cast, yet also underwhelmed with its political drama and generic production values. But the series has continued to build on its strengths and has improved enough that it’s no longer marred by its pilot’s weaknesses. The lead character is well crafted and so are her relationships with the supporting cast, which makes for greater clarity between the character’s main narrative and the political drama, with a better integrated story and more development. The only potential faults of these early episodes is that at times, the writers sacrifice narrative complexity for optimistic and comprehensive storytelling, with plot resolutions that could have led to darker and more difficult conflicts being oversimplified in order to allow for quick resolutions. The series so far has been very light and positive, with only an underlying current of devious in-house governmental foul play. This pacing is working well for the show currently, drawing in its audience, but somewhere down the line the darker side of the political game needs to have more severe consequences.

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Banshee, Ep. 2.05: “The Truth About Unicorns” may as well be a film

The die-hard Banshee fan has every right to dislike “The Truth About Unicorns.” So much of what you would expect from an episode of this series is simply not here. That, however, does not mean that “The Truth About Unicorns” doesn’t stay true to the identity of Banshee

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Banshee, Ep. 2.01: “Little Fish” opens the season with precision

Even if the characters in this series don’t reach beyond the tropes they stem from, they’re all a part of the cog that makes Banshee run so well, at least since the back half of its first season. So, when “Little Fish” begins and you get a huge portion of the episode devoted to doing right by those characters and the events they faced last year rather than piling on action and sex scenes, a sigh of relief runs through you if you were one of the people who actually got around to seeing Banshee and accepting it on its own terms.

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Is ‘Liberal’ Hollywood to Blame for America’s Gun Culture?

On December 14, 2012, a young man named Adam Lanza broke into a primary school and fatally shot 26 people in the small village of Sandy Hook, Connecticut. Twenty of them were children, aged 6 or 7. On that day, no matter where I went or what I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about the …

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‘Argo’ deftly drums up suspense but leaves character depth thin

Argo Directed by Ben Affleck Written by Chris Terrio USA, 2012 Ben Affleck’s latest directorial effort Argo is a tightly woven anecdote to history that utilizes a stranger than fiction preposterousness to strong crowd pleasing effect. The declassified true story reveals the unorthodox ingenuity involved in the unlikely coordination between Hollywood and the CIA as …

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