Billions Season 3 Review

Showtime continues to be the most intriguing network on any system, and unlike HBO and AMC, seems more than capable of coming up with astonishing new series when the old ones depart. Billions has been one of the more intriguing players in its rotation, and with the real world taking new and shocking turns,  it is more than up to the challenge/

When Season 2 ended, Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) had just been indicted for insider trading for his manipulation of the stock 'Ice Juice'. We also learned that this manipulation had been masterminded by U.S. Attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) at  the cost of his personal fortune, his best friend, and his relationship with his father (Jeffrey DeMunn). As Season 3 begins, both Rhoades and Axe are in strange new worlds. Bobby's marriage to Lara (Malin Akerman) has imploded, with a separation from her, and a further problem with his kids. In the season premiere, facing the possible collapse of Ax Capital, he agreed to suspend trading, and then spent yesterday's episode entirely unable to keep still. Bobby is a shark, and can't figure out what to do if he's not trading. So, even as he tries to stem off prison, he can't avoid doing the only thing he knows how to do.

Chuck is in an even deeper bind. With a new administration and a new attorney general (wonderfully portrayed by Clancy Brown), he has managed to keep his job when all around are losing theirs, and is trying to keep a distance from the new ADA (Christopher Denham, master of the understatement) He has also managed to reconcile with Wendy (Maggie Siff, incredible), but still can't keep his hands off the case. As the prosecutor tells him: "You're a man who's committed a crime of passion. It felt good at the time, but now you want to get all the blood of the walls." Chuck knows the peril he's in, even as he continues to seek the governor's chair.

Ax Capital is in a similar case of flux. With Bobby now 'gone', leadership has been set up between Wendy, Wags (David Costabile, stealing every scene he's in) and Taylor (Asia Kate Dillon, now promoted to series regular). Taylor managed to win over Ax's confidence in Season 2, and in the finale was promoted to CIO. The entire firm is looking to them for leadership, and they have been more than willing to provide it. But Ax can't stop working behind the scenes, even though all of them are desperately trying to protect him. Ax, like Chuck, can be his own worst enemy. The question is, who'll break first?

Billions has now easily risen to the status of best drama on Showtime. It manages to inhabit the gray area that all good series on television now seem to occupy, while not forfeiting any of the great acting and writing that so many of them lack. The creators have put together two of the strongest lead characters on television, and yet you can probably count on one hand the number of the time the two of them have been in the same scene together. Add to this the fact that Wendy's new position has reestablished the power triangle that leads to some of the series best drama (including the fact that Wendy and Bobby have never even considered a romantic relationship), and you have something you barely see on TV any more. All of the acting on this series is remarkable, and yet attention must still be paid to Dillon. I can't think of any series that would hire a gender neutral actor to play a gender neutral role, and then spend the entire series, making sure  that the sex of the character was the least interesting thing about them. Dillon commands the screen in every scene their in, and should be considered among the Emmy nominations.

Billions is currently Showtime's crowning achievement, just like Masters of Sex was five years ago. I really hope that the Emmys find a way to recognize it the way they didn't for Masters.  In an era where the almighty dollar is king, this show seems far more relevant than ever.

My score: 4.5 stars.

Homicide Episode Guide: All Is Bright

Written by Rafael Alvarez; story by James Yoshimura and Julie Martin

Directed by Matt Reeves

Well, for the first time in three years, its Christmas for the Homicide  squad. And while there may be putting up a tree in the Waterfront, and hanging tinsel on the board, neither murder nor morality take a holiday. The detectives learn this in spades in ‘All is Bright’.

For the first time Ballard and Gharty get handed a murder of their own to investigate. The deceased is Philip Longley, who gets assaulted with a bottle of detergent at his local Laundromat and has bleach poured down his throat in the bargain. We don’t get the motive, however, until the autopsy is finished and it is revealed that Longley was HIV positive--- a big deal, when you are as sexually active as Longley was.  What strikes us as galling is that Longley (who showed no outward sign of his illness) had the disease for six years and told no one about it, save his mother--- and he had no problem spreading his love all over Baltimore.  The ironic twist is that got him killed by a woman he had already done the same to--- the woman who killed him was infected.

Continuing in the tradition of the ‘walking dead’ that perforate this season is Rita Hale, a woman in the final stages of AIDS. Openly covered with sores, Hale has less than five months to live. It’s obvious she had motive and she makes it pretty clear she would have done it. The detectives, however, are split on how to handle it. Ballard (perhaps not surprisingly) is prepared to overlook Hale’s crime as she has been the victim of a greater evil. Gharty remains cool and detached but you can’t escape the feeling that he is prejudiced against her because of her disease. The episode comes down to an extended sequence in the box between the two detectives and Hale.  Hale is openly scornful, sarcastic, and eventually sorrowful and you get the feeling that neither Ballard or Gharty is wild about what they’re doing. Ballard is so upset by it that she butts head with Gee over charging her. While the lieutenant isn’t unsympathetic, he  is blunt--- Hale is a killer first and a person afterwards.

Callie Thorne gives her first solid performance as Ballard. We learn a bit about her in the interrogation--- she had a fiancé in Seattle, and is currently dating someone in Baltimore--- but her attitude towards Hale, and the other women Longley slept with indicates her real opinion about the deceased. It is also clear that she has her own worries (she gets tested for HIV at the end of the episode) Equally memorable is Kathyrn Erbe as Rita.  Erbe is a fine actress (after this episode, Fontana would cast her in Oz as another doomed woman, murderer Shirley Bellinger) and in her few scenes she creates a memorable woman, bitter, sad and ultimately haunting.

Ballard and Gharty aren’t the only detectives faced with hard choices.  Falsone continues to dog Kellerman over the Luther Mahoney shooting and Kellerman reluctantly tells Lewis that Georgia Rae might have a tape of the murder. Meldrick is understandably pissed by this and this will cause the estrangement between the two partners to get even worse. Kellerman is rapidly becoming isolated from the unit.

Even the comic subplot is pretty grim. We meet Munch’s  first ex-wife Gwen as she calls on him to help her plan his former mother-in-law’s funeral. Gwen’s mother was a major literary critic, and had a huge number of colleagues in the literary world. With the help of Munch’s brother Bernard, they plan for large reception--- only to have no one there, save for true-crime novelist Peter Maas (playing himself). As Maas says, Munch’s mother-in-law was a bitter, hackneyed, unpleasant woman and he came just to make sure she was dead. Its pretty clear that this woman despised Munch and did everything in her power to break the two of them up.  Yet despite all this, after seeing his wife’s downfall, he delivers a rather nice eulogy for the woman at the Waterfront Christmas party.  For all his cynicism John can be really sweet sometimes.

Almost in passing, we see Bayliss, who has had a crush on Dr. Cox since he first met her, finally reveals his feelings for her by kissing her. The two of them will hook up for a while, but this relationship doesn’t last either. For Bayliss, however, it’s the start of a lot of action for him.

Not exactly a warm and fuzzy show, is it? Topping it off, we have one of the best music montages in a long time, as Suzanne Vega’s angry, metallic song ‘Blood Makes Noise’ plays as Rita gets booked. That image and sound will remain in your head long after the credits have rolled.

‘All is Bright’ is anything but. It is dark with difficult issues, deals with old wounds that don’t scab over and very problematic relationships—in short, its everything that we’ve come to expect from Homicide. This is great television

My score: 4.5 stars.

A Show That Lives Up To Its Name: For the People Review

By now anyone who has been following this column for a sustained length of time knows how much I loathe Shonda Rhimes. I even wrote up a column just two weeks where I cursed How To Get Away With Murder for the 4000th time. So I expect everyone who reads the following review to judge this carefully, maybe give it more consideration.

By now, everyone knows the Shondaland formula. It follows a group of attractive people, usually very long, who are interested in three things: sex, advancement of their careers, and then maybe their profession, whether it be medicine, law or politics. The majority of the leads are females and/or minorities, and if they have any character at all, it shoved aside for the sake of their careers.

That's why For the People comes like a bucket of ice water to the system of someone used to this same formula. In the first three episodes, I've seen two sex scenes - which for Rhimes' world is almost virginal. The majority of the characters are in law, (yes, like in Murder) , but they still seem to be young enough not to have the idealism stomped out of them, and actually seem to believe in justice for their clients. And god help us, there's actually been character development in the episodes I've seen that doesn't pertain to sex. (Well, there is a character who seems bent solely on advancement and sex, but oddly enough, he's also the most loathed. Which is rare.)

For The People looks at a group of attorney's for 'The Mother Court', a district court in New York.  Three of the major attorneys have just been sworn in for the prosecutors, led primarily by Roger Gunn (Ben Shenkman). Three others work in the public defender's office, led by Jill Carlan (Hope Davis, finally getting work on television worthy of her.) There are also some fairly strong authority figures around the courtroom -the main bailiff, Tina Krissman (Anna Deaveare Smith is in the house!) and Judge Byrne, who oversees many of the courts and acts as referee (Vondie Curtis-Hall, where have you been the last ten years). Strangely enough, these authority figures are fully dimensional, and actually seem to try and give as much of a damn, while still trying to work within the system. It comes as little surprise that Smith's character is the most intriguing, as someone who tries to guide the PD's in the direction of people who need help, while trying to remain working within the system.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the attorney who play the PD's get some of the juicier storylines. There's a Jewish attorney who basically worked at his parent's dry cleaner to get through law school, who finds himself defending a neo-Nazi accused of trying to assassinate a state politician. He goes through all kinds of emotional  tug-of-war just trying to release him, and doesn't feel any better about what he's done when he's finished. There's Allison Adams, a PD, who is willing to break the rules with her boyfriend to get a client off, but still feels pain when it comes time to dealing with software that might end up sending a child not unlike her to a higher sentence. And in the lead role is Britt Robertson as Sandra Bell, a foster child who still burns at the injustices of the system, and who has too much empathy with her clients.

But by far the breakout character in this series is Susannah Flood portrayal of prosecutor Kate Littlejohn. A humorless, fast-talking, rules-following attorney, she seems what Paris Gellar might have become after Gilmore Girls. (And frankly, I'd rather have seen Liza Weill playing her than stuck as Bonnie in Murder.) She deliberately makes herself hard to like, lie so many Shondaland characters. But unlike those characters, people respect her, and there happens to be a soul in that characters. In last night's episode, she delivered a heartfelt monologue about her childhood desire for a trip to the Capitol and what thwarted it that was far more impassioned than I've heard in any series in awhile. And the way she worked on a project with Legos, and its final revelation actually revealed a depth that a lot of network characters don't have.

For the People, perhaps not that surprisingly, is more of a Shondaland series in all but name. It bears the producers production sign, but there's little else. It's extremely well written and acted, and genuinely seems to give a damn about its characters. Perhaps that's the main reason, it's running a poor third Tuesdays at 10pm. I have a request. For the People's ratings are about the same as How to Get Away With Murder, a Shondaland legal drama, which is anything but. ABC is going to have to make some tough choices about which series to kill. They'll probably end up saving both, but if I get a vote, it's for, well, you know.

My score: 4 stars.

Homicide Episode Guide: Saigon Rose

Written by Eric Overmeyer; story by Tom Fontana and James Yoshimura

Directed by Nick Gomez

It is rare for Homicide to draw its news from the real world, a la Law & Order.  Indeed, two of the times they did do something like this were in the crossovers they had done with Law & Order As for real cases I know of only  two regular Homicides that are based on real news stories not in Simon’s book are season 3 ‘Colors’ (which was based on the 1992 murder of a Japanese exchange students) and ‘Saigon Rose’ which is based on an incident in New Orleans a few months earlier.  Rather than deal with racism, as ‘Colors’ did, this one deals with  dark look inside the ugliness of a very  disturbed soul.

The episode deal with a multiple homicide at a Vietnamese restaurant. Four members of the Nguyen family are killed while sitting down to dinner at the family restaurant. Also killed is Officer Larry Jones, a policeman who moonlighted as a security guard for the family to earn some extra cash.  The motive is fairly obvious--- it was a very well-planned robbery. The reason that it breaks is because there are two surviving witnesses, two surviving children—they are  spared only because they are in the kitchen when the bullets start flying.  They can identify the voice of the killer--- a beat cop from the neighborhood named Toinette Perry. And the reason they recognize her is because the cop, like Jones (who was his partner), moonlighted as a security guard for them.

Since there is little mystery as to what happened, the drama of the episode occurs as we realize the nature of Perry. When we first meet her, she drives up to help Pembleton and Lewis identify the victims and offer her assistance in catching the killer.  We slowly learn (first from Mrs. Jones and then from the officers own jacket) that she is a lousy cop, sloppy in her police work, with extreme paranoid tendencies and a borderline personality. In fact, the only reason that she made the force in the first place is because of Affirmative Action as well as the fact that her father was a councilman, who got the board to overlook her bad psych exam. 

The same qualities that make Perry a lousy cop make her a lousy criminal. Frank and Meldrick easily poke holes in her story, she can not give a reasonable answer to any question and she easily gets flustered.  But we don’t realize the true nature of her evil until we talk with her accomplice--- her cousin, a paroled felon.  He was supposed to rob the place cleanly and later Toinette would show up and screw around with the evidence and witnesses so that he never got caught. Then Toinette came in and without any pretense or reason began shooting everyone in sight. Nor is this even her first murder--- we learn near the end of the episode that she  killed her own father a year ago. What makes all of this even more unsettling is that Perry feels absolutely no remorse for what has happened---  even when she lays the murders on her cousins, its clear she’s more concerned with herself than with the lives that were lost. Camille McMcurty Ali is very unsettling in her portrait of a woman who clearly has no morality or scruples.

The murder is so unsettling that the normally unflappable Dr. Cox is clearly unsettled by the viciousness of the slaughter. Indeed, she is so upset by this particular crime that she openly talks with Mike Kellerman about leaving the M.E.’s office.. Ironically, at this point  Kellerman is seriously considering a career change also. (Perhaps this is a foreshadowing of sorts; by the time the season is over both Cox and Kellerman will be gone from the series) But let’s back up.

Georgia Rae Mahoney, who was released on bail a few weeks ago, has now been set free completely, the chargers against her for both the detective shootings and the Collins’ murders dropped.  One wonders, given the preponderance of evidence how this was even possible; later we will learn that more corruption was involved in her release. Furthermore, Georgia Rae has no intention of leaving Baltimore and, as she made clear in ‘Birthday’ the previous episode, she has every intention of blackmailing and breaking Kellerman about his involvement in the death of Luther.

With Georgia Rae hounding him off the job, and Falsone still hounding him on it (in a slightly unrealistic sequence the two detectives get into a scuffle and end up holding their guns on each other) Mike realizes the enormity of the trouble he is in. He finally confesses the truth to Juliana, who tells him that he can’t  carry this alone; he has to tell Meldrick and Stivers about the videotape Georgia Rae has. He’ll need some time to get there, but when he does neither will  be thrilled. Unfortunately, things are continuing to spiral out of control

For the first time since the ‘Blood Ties’ three-parter, Ballard and Gharty get a story of their own. Unfortunately, compared to Kellerman, it’s a pretty lightweight one. After dining on the local delicacies of Baltimore--- crabcakes--- Laura suffers  anaphylactic shock brought on by an allergic reaction to shellfish. This was something of an in-joke because actress Callie Thorne suffered from food allergies.  The writers probably would have done better to give her some policework (to their credit she’d get a case the following episode)

We also meet one last demi-regular--- Billie Lou, the new bartender at he Waterfront who has a very unique act with a double bass. We’ll be seeing her around a bit more later on.

‘Saigon Rose’ is a pretty disturbing episode in its portrait of a woman with no scruples whatsoever. We have no idea what’s wrong with Toinette Perry and her actions are truly senseless. This is how Homicide  works and even though its not as brilliant as ‘Every Mother’s Son’ or the Mahoney saga, it’s pretty tense anyway.

My score: 4 stars.

Better Late Than Never: Grace & Frankie Season 4

In a world where even the most endearing and delightful series on any service seem to have a short life span, there is something to be said for the old-fashioned comedy series that doesn't seem determined to end any time soon. This is to be expected on network and some cable services which keep their hit shows on the air well past their expiration dates, but is harder to fathom among some of the more involved services, and considering the makeup of most of the cast of Grace & Frankie, it's actually encouraging that the series had already been renewed for Season 5.

As Season 4 begins to unfold, Grace and Frankie have momentarily separated, and when Frankie (Lily Tomlin) returns from Santa Fe to attend her sons baby shower, she is appalled to find that Grace (Jane Fonda) has filled the gap with a slightly younger roommate, her pedicurist Sherrie (Lisa Kudrow, as always, delightful) Sherrie actually has some appealing secrets, and my one regret about the way they resolved her storyline is that, well, they resolved her storyline, but who knows, maybe we'll see her again by the end of the season. It doesn't take long for the two roommates to find their old patterns and new problems. For example, when Frankie trotted off to Santa Fe with her lover Jacob (Ernie Hudson, who I hope will see more of soon) to resolve paperwork in handling her mail, she arranged things so that she declared herself dead. Now that she's returned herself back to LA, more or less permanently, she now has to deal with the ramifications. As she puts it 'by the time I make myself alive, I'll actually be dead."

Grace is undergoing her own problems. The relationship she began with her business rival Nick (Peter Gallagher) has actually become more serious than she is willing to admit, and she finds herself rather amazed to find that Nick actually wants more of her, not less. Given how restrictive she is, one can sense it will end in tears, but there are probably going to be a fair amount of laughs along the way.

Robert and Sol seem to be moving in a solid direction these days. Robert was nominated for a local theater award for his production of 1776,  a storyline that took up much of Season 3. Sol tries to get him to use his winners speech as a call to barricades, and is actually a little bemused when he wins, does call to the barricades.. and forgets to mentions his husband. (Considering that Sam Waterston and Martin Sheen are the leads here, there are definitely layers among layers in this joke.) Then there was the fact that Sol thinks he's found a gay couple as numbers only to find that they're a straight couple - but the husband is clearly closeted. This adds a layer of seriousness to the story that the writers have managed to deal with extremely well in this series.

Grace & Frankie isn't even close to the most popular comedy on Netflix. It's not the hippest show. It's certainly nowhere close to being the best show. But considering the fact that all of the major leads are either at or fast approaching 80, particularly in an age where, even now, we rarely have anyone above 50 in a lead role, it is by far one of the most daring shows on any platform. And considering that it simply wants to make its points in pure unadulterated jokes, there's something very admirable about that, and to be commended. And really, I don't know how long the series can naturally last. What I do know, is this series handles the realties of aging more realistically - and comically - then almost any series I've seen on TV. In one episode, Lisa Kudrow's character says she's had many good friends, but she's never "had a Grace.. or a Frankie, for that matter." Frankly, TV needs more of both. I look forward to the rest of the season, and for Season 5 as well.

My score: 4 stars.

Homicide Episode Guide: Birthday

Written by Julie Martin

Directed by Alison MacLean

In the early stages of Season 6, Homicide was still struggling to find the right balance between the old and the new. With Andre Braugher officially announcing this was his final season, it might have made more sense to give more storylines to the rest of the cast. But when you've got one of the greatest characters in the history of the medium on your payroll, you use him as much as you can. Simultaneously, the writers were still struggling to figure out how to use the newer actors who had joined this season.

'Birthday' is a prime example of how they were moving. For the fourth time in six episodes,  Falsone is given the center of a major storyline. Keeping with the what would quickly become a major theme of Season 6, the victim in the case is a member of the 'living dead'. Grace Rivera is found in a Fells Point alley beaten, raped and near the point of death. Called on to the scene along with Sex Crimes, Falsone, Lewis and Stivers (now having rotated to sex crimes), find themselves fighting for coverage. Falsone, still cocky, guarantees Gee that he will clear this case, something Meldrick tells him in an idiotic thing to do. Falsone manages to strike a rapport with Rivera, who has no memory of the attack or anything that led up her ending up near death. Rivera is the exact obverse of almost every major assault victim you see on TV, particularly the ones that you would see on Law & Order: SVU. She is not shattered or hysterical, but rather grateful to be alive, angry about the investigative process, and when the attacker is caught, reflective on how her lifestyle has basically led to this event.

Rivera is promiscuous (as her roommate, the closest thing to family she has says, "she says you gotta kiss a lot of frogs") and she seems to think that she has made a lot of bad choices in her life. But she doesn't seem like a 'victim' in the same sense that so many rape victims are, or would later be portrayed. She's a good person, and Allison Foland makes her seem real without being tough. Which is why the denouement to the episode comes as such as a shock. Falsone comes to the hospital to tell her that they are about to charge her attacker with attempted murder, and learns from the doctor that she started to have a brain hemorrhage and died on the table. For awhile they made this character come to life, and it hurts to see someone so vital die so inauspiciously. In  other words, it's classic Homicide.

The investigation is more or less Homicide, too. The attacker is not some abusive sex offender, but rather the friendly bartender who let Rivera run a tab. He is caught on the re-canvas, when it turns out the bartender who Lewis talked to the first time lied so she wouldn't get in trouble with her boss. And the bartender never gives any real explanation as to why he attacked Rivera.

For reasons that never made any sense to me, either at the time or now, Jon Seda was considered one of the worst things to happened to Homicide in the final two seasons.  Admittedly, he comes across as overly aggressive at times and often very awkward, but I honestly thought that was part of his charm, at least in Season 6. His dogged personality, and his lack of confidence coming from auto seems natural and very well done, and I thought that much of his work was among the high points of the season.

Frank, in the meantime, is dealing with drama of his own. Mary is way overdue with her second child, and its starting to irk him, to the point where he's confiding in Bayliss.. Tim suggests that they go to a restaurant and get a special kind of salad, which he claims will help induce labor,. Frank thinks this is ridiculous, but takes Mary to a restaurant anyway to get this salad. She ends up going into labor, but there are complications, and she has to have an emergency C-Section. Frank feels a degree of helplessness in the waiting room, and finds himself confiding in Tim to a level he rarely does, claiming that maybe he should've stayed in Robbery, because at least that way he'd have been there for Mary and his daughter. The doctor tells him that he has a healthy son, and he's happy. Had they used this for a reason why Frank would leave the job later on, I would have been content, as it would've been keeping with his character.

But the main reason he will leave the series is the third story, and it involves Kellerman and Georgia Rae Mahoney. Georgia is out on bail (we won't learn how this is possible until the middle of the season) and she starts her season long torment of Kellerman. Luther, for all his sins, was subtle in his machinations; his sister is far more direct. She tells Kellerman that her brother had surveillance cameras in his entire apartment, and she has a videotape of him. Kellerman spends the remainder of the episode finding out there was surveillance, and it would've picked up everything in the apartment where he shot Luther. Georgia continues to taunt him, saying she won't give any information, and this pressure will lead Mike back to drinking. Reed Diamond gives the first of many good performances he will give in his last season, as he begins to drown. Equally good is Hazelle Goodman as Georgia Rae, which makes you really wish the writers had made more use of her.

'Birthday'  is a return to the dark level of Homicide that we have seen,  but there's still a fair lack of balance for the series. The season is now almost a third over, and we've seen precious little of Callie Thorne or Peter Gerety. (The writers will correct this in the next few episodes). It's a good balance of a traditional cop show (there's a hell of an 'A' story, a solid 'B', and a decent 'C'), but considering that Homicide was anything but the traditional cop show, it's something of a letdown. Still Seda, Braugher and Diamond are all excellent, and we seem to be definitely going in the right direction.

My score: 4 stars.

How Shonda Rhimes Continues To Get Away With Murder

The term 'hate-watching' has been in usage for almost a decade, but I can honestly say I never understood what it meant until Shonda Rhimes came into the TV business. Her entire world, which keeps expanding, despite the ever diminishing returns, seems to be based on the worst bits of TV's Golden Age with none of the rewards. I all but gave up on the majority of the craziness of her work two years with one notable exception. If you've read the title of this piece, you know what show it is.

Television has basically become a world where its harder and harder to find any real good guys outside of CBS' procedural dramas. In many ways, this has been an improvement, yet there are time I can't help but long for the days where we had simple good versus evil structures. How To Get Away With Murder would no doubt have you think, like so many series in Shondaland, that there are no good people any more. Certainly, the central characters in Murder are anything but pleasant people, and with each season, they get more and more monstrous. You could make the argument that this is the very mindset behind such brilliant dramas as Breaking Bad, which take a good man and turn him evil. The difference is, there were some truly good people in Walter White's world, and part of the brilliance of the series came when we saw the victims of this evil get ground beneath Heisenberg's Pontiac.

There are no good people in Murder. The central characters are all just various people who do bad things, and spend an entire series trying to have Viola Davis fix it. Everybody in the world of Murder is out for themselves, and when a truly good person gets involved with them, they have no problem sacrificing him to keep themselves safe. There are so many examples of this by now it could be a running gag, but I'll settle for this one.

In the first half of this season, Laurel decided to get revenge on her father for having her boyfriend murdered last season. To do that, she decided to completely bring down his business, and got involved in such an elaborate scheme to get information, it naturally ended up involving the whole Keating crew except Annalyse.  The plan fell apart, when Simon, a douche guy who had been dealing with his own issues - he was an illegal immigrant from Pakistan, and he was gay - found out what they were doing. Laurel panicked, and accidentally shot him in the head. They were all upset about it - for all of an hour - and then, naturally tried to figure out to blame everything on him. So they decided to put everything on a man who was in a coma. Real classy.

Then it got worse in the last two episodes of the season. Simon miraculously came out of his coma, and they found out he remembered everything that had happened. In order to try and save their own asses, they manipulated the situation, so that Annalyse would become his attorney and negotiate a deal for immunity that would allow him to stay in the country. Then in the last episode, Simon got scared, and Michela decided that the best way to protect them was to have him deported. Annalyse and Bonnie saved him. Michela did it anyway. And justified by saying that Annalyse wouldn't do the necessary thing.

I'd say this is the kind of thing that antiheroes do, except Gus Fring and Walter would have just had Mike kill him.  Sending a gay man back to Pakistan is even more horrendous some how. But that's how everybody in Peter Nowalk's and Shonda's world works. There are no good people. But because the stakes are really so low, what we basically see is a world of corruption, where the Keating Four just become more and more ruthless, with no real consequences, moral or otherwise. Michela says to Connor: "Do you think I'm evil?" And Connor answers: "We're all evil." That makes it okay. Seriously. I'd expect this attitude from gangster or meth dealers, but second year law students.  I didn't think attorneys became morally bankrupt til they actually starting practicing.

The real question is, why does Shonda continue to get away with? And the answer is, she isn't. Ratings for all her ABC series have dropped dramatically over the last two seasons. (There's a reason she's heading to Netflix, other than to use the actual obscenity that describes what all the characters on all her series are doing all the time.) Fewer and fewer people are embracing the craziness behind all of the Shondaland series, yet ABC is doing two more series from her world this season alone. I'm starting to feel that basing your entire network on one person and American Idol is  a bad idea. Then I consider all the revivals that are coming.  And I shudder thinking: how long will we have to wait to see Grey's Anatomy: The Next Generation?