We hope everyone is still alive and okay after Fall TV’s first official premiere week. Were the returning shows exactly the same as you wanted them to be? Were the new shows up to your comedic and dramatic standards? Did you rig your TV to play South Park and Parenthood’s premieres at the same time to see if it would get manic-depressive? When you’re not catching up on broadcasts, head over to streaming for the best new options this week had to offer, including what I’m already calling one of the best shows of the year. Big talk.
How I Met Your Mother – Season 9
For its ninth and final season, How I Met Your Mother decided to throw out all the stops (and excess storylines) and closed its focus in on one particular narrative: the weekend of Robin and Barney’s Long Island wedding. Cristin Milioti joined the show as a regular this season for the role of the titular Mother, whose story can finally be told through flashbacks and flashforwards. Things get ever more tumultuous and silly once the season gets closer to the wedding itself, and it all culminates with one of the more polarizing finales in sitcom history. Luckily, the series’ full box set contains an alternate ending for those who were fed up with the one that you’ll see here. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, and you’re lucky to please Barney even a quarter of the time. Farewell, How I Met Your Mother!
You can currently watch How I Met Your Mother’s ninth season (and all the rest) on Netflix Instant and Amazon Prime.
Because The Walking Dead’s seasons have been split up by the extended midseason hiatus, I can never remember when certain storylines happened, such as the Governor’s post-Woodbury life and Rick and Tyreese’s fight. It all happened in Season 4, by the by, which you can now stream in its entirety, which to me is a better way to tackle this often unevenly presented series. This season introduced us to Bob (Lawrence Gilliard, Jr.) and let us get to know Sasha and Beth better. (The latter gets almost an entire standalone episode with Daryl, and the two get ripped on booze and argue a lot.) As you can imagine, this season featured some of the series’ most shocking and effective deaths and massacres, ending up in the one place where everyone assumed they would finally be safe for a while. Season 5 will be starting up in a couple of weeks with some of the deadliest events the show has introduced yet, so be sure and catch up on all of this trauma first.
The Walking Dead Season 4 is currently available on Netflix Instant.
At this point, Amazon’s Pilot Season approach to original programming has given us the solid (but not particularly memorable) comedy Alpha House, but their new comedic drama Transparent easily eclipses that series and almost every other new show I’ve seen in the last year or so. Jeffrey Tambor stars as Maura (formerly Mort), a transgender parent who is coming to terms with embracing this lifestyle at the same time her three children are trying to figure their own lives and identity crises out. With winning performances from Gaby Hoffman, Amy Landecker, Jay Duplass and the many, many co-stars, Transparent not only takes on relatively new material for a TV series, but it does it with finesse and wit, always searching to highlight the characters’ traits rather than exploit them. Created by Jill Soloway (The United States of Tara), this is a series that isn’t afraid to head into risqué territory to achieve its emotional conquests.
All ten episodes of Transparent’s first season are currently available on Amazon Prime.
And when you’re done with all of these, hit the next page to find more new-to-streaming shows that might be up your alley.
Parks and Recreation – Season 6
