There are scores of TV shows out there, with dozens of new episodes each week, not to mention everything you can find on Hulu Plus, Netflix streaming, and HBO Go. How’s a viewer to keep up? To help you sort through all that television has to offer, Flavorwire is compiling the five best moments on TV each week. This round, The Leftovers finishes its mysterious first season by solving zero mysteris, and both Boardwalk Empire and Sons of Anarchy start their final installments.
The Leftovers Burns It All Down
A show that remains firmly uninterested in answering any of the many, many questions it brings up, The Leftovers unsurprisingly opted for emotional catharsis over any sort of closure for its first season finale. The Guilty Remnant’s Big Dastardly Plot turned out to be leaving horrible, misshapen replicas of the Departed all over Mapleton, driving everyone crazy in ways including but not limited to: Carrie Coon having an emotional breakdown, Justin Theroux running into a burning house, and Amy Brenneman feeling silently awful about almost getting her daughter killed. At least the Garveys’ crazy dog finally calmed down.
Boardwalk Empire Fasts Forward
…into 1931, skipping past the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and Arnold Rothstein’s murder straight through to the Depression. Nucky survives an assassination attempt, Margaret’s boss blows his brains out, and Chalky busts out of prison by shooting a guard with the guard’s own rifle. Between all the bloodletting, we get flashbacks into Nucky’s impoverished childhood in 1880s-era Atlantic City, plus present-day Nucky’s machinations for the end of Prohibition.
Pacific Rim Guy Wears Lots of Leather Again
It’s Sons of Anarchy‘s final season, and they’ve celebrated by bringing in Marilyn Manson! The former Mr. Evan Rachel Wood plays a white supremacist in prison with Jax, who is still understandably mad about the murder of his wife. Jax has yet to figure out that his mom did it, and therein lies the central dramatic tension of season seven! Just kidding, we’re way more worked up over when Courtney Love is gonna show up.
John Oliver Returns for Student Debt Sermon
In between jokes about college students’ STD problem and love for Bob Marley albums, John Oliver spent his first show in three weeks delivering a classically wonky monologue on student debt. (He did manage, however, to slip an audio clip of Lyndon B. Johnson saying “bunghole” between all the statistics.) Basically: the system is broken, for-profit schools are scams, and students are totally screwed. A typically upbeat dispatch, with plenty of cracks at ITT to make the medicine go down.
Jon Stewart Compares Anti-ISIS Coalition to 1D Dads
…in that they’re a bunch of Western, non-Muslim countries proposing to show up where they don’t belong. Stewart also expressed his frustration with Obama’s new “America, fuck yeah” attitude towards foreign interventionism, calling it a bit…”Crusade-y.”