‘The Comey Rule’ Is as Self-Satisfied as Its Subject: TV Review

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic“The Walking Dead” is edging up, this October, to its tenth anniversary on the air. That decade of ratings dominance has seen our own world grow nihilistic enough to make the series feel more tonally appropriate to the mood of the moment.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticOpening this year’s Emmy Awards, host Jimmy Kimmel told the audience — the one at home, given that there was no one sitting before him in the stands of the Staples Center — that there were a great many moving parts in piecing together the ceremony. He asked, mordantly, “What could possibly go right?”It turns out: Quite a bit.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIt’s perhaps surprising Kim Cattrall hadn’t yet headlined a soap opera. As Samantha Jones on “Sex and the City,” her slyness and way with a pun came to be revealed as elegant concealments of the character’s deep need.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticThe best talk show hosts are made into stars by the medium. To wit: Rosie O’Donnell was a well-known comic and actor but hardly the dynamo she eventually became when she began her daily show.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIn its first three seasons, “Fargo” found a surprising amount of elasticity within its constrained format. Each installment borrowed the tone of Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1996 Midwestern noir, which places human greed against a setting of frigid climate and rigid propriety, to tell increasingly complicated crime stories.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticAmidst an ever-more-crowded universe for streaming services, Peacock is emerging as a place that’s good at one very particular thing: Pulpy imports that pack fantastical intrigue into short runs, and that are better than they strictly need to be.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIf America’s modern space age began in the 1960s, it hit a wall in 1986 with the Challenger disaster, when the U.S. space shuttle by that name exploded during takeoff, killing all seven crew members aboard.

The Comey Rule operates from a false premise. The Showtime limited series, which will inevitably be watched through each individual's own political lens, coloring their interpretation of it*, dramatizes former FBI Director James Comey's memoir about his role in shaping the outcome of the 2016 election and his meetings with President Donald Trump in the months after the election.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticParis Hilton has been in the “due for a re-evaluation” stage of her career for far longer than she was evaluated in the first place.In 2008, a documentary about Hilton, entitled “Paris, Not France,” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival; in it, Hilton, one of several women whose time in the limelight in the 2000s descended into an acrimonious war waged by and on the media, attempted to explain why she’d been treated unfairly.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticThe tide of symbolism in “The Third Day,” HBO’s new limited series, rises high enough to threaten to swamp the show. But two urgently compelling central performances keep viewers afloat all the same.The six-part series is broken into two halves but united by setting: A surreal island called Osea somewhere in the United Kingdom, one governed by ritual and a sort of magic, surrounded by choppy and threatening seas and accessible only by narrow causeway.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIt’s hard to think of something less risky for a performer than making a big show of being daring.On Netflix’s new show “The Duchess,” series creator and star Katherine Ryan makes a very big deal out of transgressing, playing a character whose showy amorality feels borrowed from other, better shows. Ryan’s character, also named Katherine, is a London mom who doubles as a chaos agent.

While the filmmakers behind Showtime’s two-part “The Comey Rule” have clearly overestimated the public’s desire for— uhhh, gestures in the general direction of anything and everything in entertainment vaguely resembling the Trump Shitshow, any ancillary offshoots (see the Fox News portrait “The Loudest Voice”) and generally, politics in the corrosive age of toxic politics— writer/director Bill Ray’s “The Comey Rule” does open up with a good, if simplistic, bit and intriguing question.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticOn Hulu’s “Woke,” cartoonist Keef Knight (Lamorne Morris, recently of “New Girl”) sees his world shaken into surreality by an experience that’s sadly common. After a run-in with violent, racist police officers who stop short of taking his life but manhandle and humiliate him in the process, Keef begins to hear the accoutrements of his life — pens, photos of himself, liquor bottles — speaking to him in frank and often harsh tones.

Chances are good that if you're watching Showtime's uneven but entertaining miniseries The Comey Rule, you're not tuning in to see if Jeff Daniels is able to convincingly play 6'8" FBI beanpole James Comey (or to marvel at Jonathan Banks' uncanny casting as James Clapper). No, you're probably curious about how very Irish Brendan Gleeson (the Harry Potter films, In Bruges, Mr.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIn an episode late in the first season of the new series “Get Organized with The Home Edit,” the actress Jordana Brewster tells the show’s hosts, two professional organizers, that she wants them to make her fridge “look like a store, like you do.” When the fridge has been completed, with products facing label-forward in tidy symmetrical lines, Brewster is overwhelmed.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticThere’s something elemental about the desire to look to the stars, to imagine oneself as well as, perhaps, all humanity, finding a future beyond the planet we once called home.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticThe cleverness of “Selling Sunset,” the zeitgeist-hit Netflix reality series that might technically be termed a real-estate show, is in its application of the barest amount of genuinely informative content to a formula that resists any sort of higher purpose.

trailer.The series is based on Comey’s bestselling book A Higher Loyalty and more than a year of interviews with a number of key players.The Comey Rule is stated as being ‘an immersive, behind-the-headlines account of the historically turbulent events surrounding the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath, which divided a nation.’‘The Comey Rule is not a biopic of one man, but is instead the story of two powerful figures, Comey and Trump, whose strikingly different personalities, ethics

The first full trailer for The Comey Rule, starring Brendan Gleeson and Jeff Daniels, has been released.

Dominic Patten, Ted Johnson It is over a month until The Comey Rule limited series premieres on Showtime, but the still raging drama between Donald Trump and fired FBI Director James Comey was live tonight on cable news on Night 1 of the Republican National Convention.“If you put it in a script, I’m sure it would get rejected for not being realistic enough, that the chairman of the President’s campaign is working with a Russian intelligence officer,” Comey told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, Joy Reid