NEW SHOWS
Brooklyn Nine-Nine – “Yippie Kayak” (A)
A warm, winning Die Hard parody that takes everything great about the show’s characters and puts it in one delightful package. The year’s best Christmas episode.
Fargo – “Palindrome” (B+) / season finale
Perhaps a little too dreamlike to be wholly satisfying (or rather, that its dreamlike coda takes up a good half of the episode… couldn’t we just have had a 90 minute finale last week?) but still a great cap to one of the best seasons of TV this year.
OLD SHOWS
The Simpsons (Season 9) – “Trash of the Titans” (A-)
Steve Martin is tremendous as Sanitation Commissioner Ray Patterson. I just wish he had been given more to do. Still, this stands as probably Homer’s finest (disgraceful) episode that involves him starting a new job he is tremendously unqualified for. It’s also yet another brilliant satire of how gullible voters, buying into “crazy promises” from rubes.