We have now arrived at the point in Mad Men’s evolution where every main character is echoing the life pattern of another one.

Toward the end, a man asks Lena Dunham a reasonable question: Given her success, has it become harder to inhabit a girl like Hannah, who is incapable of doing a job interview without sabotaging it with a rape joke?

“How do I express this without getting too personal with you?” asks Dunham. “That lostness and that questioning—I wish I could say that it completely went away when you were getting to do the thing you wanted to do, but unfortunately, that’s not the truth.” Her work is going gangbusters, she admits—her personal life, those daily mortifications, that’s another matter. “I’m just fuckin’ it up all other kinds of ways.”

After The Killing‘s Season 1 finale …

Here is Maureen Ryan, TV critic for The Huffington Post: “YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME.” Here is Alan Sepinwall, influential critic for Hitfix.com: “This will be the last review I write of The Killing, because this will be the last time I watch The Killing. ” Here is James Poniewozik, TV critic at Time: “I no longer counsel patience with The Killing! You may unlock the toolshed and get the pitchforks!”

And those are the professionals. The amateurs were somewhat less kind.

Part 1 of a series:

Mad Men isn’t cowardly for avoiding race. Quite the opposite. It’s brave for being honest about Madison Avenue’s cowardice. While Don Draper and Sterling Cooper may seem woefully behind the times, that just means Matthew Wiener is right on schedule, historically speaking.

Warring histories and tabloid drama at the real Downton Abbey.

So here’s the reason for fascination: in Arthur Hopcraft’s adaptation of John le Carré’s 1974 novel, nothing is explained to you. No one conveniently recapitulates what is known and not known. At every given stage, you know as much as Smiley—no less and no more—and you are there, along with him, trying to make sense of assorted bits of testimony, experience, documentary evidence. You feel almost as if you were a member of a secret organization, and you accept what inevitably accompanies a culture of secrecy—that everyone is lying, or at least concealing something or playing some game.

The premise was relatively simple: Mr. Burns’s company softball team, having lost 28 of 30 games the previous season, goes on an incredible run when Homer starts hitting, well, homers with his WonderBat, carved from the fallen branch of a lightning-struck tree. Sound familiar? As the season winds down, it becomes a two-team race for the pennant: Springfield vs. Shelbyville. While dining at the Millionaires’ Club with the owner of the Shelbyville Power Plant, a cocky Burns agrees to a handshake bet worth you guessed it $1 million.

That’s perhaps the best way to describe what HBO’s success has stunted. A meticulous attention to detail on the part of both those who create television and those who consume it has stymied a desire for the kind of experimentation and exploration working in the microcosm of episodes allows. Focusing on an uncertain, albeit exciting, future can negatively affect the equally unknown, but much more palpable, present. Everyone’s so concerned about getting everything right that they’ve forgotten how much fun mistakes can be.

As cliché as my favorite soap’s title was, the realization that I had only one life to live was the show’s greatest gift to me as an adult. At 26 I went through a painful breakup with my fiancée, Maureen, who recognized that I might be gay before I did or could. I insisted that I wasn’t, or in any event that I loved her more than I could imagine loving anyone. Yes, I speak in soapy dialogue sometimes. Maureen forced me to face my true self, rather than retreat into fantasylands like Llanview. But the characters of Llanview, whom I still followed from time to time, were reminders that happiness lay in reckoning with the truth, with your true identity, rather than retreating into alternate personalities or dwelling on past traumas and, let’s face it, luxury problems. In time I accepted who I am; I became, to use a favorite word of Viki’s, integrated.

The revamped Battlestar Galactica announces the seriousness of its intentions with its riveting opening scene, in which an emissary of mankind is taken by surprise when the Cylons show up unexpectedly for a meeting they’ve been blowing off for 40 years. The Cylons are led by a robot in human form, later identified as model “Number Six” (played by Tricia Helfer). Number Six leans in and speaks the first lines of dialogue in the series, asking the question that will come to dominate BSG: “Are you alive?… Prove it.”