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Has Rick And Morty ever done an afterlife episode before? They haven’t really needed to, I guess; every time someone dies on the show, they just find a spare in a different dimension. Rick’s disdain for religion is too inevitable to ever even need to be brought up—he is, after all, the Atheist’s Atheist, a man whose contempt for the universe is so complete that he rearranged dimensions to make himself a god.

Once upon a time, there was a television show called South Park. There still is a television show called South Park, but for the purposes of this bit, let’s just focus on the past. Back in the halcyon days of the late ‘90s, South Park was wildly popular for its transgressive humor, its willingness to take on “any” target, and, occasionally, its storytelling. It was a show that mocked you for caring about it, but still somehow managed to earn its audience’s investment.

Jerry has always been Rick and Morty’s secret weapon. It’s impossible to respect him, which is, of course, the point. If Rick Sanchez is the nerd dream of godhood, the caustic genius whose will and brilliance let him dominate every situation he finds himself in, Jerry is his karmic opposite, a cowardly putz whose fundamental passivity inspires contempt or pity in everyone who meets him. Jerry is the kind of person every male I know was taught to live in mortal terror of becoming, a nightmare vision of excessive emotional vulnerability and neediness.

It’s possible Schmigadoon! is settling into being a show that shifts up and down along a sort of x/y axis of good versus fun. Sometimes it shifts too far along one axis without making up the space on the other, although your mileage may vary depending on how much you appreciate the “all fun homages” version of the show. “Over and Done” does what it can to make up for some of the iffy plotting of the season, but it can’t quite overcome that the show didn’t really set up this season’s plot to wrap up in a way that didn’t feel rushed.

Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of FX’s Shogun. With the two lengthy first episodes debuting tonight, and available to stream on Hulu, we’re separating the two reviews. The second will arrive tomorrow. As always, this first review is free for all, but subsequent reviews will be exclusively for paid subscribers. To get future reviews (full schedule here) and more for $5 a month (or for $40 a year through 3/4), sign up now.

America has long been home to stories of the voraciously ambitious. The rags to riches fables occur both in our fictional narratives (Gordon Gecko) and real ones (Jordan Belfort). But as America faces the natural endpoint of its individualist avarice, the “rags to riches” stories are more often inverted, with just as few steps before a plunge into poverty.  Sweden is experiencing a different arc. While neoliberalism was seeded in the US and UK, where Reaganomics and Thatcherism gutted the public sector across the 80s, a strong left wing in Sweden did the opposite.

To its credit, Discovery appears to be taking its final season seriously. I don’t mean because of the stakes of the season’s main plotline: “this could mean the end of civilization as we know it!” is an old canard, and no matter how many times we’re informed that this time is somehow more dangerous and important than every other time, it’s never really going to land for me. I’m referring more to the nods we’ve been getting to the show’s history.

Oh hey, it’s a Tilly episode. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I mean, in terms of character focus, it makes sense: Tilly is important enough for the show to have brought her back even after she tried to leave, so she needs to figure prominently in the final season. Last week, Burnham and Book went on an adventure together, so this week, we get Burnham and Tilly. (No complaints from Rayner this time about Michael going on mission, I guess a pre-warp planet is less dangerous than a scary space cloud.

One of the things that has impressed me about Strange New Worlds thus far is the show’s grasp of tone. It’s not always perfect, but even in episodes I liked less than others, there’s been a good balance of fun jokes, thrills, and heartfelt character work. As a viewer, I can feel the confidence that comes from a group of creators who know what kind of series they’re making, and know how to create the best version of that series.