Portside

From ethically dubious telenovelas like El señor de los cielos to brutally insightful features like El infierno, Mexican media has become in many ways a reflection of the violence that has racked the country since the Cártel de Juárez took over the coke game from Pablo Escobar back in the 1990s.

This new series on Amazon imagines a world in which the Axis powers triumphed in World War II and carved up America into three zones: the Greater Nazi Reich in the East and Midwest, ruled from New York; the Japanese Pacific States, ruled from San Francisco; and a derelict neutral zone splitting them, running roughly along the Rocky Mountains.

The series is a nice reminder that although comic books are derided as a kids’ medium, their supernatural setups can provide us with clarifying thought experiments that allow us to approach our present dilemmas with fresh perspectives.

Plenty of shows can self-reflexively comment on Hollywood’s systemic diversity and race problems, but Master Of None does so within an episode that simultaneously practices exactly what it’s preaching, which gives the show legitimacy.

Donald Trump’s highly touted and almost certainly inappropriate hosting gig on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” turned out to be an anemic and halfhearted dud.

Steven Soderbergh's period medical drama, The Knick, which kicked off its second season on Oct. 16, has been praised for its vivid characterization, realism, historical accuracy, and visual style.

When “Supergirl” has its premiere on Oct. 26, it will enter a cultural landscape where female superheroes are better represented than ever before: where they have nearly as much opportunity to right wrongs and fight crime – and to play the central roles in their own stories — as their muscle-bound male counterparts.

“It’s an enormously popular show, and up until this current season it was taking place predominantly in the Middle East/Islamic world region, and depicting that region in a very particular way that reinforces this mythological stereotype that exists in a lot of the Western world.” - Heba Amin, associate professor at the American University in Cairo

Even as mainstream outlets start to pay more attention to Latino viewers and with new frontiers popping up on cable, things are changing as rapidly on television for the Hispanic audience as they are for everyone else. What seems to be a new constant, however, is that the focus on this market is certainly going to grow.

Scholarly interest in Joss Whedon’s cult classic points to the growing belief that TV shows deserve to be studied as literature.