With Group 7, Alberto Rodriguez paid homage to his native Seville whilst producing a fine urban thriller. Now he does the same for rural Spain, moving an hour south to the marshlands of Andalucia. While 7 was explosive, Marshland is noirishly tense on different levels, its tight focus on character, its realism, it’s sense of place and its social critique adding up to a grippingly intense whole — and that’s not to mention it’s satisfyingly twisting plotline.

Periodically a television show comes along that makes you wonder if someone at the network declined to read the script and then, just to compound the issue, skipped watching the pilot but gave the green light anyway.

It’s a little too easy and convenient — and ultimately unfair — to say that Fox’s buzz-heavy new series Gotham could face the same problems as last year’s buzz-heavy entry, ABC’s Agents of SHIELD. But they are being lumped together as examples of shows that are missing the core ingredient of what the audience really craves.

The best thing that could have ever happen to The Walking Dead is the arrival of Z Nation on Syfy. The super-popular but critically underappreciated Walking Dead may be seen more favorably for its writing, acting, visual acumen and storytelling capabilities now that Z Nation has proven you can’t just put hungry zombies on the screen and have something worth writing home about.

It doesn’t take long for Ken Burns — this country’s preeminent documentary filmmaker — to demonstrate that by intertwining the lives of Teddy, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt for the first time, not only would the outcome be a definitive and linear look at how one family changed the course of American history, but also in that same time Burns does something even more important: He documents the doubts, the hardships, the failures, sicknesses and deaths, depression, etc.

On Sunday, HBO's bleakly engrossing drama The Leftovers concludes its 10-episode first season (it's already been picked up for a second), thus ending one of the more interesting experiments in recent TV history.

After posting three good comedies with varying degrees of potential, Amazon Studios has released two dramas that only reinforce the notion that making television is hard, no matter where you make it or how you present it.

The third wave of Amazon's partly crowdsourced pilot development slate kicked off on Thursday with five new options for people who are also looking for vacuums and watches.

After Emmy voters had one of their worst years ever in the nominating process, Monday's ceremony ultimately came down to whether they'd at least get the winners right. And, as is custom, whether the host — in this case, Seth Meyers — and the telecast itself, could entertain.

This story first appeared in the Aug. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

The Honorable Woman, SundanceTV

Even before seeing a frame of Intruders, all the ideas sounded good. For starters, you have writer and creator Glen Morgan (The X-Files) getting to make a real X-Files-style show. That’s a good thing. And, since so many actors seem to be British these days, it seemed extra clever that this BBC America series, which takes place in the Pacific Northwest, chose to use a bunch of British actors but have them play Americans. Everybody gets it. So let’s play.