When Life Gives You Tangerines

Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight charts the Guinness brewing dynasty's warring heirs in 1868 Dublin. Streaming on Netflix.

One of two intense medical dramas NBC introduced in the fall of 2009, "Mercy" had all the advantages its one-named rival "Trauma" did not. First, it had talent behind the scenes. Liz Heldens from "Friday Night Lights" created the show and led the writers, proving once again that the best way to dramatize the real world is to show it realistically"”ugliness and all. Second, it had attitude and guts to stay true to its revolutionary premise, the well-informed notion "that nurses remain [not only] more generous caregivers, but that they are more intuitively apt, smarter, more committed and as technically able as their [physician] superiors, with none of the accompanying arrogance." In a winner-take-all ER smackdown, you always would go all-in with the Mercy Hospital nurses. The main character, nurse Veronica Flanagan Callahan, has just returned from a tour in Iraq, where she clearly learned more in each day than the pompous, presumptuous doctors learned in all five years of medical school. Of course, Veronica gets neither the respect nor the reward she deserves, but "Mercy" dangles the possibility of true love as just recompense for Veronica's skill and compassion. Taylor Schilling plays Veronica with exactly the right balance of toughness and vulnerability, skillfully juxtaposing her consummate skill as a nurse with her intrepid ingenuousness in matters of the heart. If only "Mercy" had survived into a second season, all the tangled threads in the story might have come to their proper denouement. If only.

Shōgun, the Emmy-sweeping FX epic, immerses viewers in feudal Japan's treacherous power struggles through stunning cinematography, complex characters, and extraordinary storytelling.

Ryan Murphy's glossy legal drama stars Kim Kardashian and Naomi Watts in an all-female divorce law firm taking on New York's ugliest splits. Streaming on Hulu.

"A Teacher" is a TV miniseries that explores the complex and controversial relationship between a high school teacher, Claire, and her student, Eric. The show follows their illicit affair over the course of several years, revealing the damaging impact it has on both of their lives.

The first season of this HBO-produced TV show is set in small town Treme three months after Hurricane Katrina has hit the New Orleans area. The leading characters in the TV series are musicians, bar-owners, chefs and Mardi Gras Indians and other odious characters, many of them playing themselves as a jazz trumpeter, singer and composer Kermit Ruffins who take part in the pilot episode and appears through all of the first season (he guests in second and third episode as well). As for Treme creators "“ you definitely know the names David Simon and James Yoshimura, who wrote a screenplay for another HBO TV show: Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets; Nina Kostroff Noble, who brought to you The Corner; Eric Overmyer, a talented writer and producer, who stands behind Law & Order, The Wire and New Amsterdam; Carolyn Strauss, an ex-President of HBO, who was responsible for success of The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Sex and the City. This professional team has delivered a buoyant and life-asserting television show about life and struggle of New Orleans residents trying to rebuild their homes, businesses, lives and relationships. These quite a serious, as per common sense things, are presented in very humorous light, making us to believe the everything will be OK with these nice Louisianan folks. The slogan of TV series is: " Hurricanes, Floods, Exile, Crime. Corruption. Betrayal. Greed. Neglect. Is That All You Got?" is colorfully reflects their life-affirming relation to reality, which is worthy of all respect taking to consideration all the circumstances they have been so unlucky to gone thru.