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I’m beginning to really enjoy the rhythm of Landman Season 2. This is perhaps because it hasn’t always had a discernible one.

You could feel it coming, couldn't you? All throughout Mayor of Kingstown Season 4, that feeling of impending calamity has been building, and building, and here in Episode 8, "Belleville", it arrives.

I do love a subplot that feels very specific, and Sheriff Country has had its share of those already. But it has a really good one in Episode 8, appropriately titled “Death & Taxes”, which really enjoyably leans into the show’s very specific vibe and sense of place.

I’ve been moaning about Boston Blue’s lack of meaningful conflict. But I’m beginning to wonder if maybe the real thing that was missing was depth.

Trust DMV to radically improve just in time for the midseason finale.

It turns out Laila is still in Watson Season 2 after all, but her sudden reappearance in Episode 9 causes more problems than it fixes.

Taylor Sheridan has always had an odd fascination with having his plots turn on totally random events. Sometimes it's an errant bear -- between Yellowstone and Mayor of Kingstown, events have been bear-related surprisingly often -- and sometimes it's a meth lab or a traffic pileup or whatever.

The old chess metaphor is pretty played out, but it's by far the most appropriate one to describe what's happening in Mayor of Kingstown Season 4.

Sheriff Country has some mixed subplots in terms of quality, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s similarly inarguable that the main thrust of it is really very good.

I’ve spent most of my coverage of Boston Blue complaining about conflict – or the lack of it, as has often been the case here.

Just in case you were wondering whether DMV itself is aware of how annoying Colette is, Episode 8 has you covered.

I’m not the biggest fan of Watson, as anyone who has been reading these Season 2 recaps can probably tell, but I’m happy to admit...

Can you smell that? No, it’s not hydrogen sulphide – although, this being Landman, it kind of is hydrogen sulphide – but the skeleton of a plot, and a point, both of which seem to be manifesting in Season 2 in a way that they never quite managed to do first time around.

Mayor of Kingstown continues to treat Season 4 as an exercise in how bad things can get for almost everyone involved.

When it’s firing on all cylinders, Sheriff Country is a superb procedural, as evidenced by its previous outing.

It definitely feels like Boston Blue is learning. Like the previous episode, which for the first time attempted to meaningfully challenge almost all of its characters, Episode 6, “Code of Ethics”, throws in a few new wrinkles, especially for Danny and Baez.

It would be a bit of a stretch to say that the East Hollywood DMV office has ever really felt like a team. It’s a designation that most of the employees would actively avoid in usual circumstances, but Episode 7 of the CBS sitcom, “There Is No I in DMV”, is not operating under usual circumstances.

Just in case you needed any more evidence that Watson works best as a straight-up medical drama that has nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes, look no further than “Giant Steps”, which is, by my count, the first and thus far only genuinely good episode of Season 2.