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FROM THE TITLE I thought it was an adaptation of Fitzcarraldo, the Werner Herzog movie about a would-be rubber baron who dreams of building an opera house in the Amazon. The mad glare of Klaus Kinski emanating from a TV screen — the prospect is both terrifying and thrilling. But the jungle in the title of the Amazon series is strictly concrete: New York City, home of the fictional New York Symphony. Its resident madman Rodrigo De Souza, played by Gael Garcia Bernal, does his own glaring, with the opposite effect. Like a video of a cat surprised by a cucumber, it’s adorable.

Created by Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzmann and Alex Timbers, Mozart in the Jungle is a comedy about classical musicians, eccentric geniuses, and the everlasting clash between money and art. “Do we raise funds in order to make music, or make music in order to raise funds?” asks Rodrigo, who is so famous he goes by one name. A former child prodigy, he has replaced the conductor and musical director Thomas Pembridge (Malcolm McDowell). When he’s not upsetting tradition by holding open auditions, changing the program, or taking the orchestra out for an unsanctioned open-air performance, he’s at fund-raisers, trundled out like Exhibit A for society matrons with checkbooks. He’ll play the game, but he has his limits, rejecting an ad campaign called “Hear the Hair,” then sawing off his famous locks.

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“YOU’RE the kind of lawyer guilty people hire,” the embezzler’s wife tells Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk). Even the most clueless criminal can tell that the protagonist of Better Call Saul is a shady character. But when the AMC series begins, Jimmy has not fully embraced the shady side. He’s still trying to do the right thing — it’s just that in Jimmy’s world, “good” and “bad” are relative. Yes, he gets a pair of scam artists in trouble, but he does bargain their punishment down from death to one broken leg each. All things considered, that’s a great lawyer. Great-ish.

Better Call Saul is the story of the man who would become Saul Goodman (As in, “It’s all good, man”), the unscrupulous lawyer on Breaking Bad. Many of the characters from Breaking Bad deserve their own series — I would watch one in which Badger pitches story ideas to Hollywood, or Gus Fring cooks chicken — but Saul is an excellent choice. Not only does he find creative solutions for dire situations, not only is he a vending machine of hilarious quotes, but he takes such delight in being his scuzzy self. He’s not a hypocrite. Everyone should love their job as much as Saul does. “Don’t drink and drive,” he reminds his clients, “But if you do, call me.”

Read our TV column The Binge at BusinessWorld.

EVERYONE thinks they’re the hero of their own story. History is made up of all their stories bumping up against each other. How do you make sense of this chaos? What does it all mean? Does it mean anything? (No, says Albert Camus, from a paperback that a teenage clerk is reading, existence is absurd. “I don’t know who that is, but I’m guessing he doesn’t have a six-year-old girl,” retorts Betsy the cancer-stricken housewife.) At best we can tease out a pattern of actions and consequences, then impose a beginning and an end to create narrative cohesion. But you need time and distance in order to do this. What if you’re inside the story as it’s happening?

In the amazing second season of Noah Hawley’s Fargo, the characters can be too engrossed with composing their own stories to see the bigger story of America, or the even bigger story of the universe. There are UFOs in this season, because in 1979 they were all over the place, and because they fit in this series. Fargo 2 is so enthralling that after the initial “Holy crap, UFOs!” you just accept that they’re there, turning up at odd moments like cinematography aids.

Read our column on Fargo season 2 in The Binge.

SHERLOCK fans are among the most patient fans on earth, and they have to be. Since the BBC series created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss premiered in 2010, there have been exactly nine episodes, 10 if you count the one-off holiday special that aired last week. The fans have used the time between episodes to create endless tumblr pages and memes featuring Sherlock stars Benedict Cumberbatch (Check out the one demonstrating his resemblance to an otter) and Martin Freeman, write fan fiction about Holmes and Watson, organize a worldwide army (Cumberbitches), and report on every move made by Cumberbatch and Freeman. I would probably not stalk the Cumberbatch, but I might consider replacing my library if he were to record all the volumes as audiobooks.

Read our column The Binge at BusinessWorld.

Superpowers are one of the less interesting elements in Marvel’s Jessica Jones. They’re very useful, and they account for the heroine’s ability to sleep soundly despite having a broken front door, but they don’t protect her from life itself. No wonder she’s so pissed off.

She certainly doesn’t need superpowers to intimidate people. As played by Krysten Ritter, Jones looks like a model, dresses like a roadie in a metal band, takes no shit from anyone, and has a hard stare that can freeze your insides. She’s Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, with a resemblance to Filipino movie queen Gloria Romero. “New York may be the city that never sleeps,” she says over the moody jazzy score, “but it sure does sleep around.” As a private investigator, she specializes in unearthing illicit sex and deceit, and if that wasn’t enough to turn her into a hard-drinking cynic, she’s also dealing with a personal trauma. That trauma provides the plot for season one of the Netflix series created by Melissa Rosenberg, based on one of the lesser-known Marvel comic books.

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The Binge is on a break till 8 January, giving us time to catch up on the new shows. And there’s the Sherlock special coming up.

Doctors and aswang are the two things most often associated with Filipinos on prime-time American TV. In the ’80s hospital drama St. Elsewhere, doctors were boggled by a weird sickness called “ba-ngyoo-ngyot”; more recently a doctor in House was supposed to be Filipino-Korean. “Ass-wang” have turned up on CSI, Grimm, and recently on The Strain, where they were described in a book. But another category has sprung up since Tina Fey started fantasizing about one on 30 Rock: the Filipino boyfriend. There’s the computer nerd on How to Get Away With Murder, and now there’s the raison d’etre for a new CW series: a Fil-American guy so desirable that the titular character leaves everything she’s ever worked for in New York to follow him to West Covina, CA.

Read our TV column The Binge at BusinessWorld.