A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the production of episodes for the regular season: a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover) give plenty of notes, helpful and otherwise, and critics begin to rear […]

  AGENTS OF SHIELD was unquestionably a better show at the end of this season than it was when it arrived, but it still has plenty of work to do.  SHIELD arrived on the air with almost impossible expectations.  It was, however unfairly, inevitably going to be compared to the mega-budgeted superhero spectacles with which […]

  DEXTER:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime Here we are, once again at the outset of the declared final season for a long-lived, successfully distinctive TV series.  The conclusion of DEXTER won’t compare to the upcoming end of Breaking Bad later this summer (or to next year’s exit of Mad Men) in terms of passionate expectations, […]

  ROOKIE BLUE:  Thursday 9PM on ABC It’s quite an accomplishment for a scripted summer series on one of the broadcast networks to last five seasons on the air, and the ABC/Canadian co-production ROOKIE BLUE is now so venerable that one of the plotlines in tonight’s Season 5 premiere had the character whose rookie year kicked off […]

  With the arrival of ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK after House of Cards, Hemlock Grove and Arrested Development, Netflix has completed the first quartet of its initial plunge into high-profile original programming .  Based on the available evidence (Netflix doesn’t release viewership information), the process has gone extremely well, with both subscriptions and the stock […]

  The first season of YELLOWSTONE was a feat of auteurship.  Every episode of the recently-rebooted Paramount Network’s prestige series was written and directed solely by series creator Taylor Sheridan, something not even David Lynch or Sam Esmail can claim.  The result was 10 hours of television that qualified, to an extent rarely seen, as […]

  THE AMERICANS isn’t a show that indulges in many meta moments, but late in this Season 4 it gave one to Matthew Beeman (Daniel Flaherty), son of FBI agent Stan (Noah Emmerich), in one of his unwitting conversations with neighbor and incipient romantic interest Paige Jennings (Holly Taylor), the daughter of deep-cover Soviet spies […]

  BETTER CALL SAUL:  Monday 10PM on AMC Previously… on BETTER CALL SAUL:  In 2002, the man who will become Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) is still Jimmy McGill, a struggling New Mexico criminal attorney struggling to make ends meet and saddled with his brother Chuck (Michael McKean), a much more successful lawyer who’s unfortunately had […]