AGENTS OF SHIELD:  Tuesday 9PM on ABC It took most of its first season for AGENTS OF SHIELD to start becoming the show the synergy experts at Disney, Marvel and ABC desperately wanted it to be, and by then it had squandered most of the gaudy ratings that had greeted it last fall.  Only when the plotline of Captain America: […]

  MISTRESSES faced some challenges in its 3rd season.  Two were interrelated:  for budget reasons, the network and studio decided to relocate the production to Vancouver, and that prompted marquee star Alyssa Milano to disengage from her contract.  Season 3 didn’t really suffer from these changes, since Milano’s character Savi had a relatively weak role […]

  Stripped of its period trappings and the fact that its heroine is named Carrie Bradshaw, THE CARRIE DIARIES is the most basic and least interesting of CW’s YA romances.  The season finale, like countless season finales set in high school before it, revolved around the junior prom, even though none of the characters ever […]

  The all-knowing Machine at the heart of PERSON OF INTEREST turned positively chatty in last night’s Season 2 finale, providing real-time advice and assistance via phone and text services to just about anyone who asked it nicely.  (If you didn’t care for numbers, it would help you out via musical tones.)   The Machine, […]

> Previously On… THE WALKING DEAD:  Our erstwhile humans spent many, many episodes on a farm owned by cranky vet Hershel (Scott Wilson), while they searched for the missing Sophia (Madison Lintz).  There were lots of lengthy conversations about the meaning of life in a zombie-infected universe, and whether it was worth going on–let alone […]

  THE BRUTALIST (A24 – TBD):  The most remarkable thing about Brady Corbet’s epic may be that it’s so enjoyable to watch.  The notion of a 197-minute saga (not including intermission) about Holocaust survivors and the crushing effects of capitalism practically screams “ordeal,” especially with the knowledge that Corbet’s last film was the cringingly pretentious Vox […]

  DECEPTION:  Monday 10PM on NBC 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 […]

  The first season of CW’s musical-comedy CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND was by far the most daring and distinctive show on broadcast television, but a nagging question remained:  what could it do for an encore?  It wasn’t clear how long the story could follow Rebecca Bunch (series co-creator Rachel Bloom) in her stalking of one-time summer camp […]