Although Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin are still present to provide a continuing center of gravity, the HOMELAND that concluded its sixth season tonight is almost unrecognizable from the one that premiered in 2011.  That series was a dazzling mix of doomed romance and psychological spy thriller, about a bipolar CIA agent who couldn’t […]

> Disclaimer:  Network pilots now in circulation are not necessarily in the form that will air in the Fall.  Pilots are often reedited and rescored, and in some cases even recast or reshot.  So these critiques shouldn’t be taken as full reviews, but rather as a guide to the general style and content of the […]

    Even as the scripted drama business on the broadcast networks subsides into increasing irrelevance, new players arise who want to take part.  Dramas may not be cost-effective in the way that they once were, but they’re still an unmatched vehicle for branding–just ask AMC–and Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are among the entities who […]

  A return visit to LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT on the occasion of its 15th season finale revealed a procedural that had gone positively soapy–possibly a result of creator Dick Wolf’s recent success with his more serialized Chicago pair of series. Both of the cases covered in the hour, which was written by […]

> In 2007, Julie Delpy wrote, directed and co-starred in 2 Days In Paris, a romantic comedy-drama featuring Adam Goldberg and herself as a couple who lived in NY and visited the title city for a tumultuous visit with her character Marie’s family.  Paris was only a moderate art-house success in the US ($4.4M), but […]

  ARROW:  Wednesday 8PM on CW ARROW didn’t lose a step in its second-season return, with little sign of the season-premiere-itis often afflicting serialized shows that have to dig themselves out of the plot twists forced by the previous season’s finale.  The potential was there, since the episode began with Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) having renounced […]

  HANNIBAL:  Thursday 10PM on NBC – Potential DVR Alert Bryan Fuller has a very unusual sensibility, especially for network TV.  He’s attracted both to gruesome crime stories and elaborate visual tableaux, as he showed in his Wonderfalls and particularly Pushing Daisies, with its mix of candy-coated production design and bizarre murder mysteries–it was like […]

  LEGENDS OF TOMORROW‘s destiny as the goofball discard pile of CW’s DC/Greg Berlanti universe may have reached its apotheosis with tonight’s Season 3 finale, written by co-creator/Executive Producers Matt Guggenheim and Phil Klemmer.  It featured a family-sized box of former series regulars and guest stars from throughout the run of the series, but its […]