FINDING CARTER:  Tuesday 10PM on MTV – Potential DVR Alert Most YA drama, in one way or another, is about the emotional dislocation of being a teen, and in recent years, the reigning trope has been to externalize the theme supernaturally:  the teen discovers that he/she is a vampire, an alien, a witch, a […]

  GOTHAM:  Monday 8PM on FOX – If Nothing Else Is On… PLAYERS:  Batman (and if we’re being honest, Christopher Nolan, even though he has nothing to do with this show).  Series creator Bruno Heller, who was also behind The Mentalist and HBO’s Rome.  Star Ben McKenzie, and a supporting cast headed by Donal Logue […]

  TYRANT wasn’t the summer’s worst show, but it’s been the most piercing disappointment of the mini-season,  wasting a potentially thrilling premise–behind the scenes at a Middle Eastern military dictatorship–that seemed perfectly suited to FX, one that could combine the network’s trademark narrative energy and ambition with prestige (series co-developer Howard Gordon is also a […]

  NASHVILLE:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC NASHVILLE has both improved and flattened out over time.  When the series started, it was frustratingly uneven, but also trying to do something potentially exciting:  combine the appeal of a traditional TV serial with stories that would talk frankly about women in show business (of various ages) and the […]

  THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC Based on everything we know about THE WALKING DEAD, it seemed a safe assumption after the Season 4 finale that we’d be spending a large chunk of Season 5 trapped with our heroes at Terminus, the supposed sanctuary they’d spent most of the season seeking that turned […]

  This season, HAVEN delved deeply into its own mythology, with mixed results.  Haven‘s own situation is unclear, existentially speaking:  it received a super-sized 26-episode order from Syfy earlier this year, with 13 episodes to air in 2014 and the rest at some as-yet undetermined date next year that could end up being in the […]

  JUSTIFIED:  Tuesday 10PM on FX Final seasons, as we all know, can be tricky, but JUSTIFIED seems to be in strong shape as it enters its last lap.   Justified lost a bit of its mojo last year, the victim of some inadequate villains and scattered plotting (the whole Mexican druglord subplot seemed to come […]

  LOUIE:  Thursday 10:30PM on FX We’ve learned over time that it’s impossible to take the measure of a season of LOUIE until we see what its auteur has in store for us.  Last year’s Season 4 was extraordinarily ambitious, with a feature-length episode that only barely featured its star tossed off in the midst […]