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 […]

  OUTLANDER overcame a shaky conceptual start to become a thoroughly compelling historical romance, and probably the best original series Starz has aired thus far.  There’s still something fundamentally odd about the fact that the underlying plot gimmick, the trip in time that heroine Claire (Caitriona Balfe) has taken from 1945 Scotland to 1743, has […]

  It’s not as though HAPPYISH creator Shalom Auslander is unaware that many would consider his protagonists Thom and Lee Payne (Steve Coogan and Kathryn Hahn) to be whiny, tiresome, self-important narcissists–he has plenty of other characters tell them that’s exactly what they are through the course of the series.  Watching the show, though, it’s […]

  Events on the same-sex rights front have moved so quickly that FREEHELD, which is based on a true story from 2007, and has been in development almost since it occurred, now feels like something of a history story.  Not completely, of course–as the current situation of the Kentucky clerk who won’t issue marriage licenses […]