The failures of HOSTAGES were many, and they separate into two dimensions.  One–the more important to CBS–was commercial; the show proved to be dead in the water from the night it premiered against the launch of The Blacklist.  Despite a summer of heavy promotion, NBC and James Spader wiped the floor with Hostages, and […]

  DOWNTON ABBEY:  Sunday 9PM on PBS In its fourth season as the most successful regular series in PBS history, DOWNTON ABBEY operates as smoothly as a well-staffed ancestral estate.  Even though the larger subject of the series is the creeping spread of democracy into the centuries-old system of English aristocracy, which would eventually undermine […]

  THE ASSETS:  Thursday 10PM on ABC – Change the Channel It’s easy enough to see why ABC would like to be in the spy-TV business.  Homeland, whatever its flaws, is a major hit, and The Americans, while not as sizable, has been a critical success and buzz magnet.  The novels of John Le Carre […]

  COMMUNITY:  Thursday 8PM on NBC A few days ago, the NY Times had a fascinating article about Pei-Shen Qian, an artist who is almost but not quite a forger.  He doesn’t duplicate actual paintings of the masters; instead, he paints new works with such precise adherence to their styles that (he claims) unbeknownst to […]

  TV is a little poorer for the loss of TREME, a series that never fully received the appreciation–from viewers or critics–that it deserved.  Even a bit watered down from its usual density in a last season of only 5 hours (well, 5 1/3 with tonight’s supersized finale), it was a unique mix of New […]

  HBO’s GETTING ON was generally close to unwatchable, and that’s meant as sort of a compliment.  Even in the world of pay-TV, where ratings aren’t always at the forefront of a network’s expectations, there’s usually some concession to conventional entertainment value, especially in a show that purports to be a comedy of sorts.  But Getting […]

  There was one last super-powerful conspiracy for NIKITA (Maggie Q) to bring down in tonight’s series finale, and a climactic showdown with arch-villainess Amanda (Melinda Clarke) to survive, as CW’s low-rated yet hard-to-kill action series finally came to an end after a truncated 4th mini-season. The final episode (fittingly entitled “Canceled”), written by Executive […]

  GRUDGE MATCH:  Watch It At Home – Far From A Knock-Out 1976 was the year of both Taxi Driver and Rocky.  Sylvester Stallone would go on to make innumerable millions, but he’d never be taken as seriously again as he was that year, as writer and star of the Cinderella movie he rode all the […]