Michelle Ashford’s series MASTERS OF SEX has been the extraordinary surprise of the fall television season.  It seemed, on its face, to be dauntingly unpromising.  In telling the story of sex researchers William Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) in the 1950s, surely it would be smarmy or else dull, too much […]

  It seems that for many viewers, ONCE UPON A TIME has become too conceptual for its own good.  The ratings, so robust just 2 seasons ago, have continued to sink (down another full ratings point this season), and while Once is still relatively successful by ABC standards, it’s no longer a substantial hit.  Nevertheless, […]

  Improved isn’t the same as good, and the first half of REVENGE‘s third season has languished in the gulf between those two.  Under new showrunner Sunil Nayar (who replaced series creator Mike Kelley), Revenge has backed away from the extreme idiocy of last year’s The Initiative storyline, with its quasi-government conspiracies, its psychotic long-lost […]

  In this new era of serialized television drama, plot–and the skill with which it’s doled out–is more important than ever.  An overall clumsiness with the handling of its storylines is what’s held back Lifetime’s WITCHES OF EAST END from being more than a pleasant diversion, and tonight’s season finale was sadly no exception.  The […]

  The most inventive part of tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE really wasn’t, because it was almost certainly unintentional.  Nevertheless, it was sort of brilliant, in a “found art” sort of way.  Soon after the monologue, there was a negligible piece about a suburban group performing a snowflake dance for the Christmas pageant at their local […]

  Season 4 of HAVEN was its most ambitious by far.  Under showrunners Matt McGuinness and Gabrielle Stanton, the series delved into its own mythology more deeply than it ever has before, moving past its initial rote Trouble-of-the-week structure to introduce some important new characters while radically shifting others.  All was not revealed, of course, […]

  The concept of a “finale” as an event calling for special plot revelations and narrative shockers is almost irrelevant to SCANDAL, where every episode brings massive twists.  This is a show, after all, set in a world where the sitting President and Vice President of the United States have now recently committed murder–and not […]

  GREY’S ANATOMY doesn’t get much attention these days, not even compared to its creator Shonda Rhimes’s shinier Scandal—Grey’s is just a soap–but after 10 years, it still knows how to pull off a big episode.  The fall finale, written by Co-Executive Producer William Harper and directed by Tony Phelan, effectively kicked off a long […]