In this era of peak TV, there are more shows than ever that we devour, that we obsess about and are thrilled by and that shock us and tear us apart.  There are fewer, however, that we simply love.  Julian Fellowes’s DOWNTON ABBEY was a canny mix of the old-fashioned and new-fangled, aristocracy porn […]

  One of the ways the emergence of Netflix as an important programming platform has changed the way we regard “television” is in its obliteration of the concept of a series “season” as something that takes place over an extended time.  When Netflix releases a full batch of episodes all at once, it’s more akin […]

  ALLEGIANCE:  Thursday 10PM on NBC Previously… on ALLEGIANCE:  Alex O’Connor (Gavin Stenhouse) has an Unforgettable-level memory–if also a semi-Asperbergian inability to handle social intercourse–that have made him the CIA’s most brilliant analyst.  One thing he hasn’t figured out, though, is that his mother Katya (Hope Davis), father Mark (Scott Cohen) and sister Natalie (Margarita […]

  FARGO was great television of a kind we’ve never really seen before.  Neither a prequel nor a sequel nor a remake, not even a true spin-off, this was more like a reincarnation of the Coen Brothers’ classic movie, as though the writer Noah Hawley had allowed himself to be inhabited by the filmmakers’ idiosyncratic […]

  DEFIANCE:  Friday 8PM on Syfy The second season of Syfy’s DEFIANCE was often jarringly different from its first, shifting from its initial post-apocalyptic-western procedural form to a heavily mythological storyline that broke up the central father-and-adoptive-alien-daughter relationship of Nolan (Grant Bowler) and Irisa (Stephanie Leonidas) for much of the season, while embracing a mystical […]

> Welcome to SHOWBUZZDAILY’s coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival, where the reviews will be as plentiful as we can cram into a week. TIFF started things off on a less-than-festive note with Werner Herzog’s documentary “Into the Abyss,” The title isn’t kidding: this is the story of a meaninglessly brutal triple murder committed […]

  SCANDAL:  Thursday 9PM on ABC Sheer addictiveness is SCANDAL’s stock in trade, and although the Season 4 premiere had an absence of the show’s jaw-dropping plot twists, it was already awash in adrenaline and its trademark high-voltage monologues. The premiere, written by series creator Shonda Rhimes herself and directed by Tom Verica, mostly served […]

  HANNIBAL:  Friday 10PM on NBC With the exception of Twin Peaks, HANNIBAL may well be the strangest drama ever to air on a broadcast network.  Created for television by Bryan Fuller as a prequel in the Thomas Harris canon to Red Dragon, it mixes mannered, hushed, often extended dialogue sequences with loving, lingering scenes of […]