Showtime’s HOUSE OF LIES was a bit more ambitious in its second season, and that was a good move, even if the results were uneven.  In its initial season, House was all too clearly a companion piece for Californication, a weekly half-hour of light, sexy satire around the consulting group campfire, with Don Cheadle’s […]

  BONES brought out the big guns for its Season 8 finale–a long-awaited marriage proposal from Brennan (Emily Deschanel) to Booth (David Boreanaz), and the return of the show’s arch-villain, Christopher Pelant (Andrew Leeds).  Pelant is both a genius-level computer hacker and a serial killer who, the last time we saw him, had stolen Hodgins’ […]

  ELEMENTARY is a very classy, enjoyable network procedural that has the misfortune of existing at the same time as the altogether more dazzling BBC/PBS Sherlock, which has the same premise:  Sherlock Holmes as a modern-day detective.  Both the strengths and weaknesses of the CBS approach were evident in last night’s 2-hour season finale. What […]

  THE KILLING:  Sunday 9PM on AMC By its second season, THE KILLING was as ridiculed as any serious drama on television this side of Smash.  There were its mannerisms–just how many flights to her fiancee in California could Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) narrowly miss?–its perpetually gloomy, rainy atmospherics, its blind corner and red herring-laden […]

  WORLD WAR Z:  Watch It At Home – Third Act Heroics, In More Ways Than One The travails of WORLD WAR Z on the way to the screen have been widely discussed, and in the end the misshapen, Frankenstein-like $200M (plus marketing costs) assembly of various genres, writers, editors and re-shoots are something of […]

  With the arrival of ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK after House of Cards, Hemlock Grove and Arrested Development, Netflix has completed the first quartet of its initial plunge into high-profile original programming .  Based on the available evidence (Netflix doesn’t release viewership information), the process has gone extremely well, with both subscriptions and the stock […]

  FALLING SKIES told a somewhat different story this season under showrunner Remi Aubuchon than it had in its first two years, and the changes worked fairly well for the most part.  Tom Mason (Noah Wyle) and his plucky band of rebels against the evil alien Espheni, instead of roaming the east coast, were based […]

  MIND GAMES:  Tuesday 10PM on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On… The creator of ABC’s midseason MIND GAMES, Kyle Killen, was the man behind Lone Star and Awake (as well as the movie The Beaver), so he doesn’t lack in fertile imagination.  What he hasn’t had, however, is any commercial success whatsoever, and […]