Like its central hero, Dr. Lee Rosen (David Strathairn), ALPHAS spent most of its Season 2 finale staggering about in a daze, apparently bleeding to death.  And–SPOILER ALERT— also like Rosen, as well as everyone else who had the misfortune to be in Grand Central Station at the close of the episode aside from […]

  Throughout its first season, COPPER has almost never been as vivid as it seemed like it should be.  The show’s premise and auspices were promising:  the lead producers were Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, who apart from their illustrious solo credits, had combined as a team for the seminal cop show Homicide:  Life On […]

  If tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE didn’t have much to recommend it–and it didn’t–blame can’t be put on its very busy host and musical guest Bruno Mars.  Mars did everything that was asked of him, and actually supplied the episode’s highlight, a rapid-fire series of musical impersonations (in the framework of a Pandora Radio sketch) […]

  Few television series have worked so hard to be unlikeable as BOSS.  There had been some thought, after its initial off-putting season, that when Starz replaced series creator Farhad Safinia with Dee Johnson as showrunner, the aim might have been to water down some of the show’s bile, but such was clearly not the […]

  HUNTED:  Friday 10PM on Cinemax – Potential DVR Alert On the same night that coincidentally brought the season premiere of Nikita, we have a new series that treads similar ground, both centering on gorgeous, betrayed spies, although the tones of the two shows are very different.  In HUNTED, set and produced in Britain but […]

  NIKITA:  Friday 9PM on CW WHERE WE WERE:  Vanquishing Division.  Percy is finally, truly dead, Amanda is gone, and Nikita (Maggie Q) and her cohorts–lover and now fiance Michael (Shane West), protege Alex (Lyndsy Fonseca), hacker Birkhoff (Aaron Stanford), the more bureaucratic Ryan (Noah Bean), as well as Sonya (Lyndie Greenwood), who had worked […]

A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the production of episodes for the regular season: a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover) give plenty of notes, helpful and otherwise, and critics begin to rear […]

  ALEX CROSS – Not At Any Price – A Pilot For A Show You Wouldn’t Watch ALEX CROSS is as generic as a cop movie can be–it’s a few commercial breaks away from airing on CBS or TNT–but there’s been a certain fascination about it since it was announced that the lead role would […]