KIDDING:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime (available now via streaming & VOD) Showtime’s new dramedy KIDDING is being likened to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind because it mixes gags with melancholy, and particularly because it reunites star Jim Carrey with director Michel Gondry.  But a critical member of that team is missing:  writer Charlie […]

  The HBO miniseries version of Gillian Flynn’s novel SHARP OBJECTS proved to be a fascinating exercise in adaptation.  Although the TV credits reported the show to be “created by” showrunner Marti Noxon, it was clearly the result of a close collaboration between Noxon, Flynn (not just a producer on the project but one of […]

  The first season of YELLOWSTONE was a feat of auteurship.  Every episode of the recently-rebooted Paramount Network’s prestige series was written and directed solely by series creator Taylor Sheridan, something not even David Lynch or Sam Esmail can claim.  The result was 10 hours of television that qualified, to an extent rarely seen, as […]

  Behind the scenes events threatened to overtake the narrative of THE AFFAIR this season.  Midway through the run, Showtime announced that next year’s Season 5 would be the series finale, making the current season something of a preface to the end.  It then developed that original lead actress Ruth Wilson had asked the producers […]

  CW’s THE 100 has set its bar fairly high fover the years, and on those terms, Season 5 wasn’t quite up to par.  The central crisis–our protagonists had to face off against a pack of vicious thawed-out convicts–was uncomfortably close to a Direct-to-VOD premise, and the climactic arrival of yet another nuclear holocaust struck […]

  The most tantalizing question of the Summer 2018 TV season is whether Jesse Armstrong, the creator of HBO’s slow-boil triumph SUCCESSION, knew what he was doing all along, or if the first 3-4 episodes were as uncertain as they seemed at the time.  In that beginning phase, Succession felt like Billions for The Gang […]

  The first season of Freeform’s Marvel series CLOAK & DAGGER was from the measured pace school of serialized TV drama.  Joe Pokaski’s saga was essentially 10 hours of origin story, tracing Tandy Bowen (Olivia Holt) and Tyrone Johnson (Aubrey Joseph) from teen outcasts to budding superheroes, with only scattered uses of their powers until […]

  BURDEN OF TRUTH:  Wednesday 8PM on CW This summer’s crop of original broadcast dramas (Reverie, Take Two, The Outpost) has been notably bad, and in that context, CW’s new Canadian import, the straightforward legal drama BURDEN OF TRUTH, comes as something of a relief. The set-up is a much tamer version of the one […]