INHUMANS:  Friday 9PM on ABC (starting Sept 29) – Change the Channel In this world of Peak TV, it’s harder for a new series to break through the clutter than it’s ever been, and that thicket will be a veritable forest during the fourth week of September, when the major broadcast networks will follow […]

  The second season of TNT’s ANIMAL KINGDOM concluded on a fitting note of dissolution and violence.  It was a well-told season, shepherded by series creator Jonathan Lisco and uber-showrunner John Wells, who’s been guiding TV dramas to long runs since China Beach and ER.  Lisco and Wells successfully increased the stakes among the criminal […]

  The seventh season of HBO’s blockbuster GAME OF THRONES, its most watched and in some ways most confounding, was shaped by two outside factors, and possibly a third.  Series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, having outrun the completed portion of George R. R. Martin’s series of novels, were in total control of the […]

  HALT AND CATCH FIRE:  Saturday 9PM on AMC The links between AMC’s HALT AND CATCH FIRE as a television series, the stories it tells, and its characters have gone unusually deep.  The positive part has been that as series creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers have grown steadily more assured and ambitious in each […]

  I’M DYING UP HERE certainly wasn’t the worst show of the summer, but it did make one wonder how it had made its way through the development process and onto Showtime’s air.  Series creator Dave Flebotte’s take on the nonfiction book by William Knoedelseder was almost defiantly uncommercial.  The book detailed the 1970s LA […]

  ORPHAN BLACK is destined to be remembered more for the showcase it gave to the astonishing Tatiana Maslany than for its own narrative, although of course one couldn’t have existed without the other.  Series creators Graeme Manson and John Fawcett deserve credit not just for their tricky concept of a biological thriller that featured […]

  An odd thing happened to NASHVILLE in its 5th season, as it shifted networks to CMT and showrunners to Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick.  When series creator Callie Khouri and original showrunner Dee Johnson were in charge, Nashville had revolved around three women:  country music superstar Rayna Jaymes (Connie Britton), glitzy troublemaker Juliette Barnes […]

  MR. MERCEDES:  Wednesday 8PM on Audience Network (DirecTV) – DVR Alert It’s been quite a week for the splintering of television.  FX announced that it, like AMC, would launch a pay version of its service, allowing viewers on certain platforms to watch its shows without commercials for a monthly fee.  Then Disney dropped a […]