Even among procedurals, ABC’s Canadian summer series MOTIVE was a bare-bones example of the genre–it was virtually abstract.  The show had a single gimmick:  at the start of each episode, the killer and victim were identified, so in theory the only mystery was why this person killed that one.  (Sometimes, as in the first […]

  Every fan of HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER came into tonight’s Season 9 premiere knowing three things.  This will be not just the ninth, but the final season of the series; last season’s finale introduced us, at long last, to the still-unnamed Mother (new regular Cristin Milioti); and the entire season will take place […]

  LUCKY 7:  Tuesday 10PM on ABC Previously… on LUCKY 7:  In a Queens, NY auto shop, (almost) all the employees have just hit a $45M lottery jackpot.  However, that hasn’t made their problems go away.  Brothers Matt (Matt Long) and Nicky (Stephen Louis Grush), both in need of money before their win was announced […]

  WHITE COLLAR:  Thursday 9PM on USA Season 5 of WHITE COLLAR couldn’t be in more of a rush to get the hell away from its Season 4 cliffhanger.  When we left intrepid FBI agent Peter Burke (Tim DeKay), he was in prison for killing a US Senator, a crime actually committed by the father […]

  Star power makes all the difference  in THE SKELETON TWINS.  Craig Johnson’s dramedy (written with Mark Heyman) takes place in fairly commonplace territory, especially at Sundance:  siblings bound together, whether they like it or not, by embittered love and old family scars.  What isn’t expected, though, is for those roles to be filled by SNL alumni Kristen […]

  GREY’S ANATOMY doesn’t get much attention these days, not even compared to its creator Shonda Rhimes’s shinier Scandal—Grey’s is just a soap–but after 10 years, it still knows how to pull off a big episode.  The fall finale, written by Co-Executive Producer William Harper and directed by Tony Phelan, effectively kicked off a long […]

  EPISODES:  Sunday 10:30PM on Showtime EPISODES, written from beginning to end by David Crane (a creator of Friends) and fellow sitcom vet Jeffrey Klarik, improved considerably in its second season, adding some shading to its original cartoon about a married pair of relative babes-in-the-woods British writer/producers corrupted by the comfort and thorough superficiality of […]

  This year’s COVEN season of AMERICAN HORROR STORY was as cohesive as the proudly bizarre  series is ever likely to get.  That entailed a slight shortage of the WTF variety moments that have made the two previous seasons memorable–no aliens, no fiendish medical experiments, no appearances by Anne Frank–but there was something to be […]