THE WALKING DEAD is in danger of becoming TV’s version of The Phantom Menace: a gigantic hit that no one really likes.  The ratings, while still massive, were significantly down in Season 7, which premiered with the instantly-infamous episode that introduced villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who promptly clubbed two cast regulars to death […]

  BIG LITTLE LIES was a bait and switch of the highest order.  The show was marketed as a murder mystery, and the fragmentary flashforwards early on confirmed the idea that this was where the story was headed.  But the killing itself didn’t actually occur until the last 15 minutes of the 7th and final […]

  For a while there, it seemed as though the finale of GRIMM was on a crusade to make sure the show could never be rebooted, massacring almost the entire regular cast one by one, which in an age where IP is more important than anything else would have been a fairly brave move.  But […]

  The Matrix is one of the many pop culture properties that have influenced Noah Hawley’s LEGION, and Legion has been something of a matrix itself.  Behind its surface and around its edges, the shape of a much more conventional Marvel comic-book adventure story has lurked from the start, and with the final two episodes […]

  There was a time when BONES was a breath of fresh TV air.  When it arrived in 2005, the networks were deep into Peak Grim Procedural mode, as shows like CSI, Criminal Minds and NCIS thrived and spawned seemingly endless spin-offs.  Bones pumped some changes into the format, adding rom-com, screwball comedy, warmth and […]

  INTO THE BADLANDS:  Sunday 10PM on AMC The vigorously pulpy INTO THE BADLANDS has returned for a second season, gifted by AMC with a Walking Dead lead-in for the first 3 weeks of its run that should guarantee some viewer attention.  This time it has a 10-episode order, not necessarily good news considering how […]

  It’s easy to overlook the ingeniousness of Dan Fogelman’s THIS IS US, the season’s only broadcast network smash hit.  On its face, the show is a familiar, even old-fashioned family soap, in which the various members of a clan are constantly beset by romantic, professional or medical problems–The Fosters with older siblings.  But Fogelman’s […]

  TRIAL & ERROR:  Tuesday 9PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… NBC’s TRIAL & ERROR is a cluttered joke-book of a sitcom that parodies true-crime docuseries like Making A Murderer and especially The Staircase.  As in the latter, the accused murderer, here named Larry Henderson (John Lithgow), is a figure of some […]