DEAD OF SUMMER:  Tuesday 9PM on Freeform – If Nothing Else Is On… Freeform’s DEAD OF SUMMER arrives with A-list auspices.  Two of its co-creators, Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, are also the creators of Once Upon A Time (the remaining co-creator and series showrunner, Ian Goldberg, is a former Once writer/producer), and Horowitz […]

  This was the first season of GAME OF THRONES A.N. (Ahead of the Novels), and we can’t know at this point how much series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were informed by what they know about the work novelist George R. R. Martin hasn’t yet published.  But Martin will be hard-pressed to come […]

  RAY DONOVAN:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime When a car crashes into a Los Angeles wall in the Season 4 premiere of Showtime’s sizable if somewhat inexplicable hit RAY DONOVAN, it doesn’t just crash into a wall:  it crashes directly into a giant mural of the Virgin Mary.  That’s the way Ray Donovan rolls, its […]

  ROADIES:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime – In the Queue Showtime’s ROADIES is the first small-screen project from Cameron Crowe (he wrote and directed the pilot, and is showrunner with My So Called-Life‘s Winnie Holzman), and it’s very much a distillation of everything that makes his filmmaking exhilarating and frustrating.  There’s the wholehearted affection he […]

  AMERICAN GOTHIC:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS – Change the Channel Since even ABC is having trouble these days with its trademark soaps about melodrama, dark reveals and violence among close relations (The Family, Blood & Oil, the exhausted cancellation of Revenge), it’s not much of a surprise that CBS is completely out of its […]

  PERSON OF INTEREST was CBS’s most ambitious and elegantly constructed procedural, and its ratings in other circumstances would have been decent enough to keep it on the air beyond a 4 1/2-season run.  But the TV business changed around it, and marginal ratings can no longer sustain expensive series that don’t permit their networks […]

  THE LAST SHIP:  Sunday 9PM on TNT The world was saved at the end of THE LAST SHIP‘s second season.  Not only was a cure found for the virus that had caused a nearly apocalyptic pandemic, killing off most of Earth’s population, but the dearly departed Dr. Scott (Rhona Mitra) perfected a way to […]

  Effective showrunners learn from their mistakes, and the 4th and, as we now know, penultimate season of BBCAmerica’s ORPHAN BLACK was altogether more satisfying than Season 3.  Creator/showrunners Graeme Manson and John Fawcett had gotten ambitious in all the wrong ways last year, creating a line of male “Castor” clones (all played by Ari […]