KNIVES OUT (Lionsgate – November 27):  Rian Johnson’s delectable reinvention of the old-fashioned puzzle whodunnit wears its convoluted plotting on its sleeve, weaving and circling about so that when you think you know what’s going on, he can bang his trap shut.  Johnson isn’t shy about his influences here.  The murder victim, Harlan Thrombrey […]

  The midseason finale of the purported romantic thriller BEAUTY & THE BEAST delivered almost all romance, no thrills, as it continues to have only a glancing relationship with its title. Plotting has been this show’s weak spot from the start, so the fact that its procedural crime-solving story of the week was underdeveloped to […]

  Many remarkable things have happened in the world of television over the past few years, but none may be odder than the fact that a story about the 16th century Mary, Queen of Scots ran on network TV for four seasons.  Even more, while REIGN initially squeezed into the CW demographic by concentrating on […]

  THE ORIGINALS has some recurring problems.  For one thing, since its antihero family the Mikaelsons are ageless supernaturals who emigrated to the US over the centuries, their foes–and even the family members who turn up from time to time, sometimes in new bodies–tend to be interchangeable Eurotrash.  It took effort this season to remember […]

  AGENTS OF SHIELD has been given one more final season after the sixth that concluded tonight, and that will bring to an end an extended footnote to Marvel’s cultural domination of our moment.  Agents was the project most caught up in the territorial strife between Marvel Television and the increasingly all-powerful Marvel Cinematic Universe, […]

  One of the reasons “locked room” mysteries appeal to producers is that they require limited production values, and for what amounted to half its initial season, DARK MATTER tried to make up for its inadequate budget by being a locked spaceship mystery, with chunks of its content taking place on the dimly-lit, far from detailed sets […]

  Ah yes… the clink of silver on fine china, the lords and ladies sitting down to dinner in their best evening dress, the barely perceptible rustle of servants smoothly executing their duties behind the scenes–it’s all back.  America’s favorite TV vacation destination (certainly more appealing than the Hamptons of ABC’s competing Revenge, a place […]

  UNDER THE DOME went rather bonkers in its second season, apparently flummoxed by the fact that it existed at all.  Dome had originally been conceived as a limited summer series that, like the Stephen King novel which inspired it, would have a beginning, middle and end.  But the show became a sensational hit, the […]