Something unexpected has been going on in the first half of the fourth season of AMC’s franchise spin-off FEAR THE WALKING DEAD. Fear has always felt like a corporate calculation and a creative afterthought, unable to find a lasting identity as it roamed from being a Walking Dead prequel to being all too literally […]
HOUDINI & DOYLE: Monday 9PM on FOX – Change the Channel Paranormal procedurals have been fertile ground for FOX since at least The X-Files, recently with Lucifer and Sleepy Hollow (and the rebooted X-Files). The network’s early-arrival summer series HOUDINI & DOYLE, though, is a plodding, uninspired miss in the subgenre. As the rules […]
STATE OF AFFAIRS ended its season tonight with a cliffhanger that will almost certainly remain unresolved, although one might speculate whether the mysterious airstrike that was heading toward Charleston Tucker (Katherine Heigl) in Afghanistan might have been sent not by Victor Gantry (Adam Arkin), the perfidious head of a paramilitary conglomerate or President Constance […]
Over the course of its season, NBC’s SHADES OF BLUE muddled its way from being a broadcast network-lite version of a gritty cable cop drama to a more conventional heist thriller. It was flawed in both contexts, but more able to carry its weight as the latter. The series, created by Adi Hasak, was […]
The signs are foreboding for AGENT CARTER: not only have the Season 2 ratings gone from lukewarm to frigid, but star Hayley Atwell has signed for another ABC pilot (although since the same studio and network are involved, and Carter only produces a limited number of episodes each season, doing both isn’t impossible). It […]
It’s been an odd, spotty half-season for THE VAMPIRE DIARIES. For one thing, it’s been more like two mini-seasons: the story of all-powerful, unkillable vampire-witch-whatever Silas, which would have been expected to climax in the fall finale, abruptly ended 7 episodes into the season–which was too bad, because with Silas as its Stefanganger (Paul […]
In the fall of its fifth season, THE WALKING DEAD has remained a ratings phenomenon like nothing else on television, and for much of this run of episodes, the always-uneven show deserved some of its wild success. Showrunner Scott M. Gimple and overall Walking Dead honcho Robert Kirkman made unexpected pacing choices that kept […]
With the addition of Rockne S. O’Bannon to the REVOLUTION writing/producing team as co-showrunner, alongside series creator Eric Kripke, the first half (actually 9/22nds) of its second season has been more tightly focused and dramatically effective than the mess of its first year. There were considerably less of Season 1’s annoying mannerisms: endless trudging […]