THE BLACKLIST adequately completed the first act of its season’s mission with tonight’s fall finale–but the tough part is still to come.  NBC largely adopted a conservative schedule this season–a new sitcom after Tuesday’s The Voice and a couple more thrown away on Thursday, another fantasy thriller after Grimm, a third old-skewing procedural to […]

  Last week’s episode of NBC’s THIS IS US notched an impressive achievement:  in Live + 7 ratings, it moved past Empire to become the highest rated drama on broadcast TV.  Admittedly, L7 ratings aren’t the most meaningful metric for advertiser purposes, and being the highest rated broadcast drama isn’t the gala event it would […]

  We’ll find out in just a few weeks exactly how big a hit NBC’s THE BLACKLIST really is, thanks to the network’s announcement that the show will air in January for the first time outside the protective shadow of The Voice as its lead-in.  Until now, it’s been the breakout hit of the fall, […]

  One never knows, but the rebranding of its network probably doesn’t bode well for RECOVERY ROAD.  The recently-renamed Freeform, which has over the last few months canceled Chasing Life and Switched At Birth, while renewing Stitchers and Shadowhunters, seems to be moving in the direction of heroine-led fantasy-adventures and procedurals, rather than the YA […]

  Almost every quality series, at one point or another, takes a wrong turn (remember the Friday Night Lights murder storyline?); the mark of one with staying power is whether it can bounce back.  THE FOSTERS was in danger of going over the edge at the end of its first season, piling one melodramatic plot […]

  It remains a pop culture puzzle that Marvel can have such uninterrupted, unprecedented success as a producer of blockbuster movies, yet still not have cracked the code of TV, while DC, which is hurrying (perhaps too fast) to play catch-up on the big screen, is routinely turning out hit series for the small one.  (Well, […]

  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 concept of a “finale” as an event calling for special plot revelations and narrative shockers is almost irrelevant to SCANDAL, where every episode brings massive twists.  This is a show, after all, set in a world where the sitting President and Vice President of the United States have now recently committed murder–and not […]