THE ORIGINALS and its creator/showrunner Julie Plec have been fearless about plunging viewers of the New Orleans-set supernatural soap into a veritable bayou of mythology.  We’re half a season in, and already swamped by vampires, werewolves, vampire/werewolf hybrids, an impossible unborn hybrid baby, a teen super-witch, an assortment of garden-variety witches, and the occasional […]

  REIGN rang down the curtain on the first piece of its season (it returns on January 23, having managed to hold onto its post-Vampire Diaries timeslot) in fine historical romance style.  The script, by series co-creator Laurie McCarthy (the episode was directed by Fred Gerber), brought the show’s main storyline to the forefront:  the […]

  How much guitar string does NASHVILLE have left?  Last night’s fall finale had a 1.4 rating in 18-49s, half a point below last season’s–which was already considered a major disappointment.  When you’re already below a 2, half a point is critically important, and at some point, the revenues ABC/Disney get from Nashville iTunes sales […]

  From the viewpoint of its newly-concluded third season, the first 2 years of Starz’s BLACK SAILS feel like a very long and somewhat misguided prologue to where the series is now.  With Michael Bay as its leading Executive Producer, Black Sails was presented as a yarn of 18th century sea piracy, built around the […]

  Even as ABC’s Agents of SHIELD suggests the limits of corporate/entertainment synergy, it’s been working out just fine for the same network’s ONCE UPON A TIME.  Whether the idea originated with the show’s network, studio or (as they claim) producers, melding Disney’s Frozen with the Once melenge of fairy tale, myth and pop culture […]

  VINYL watchers, HBO feels your pain.  Late in a run that matched low ratings with little buzz or critical enthusiasm, the network took the unusual step of not just firing co-creator/showrunner Terence Winter, but of publicizing that decision before Season 1 even finished airing, despite the fact that HBO and Winter have a history […]

  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 […]

  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, […]