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 […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

  Today’s CW announcement that in March, THE TOMORROW PEOPLE will move to Monday nights, swapping the hit Arrow for the untested Star-Crossed as its lead in, probably starts the clock ticking on the show’s remaining time to prove itself.  The series has made a few steps to improve since its underwhelming pilot, but it’s […]

  The first half of The Walking Dead‘s 9th season included so many major changes that its ratings continuing their general downward trend rather than collapsing entirely may count as a sort of moral victory, even though the numbers are now at series lows.  New showrunner Angela Kang had 8 episodes to cover a whole […]

  SUITS is USA Network’s last remaining scripted hit, yet it finds itself in a bind:  with tonight’s midpoint of Season 4, it’s taken its original premise–Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) having been hired as a law firm associate by partner Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), even though Harvey knew that Mike had never attended law […]