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 […]

  For its fall finale (the show is taking a relatively brief break, returning on January 7), AGENTS OF SHIELD turned to its continuing storylines, such as they are.  The script by Co-Producer Shalisha Francis, directed by Holly Dale, went back to the pilot and its story of the Centipede project, which has recurred in […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

  In the best case scenario, this first half of THE WALKING DEAD‘s 7th season has been a necessary evil.  While ponderousness has been built into the show’s DNA more or less from the start, Walking Dead has never before been as oppressive as these 8 episodes.  Part of that is sheer length:  AMC has gone […]

  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 […]

  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 […]