In its second season, Syfy’s DEFIANCE continued to be erratic, although sometimes in a more satisfying way than in Season 1.  Under the helm of series co-creator and new showrunner Kevin Murphy (replacing fellow co-creator Michael Taylor), Defiance was less bound by its initial efforts to be a neo-western–set in a post-apocalyptic St. Louis […]

  Hardly anyone in America watched THE DIVIDE this summer, and it wasn’t because the series was some kind of bleak, off-putting experiment in reinventing the form of television drama, taking pleasure in alienating all but the most esoteric viewers.  On the contrary, the series was a big-tent crime melodrama that energized its traditional format with […]

  STALKER:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS starting October 1 – Change the Channel PLAYERS:  Series creator Kevin Williamson, of The Following, The Vampire Diaries and Scream fame.  Stars Maggie Q and Dylan McDermott, and a supporting cast that includes Victor Rasuk, Mariana Klaveno and Elisabeth Rohm (the latter added in a recasting after the pilot […]

  TYRANT wasn’t the summer’s worst show, but it’s been the most piercing disappointment of the mini-season,  wasting a potentially thrilling premise–behind the scenes at a Middle Eastern military dictatorship–that seemed perfectly suited to FX, one that could combine the network’s trademark narrative energy and ambition with prestige (series co-developer Howard Gordon is also a […]

  CONSTANTINE:  Friday 10PM on NBC starting October 24 – If Nothing Else is On… (but also Incomplete) PLAYERS:  DC Comics.  Series creators Daniel Cerrone (a showrunner, although not creator, of Dexter) and David S. Goyer (of DaVinci’s Demons and the Dark Knight movies).  Pilot director Neil Marshall, who’s best known for directing the “Blackwater” episode […]

  Television as a medium seems to become more exciting and surprising practically every week these days, but one thing remains the same:  The EMMY AWARDS is still the weak, erratic sibling of the other major awards shows, even when the telecast itself is slickly packaged, as was mostly the case with tonight’s rendition from […]

  Before the final 2 weeks of its run, the word no one would ever have dreamed of attaching to TRUE BLOOD was “subdued”; it was the guilty pleasure HBO series that was loaded with sex and violence and got great ratings, but without the class of, say, Game of Thrones, and with no serious […]

  Once it became clear that, for the most part, THE LAST SHIP was science fiction only in the strictest sense (there was science and it was fiction), it was fairly enjoyable for the neo-Tom Clancy-esque action-adventure it aspired to be.  Much of Season 1 was, for all intents and purposes, a Cold War saga, […]