CW’s THE 100 has set its bar fairly high fover the years, and on those terms, Season 5 wasn’t quite up to par.  The central crisis–our protagonists had to face off against a pack of vicious thawed-out convicts–was uncomfortably close to a Direct-to-VOD premise, and the climactic arrival of yet another nuclear holocaust struck […]

  Only in the world of RAY DONOVAN would a season’s (more or less) happy ending commence with the chainsaw dismemberment of corpses, but that’s Showtime’s twisted family saga.  The headline of Season 6 was the show’s relocation from Los Angeles to New York, which hardly seemed affect its DNA at all.  In fact, at […]

  If NBC’s Thursday night sitcoms were a movie about college roommates, The Office would be the one who doesn’t study or do the work but still gets better grades than anyone else, 30 Rock would be the teacher’s pet, Community the stoner who’s either going to end up as a temp or a billionaire.  […]

  There’s a reason CBS is as successful as it is.  PERSON OF INTEREST is just a procedural–albeit one with an unusually complicated premise–but it mixes solid plotting, well-paced action and just enough character backstory to give it a little substance, and the result is an hour of television that works.   Person starts with […]

> The Tony Awards aren’t quite like any other televised awards show.  They’re happily, unapologetically insular (and so are the ratings–thank god for CBS, where “young” audience is a relative term), and there’s hardly ever anything like an upset; this year the closest was probably Mark Rylance winning Best Actor In a Play for Jerusalem […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots The pilot for HOMEGROWN, produced for CBS by Warner Bros Television, seems determined to hit as many dysfunctional-but-loving-family cliches as it can.  We have one grouchy alpha male in a household of women (here played by Gerald McRaney), the multiple generations living in one sitcom (huge living room!) […]

> Warning:  Spoilers Ahead Here, in the end, is all you needed to know about TERRA NOVA:  in its entire 2-hour season–and very possibly series–finale, dinosaurs were sighted for a grand total of about 2 minutes. Remember the original promos for Terra Nova, the ones that played on FOX for months while the show kept […]

> BEST FRIENDS FOREVER:  Premieres Wednesday 8:30PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… NBC isn’t exactly swinging for the multigender fences with BEST FRIENDS FOREVER, the newest entry into the deathtrap known as the network’s Wednesday night schedule.  The term “chick show” is rightly viewed as perjorative, but it’s hard to avoid when […]