Stripped of its period trappings and the fact that its heroine is named Carrie Bradshaw, THE CARRIE DIARIES is the most basic and least interesting of CW’s YA romances.  The season finale, like countless season finales set in high school before it, revolved around the junior prom, even though none of the characters ever […]

  NOS4A2:  Sunday 10PM on AMC It wouldn’t matter so much that the scares per hour rate of AMC’s new horror series NOS4A2 is so low, if the material in its place were more compelling.  The series is AMC’s latest attempt to find something compatible with its Walking Dead franchise, and it has promising auspices, […]

  For fans of his remarkable Battlestar Galactica reboot, it’s still strange to see series creator Ronald D. Moore switch to Starz’s much more old-fashioned OUTLANDER.  (Some of the abruptness of that switch was accidental:  Moore was attached to other, more BSG-like shows in the interim, but they weren’t picked up to series.)  Nevertheless, on […]

A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the production of episodes for the regular season: a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover) give plenty of notes, helpful and otherwise, and critics begin to rear […]

  INHUMANS:  Friday 9PM on ABC (starting Sept 29) – Change the Channel In this world of Peak TV, it’s harder for a new series to break through the clutter than it’s ever been, and that thicket will be a veritable forest during the fourth week of September, when the major broadcast networks will follow […]

  HBO has been airing a spiffy HD edition of James L. Brooks’ 1987 BROADCAST NEWS  in its recent rotation (it’s next scheduled for July 20 and 24), and that makes sense, since the Brooks film is one of the acknowledged inspirations for HBO’s current Aaron Sorkin series THE NEWSROOM.  I’m not sure how much […]

  Would ONCE UPON A TIME IN WONDERLAND have fared better if scheduled as originally planned, in the role of Sunday 8PM filler between the two half-seasons of its parent Once Upon A Time, instead of being sent to fend for itself on Thursdays?  In the short term, probably so, as Once fans might well […]

  FX’s THE STRAIN is doing something that The Walking Dead and its cohorts in the undead genre won’t:  telling a (more or less) coherent story from beginning to end, and exiting when it’s over.  During this third season, it was announced that next year, despite ratings that are still more than acceptable (if far […]