There was a scene in tonight’s Season 3 finale of SCANDAL where Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) and Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry) sat together after a shocking death and, in a manner that was remarkably low-key for this series, talked about the fact that they’d become such monsters that when the death occurred, their minds […]

  THE BLACKLIST was a hit before it was much of a show, and it’s still decidedly uneven.  That was underscored again by tonight’s season finale, which killed off–well, apparently; you never know with this series–at least one regular and grievously injured more, but put very few cards on a table that could have used […]

  While not as loudly buzzy as Girls, SILICON VALLEY has been far more popular, indeed HBO’s highest-performing new comedy in quite a while (the fact that it follows the massive Game of Thrones on the network’s line-up hasn’t hurt, of course). Unlike a lot of comedies, both network and cable, that need some time […]

  MANHATTAN:  Sunday 10PM on WGN America – Potential DVR Alert If Salem was WGN America’s Hemlock Grove, the new MANHATTAN is the network’s bid for a House of Cards, a serious, classy drama that takes on Big Issues and is meant to put its network into another, higher league.  Of course, since WGN doesn’t […]

  THE STRAIN:  Sunday 10PM on FX Previously… on THE STRAIN:  A jet stops on the tarmac at JFK with–it appears–virtually all of its occupants mysteriously dead.  Missing from the cargo hold:  a huge, ornately carved box–sort of, um, like a coffin–filled with earth and with worms that squirm into human flesh.  CDC investigator Dr. […]

  The second season of FX’s THE BRIDGE faced quite a few challenges, some of them traceable to Season 1, and others self-created.  The original version of The Bridge was closely tied to the Swedish/Danish series on which it had been based.  It featured an extremely gimmicky serial killer plot that clashed violently with the […]

  BOARDWALK EMPIRE was, from its start, HBO at its best and most frustrating.  The show was sumptuously produced, on a scale that no other small-screen purveyor of content could match, famously including the recreation of a chunk of the 1920’s-era Atlantic City boardwalk.  Its ambitious were enormous, ranging eventually through four decades and at […]

  DOWNTON ABBEY – Sunday 9PM on PBS When it started airing 5 years ago, DOWNTON ABBEY was an artifact of nostalgia for a vanished era of British society, one Americans for all our proud egalitarianism have always eaten with a spoon.  Now it feels just as much like a time capsule into a different […]