THE ORIGINALS and its creator/showrunner Julie Plec have been fearless about plunging viewers of the New Orleans-set supernatural soap into a veritable bayou of mythology.  We’re half a season in, and already swamped by vampires, werewolves, vampire/werewolf hybrids, an impossible unborn hybrid baby, a teen super-witch, an assortment of garden-variety witches, and the occasional […]

  We’ll find out in just a few weeks exactly how big a hit NBC’s THE BLACKLIST really is, thanks to the network’s announcement that the show will air in January for the first time outside the protective shadow of The Voice as its lead-in.  Until now, it’s been the breakout hit of the fall, […]

  TREME:  Sunday 9PM on HBO You don’t need big ratings to be considered a success on HBO (just ask Lena Dunham), but generating buzz is essential.  That’s something TREME never did, despite a small hard core of enthusiastic fans that can sometimes drive that kind of attention.  Perhaps it was the downbeat setting of […]

  GETTING ON:  Sunday 10PM on HBO Previously on… GETTING ON:  At a geriatric extended care ward in a Los Angeles hospital, Nurses Dawn (Alex Borstein) and Didi (Niecy Nash) attempt to cope with bureaucracy, their newly-transferred (read: demoted) physician in charge Dr. Jenna James (Laurie Metcalf), and the sheer weight of bureaucracy as they […]

  For all its gigantic, game-changing success, THE WALKING DEAD seems fated always to be a dramatically uneven series.  Under new showrunner Scott M. Gimple (who, contrary to previous practice, will keep his job in the already-ordered Season 5), the first half of Season 4 got off to a strong start, with an emphasis on […]

  New showrunner Brad Kern (working with series creators Sherri Cooper and Jennifer Levin) has made plenty of changes to BEAUTY & THE BEAST, but mostly they haven’t been improvements.  The gothic romanticism of Season 1 (and every other rendition of the tale) has been largely gone, replaced by a colder action-movie aesthetic.  Season 2 […]

  The crises on HART OF DIXIE, perhaps the most amiable hour on network television, tend to be fairly low-intensity, and tonight’s midseason finale–a Hanukkah episode, of all things, not something you often see on a show where the main characters aren’t Jewish–was no exception.  The major dramatic development of the hour came when the […]

  MAJOR CRIMES:  Monday 9PM on TNT MAJOR CRIMES isn’t the kind of series to go for “game-changing” alterations, so the back half (actually 8 episodes) of its second season, which resumed tonight after a break since August, is only incrementally different from what aired last summer.  The show is a straightforward procedural for the […]