FOR THE PEOPLE:  Tuesday 10PM on ABC – In the Queue Things may change when Shonda Rhimes moves to Netflix, but in her ABC incarnation, her name on a project creates a certain set of expectations, which the new FOR THE PEOPLE mostly satisfies.  The pilot for the series, created by former Scandal writer/producer […]

  Road trip!  It was a decidedly odd way for COPPER to exit the scene, even if last night’s episode was intended just as a season finale, not as an end to the entire series.  (BBCAmerica didn’t cancel the low-rated show until last week.)  But nevertheless, our hero Kevin Corcoran (Tom Weston-Jones) and his pals, […]

  30 ROCK:  Thursday 8PM on NBC WHERE WE WERE:  Jack (Alec Baldwin) was divorcing his now-freed North Korean prisoner wife Avery (Elizabeth Banks).  Jenna (Jane Krakowski) was engaged to her Jenna-impersonator boyfriend Paul L’Astname (Will Forte).  Liz (Tina Fey) was, somewhat surprisingly, still with boyfriend Criss (James Marsden), and even more surprisingly, former page […]

  The hits just kept coming on tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, which packed a whole fall’s worth of glitz into the show’s final 90 minutes of 2013.  Technically, Jimmy Fallon was the host and Justin Timberlake was musical guest, but as anyone would have expected, the two were essentially a team–and if they weren’t enough […]

  After three seasons on the air, it seems fair to say that–paraphrasing Star Wars—Homeland isn’t the show we were looking for.  That doesn’t make it a bad series, or an unentertaining one.  But it’s not the successor to Mad Men and Breaking Bad in the pantheon of truly great television dramas that it at […]

  The third season of DEFIANCE may have been its most assured and cohesive to date.  However, as the most expensive of Syfy’s low-rated trio of Friday scripted summer shows, its fate has been far from certain.  In fact, tonight’s season finale, written by series co-creator Kevin Murphy and directed by Michael Nankin, felt overwhelmingly […]

  Times are dark indeed in Storybrooke this season.  The ratings for ONCE UPON A TIME have never been worse, and the the once-inventive show’s writing, by series creators Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis and their staff, is at a low ebb.  Truth be told, this has been coming for a while (remember the show’s […]

  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 […]