ONCE UPON A TIME:  Friday 8PM on ABC This season’s Version 2.0 of ONCE UPON A TIME exists because of dwindling ratings, which led to a reduced budget and consequently a cast dump.  (The show was also moved to a less demanding Friday night slot.)  The potential advantage of that hardship was that after 6 […]

  COMPLICATIONS:  Thursday 9PM on USA – Change the Channel USA Network has been hammering away at its own image for some time now, trying to find a show that will brand it as cooler and edgier than the home of Monk and Psych.  Suits has given the network a 2d generation hit, and a […]

  RUSH:  Thursday 9PM on USA – Change the Channel USA Network is aiming for “edgy” with its new Thursday line-up, and so the pilot for RUSH begins with its antihero Will Rush (Tom Ellis) doing coke.  The twist?  When his lady friend goes into cardiac arrest, Will reveals himself as a brilliant physician who […]

  FARGO was great television of a kind we’ve never really seen before.  Neither a prequel nor a sequel nor a remake, not even a true spin-off, this was more like a reincarnation of the Coen Brothers’ classic movie, as though the writer Noah Hawley had allowed himself to be inhabited by the filmmakers’ idiosyncratic […]

  COMMON LAW:  Fridays 10PM on USA – Change the Channel CBS may own the world of serious procedurals, but USA Network has the patent on the jocular ones.  Monk, Psych, Burn Notice, Suits, In Plain Sight, Fairly Legal…  the list goes on and on.  In every show, there’s a quirky protagonist (“Characters Welcome”) who […]

  If there was a way to turn its premise into a TV series worth watching, TOUCH didn’t find it.  The show tried very different approaches in its two seasons, but FOX’s cancellation notice this week closed the door on any further tries. In its first season, Touch was built around the feel-good idea that […]

  How long can television (or “television,” since programming is now viewed on a multitude of screens and platforms) stay as good as it is right now?  It used to be tough to find 10 TV shows in a year worthy of being considered “best,” but now the problem is deciding which superb shows to omit.  […]

Lena Dunham’s GIRLS has been all over the place this season, so it made sense that its season finale would come out of nowhere.   We knew last week that when Jessa (Jemima Kirke) got a talking-to from former employer Katherine (Kathryn Hahn) about growing up, it was making an impression–but who would have thought that […]