GOSSIP GIRL:  Monday 9PM on CW WHERE WE WERE:  Blair (Leighton Meester) with Chuck (Ed Westwick), and then not.  Serena (Blake Lively) with Dan (Penn Badgley), and then not.  Mix, then repeat.  Other things happened:  Serena was Gossip Girl for a while, but that didn’t turn out well for anyone–particularly the show.  Nate (Chace […]

  The Season 3 finale of BOARDWALK EMPIRE, like the season itself, was an exercise in patience and a mix of satisfaction and anti-climax.   Written by series creator Terence Winter and Executive Producer Howard Korder, and directed by house director Tim Van Patten, the first half of the episode had antagonists Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) […]

  LEGIT:  Thursday 10:30PM on FX Not everyone can be Louis C.K.  That’s the lesson of LEGIT, FX’s latest excursion to its comedy sweet spot of the low-budget, stand-up grunge aesthetic that’s given us It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, The League and Wilfred as well as Louie.  This time, though, the reigning sensibility–in the pilot, […]

  THE VIKINGS:  Sunday 10PM on History Channel Previously… on VIKINGS:  Back around the 8th Century AD, Ragnar Lothbrok (Travis Fimmel) is the one Viking visionary enough to believe that there are lands to the west even more ripe for conquest (like, for example, England) than those in the east, and he embraces the revolutionary […]

  GO ON is a genuine bubble show–not just in its ratings (which are strong when it has The Voice as a lead-in and barely acceptable when it doesn’t), but in its quality.  The series wobbles from episode to episode and even between storylines in a single episode, sometimes smart and charming and equally often […]

  The all-knowing Machine at the heart of PERSON OF INTEREST turned positively chatty in last night’s Season 2 finale, providing real-time advice and assistance via phone and text services to just about anyone who asked it nicely.  (If you didn’t care for numbers, it would help you out via musical tones.)   The Machine, […]

  We’re gradually discovering that Steven Soderbergh’s definition of “retirement” from filmmaking is a fairly narrow one.  It was recently announced that he plans to direct a new series for Cinemax, and he has another cable/online series in development.  It appears that the one thing he won’t be doing for the foreseeable future is directing […]

  SAVE ME had a late start, but it managed to be the worst network show to premiere during the 2012-13 season.  Unspeakably self-righteous, smug and narcissistic–and also not remotely funny–it was a series about religion that could have been underwritten by atheists.  While the idea of having The Big C creator Darlene Hunt run […]