Having blown up the initial premise of their show in its Season 1 finale, ONCE UPON A TIME creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz have inventively plotted a Season 2 that came to a satisfying Act 1 culmination in the show’s Fall Finale episode, which they wrote and which was directed by Ralph Hemecker.  […]

  HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER:  Thursday 10PM on ABC Previously… on HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER:  At Middleton College, the brilliant, daunting law professor and criminal defense attorney Annalise Keating (Viola Davis) has gathered together her yearly group of five of her most promising students to work with her at her law […]

  HELL ON WHEELS – Sunday 9PM on AMC WHERE WE WERE:  Building the transcontinental railroad.  Our antihero, former Confederate soldier Cullen Bohannon, joined the Union Pacific Railroad’s march to the west only because he was tracking down the Union soldiers who murdered his wife during the Civil War, and (mistakenly, it seems) believed the […]

  JA’MIE: PRIVATE SCHOOL GIRL:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO – Change the Channel JA’MIE: PRIVATE SCHOOL GIRL belongs to that particular British Empire school of comedy in which the central joke is that a female character is played, very obviously, by a man in drag–not that the character is a man pretending to be a […]

  Over the course of its season, NBC’s SHADES OF BLUE muddled its way from being a broadcast network-lite version of a gritty cable cop drama to a more conventional heist thriller.  It was flawed in both contexts, but more able to carry its weight as the latter. The series, created by Adi Hasak, was […]

  TYRANT:  Wednesday 10PM on FX FX’s TYRANT has never been as incisive or daring as it could have been, given its incendiary setting in a fictional Middle Eastern nation on the brink of revolution, but it’s a survivor, back on the air for its third season.  After an unengaging initial run, the series remade […]

A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the production of episodes for the regular season: a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover) give plenty of notes, helpful and otherwise, and critics begin to rear […]

  RECKLESS:  Sunday 9PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… In the Charleston of CBS’s summer potboiler RECKLESS, it seems like just about everyone is sleeping with everyone else, or wants to.  That absurdly overheated quality is the most likable thing about what’s otherwise a fairly conventional legal procedural, which comes from a […]