ONCE UPON A TIME:  Sunday 8PM on ABC WHERE WE WERE:  Watching a season finale that looked like it could end the series, as Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison), AKA the daughter of Snow White/Mary Margaret Blanchard (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Prince Charming/David Nolan (Josh Dallas), gave her seemingly dead biological son Henry (Jared Gilmore) a […]

  If tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE didn’t have much to recommend it–and it didn’t–blame can’t be put on its very busy host and musical guest Bruno Mars.  Mars did everything that was asked of him, and actually supplied the episode’s highlight, a rapid-fire series of musical impersonations (in the framework of a Pandora Radio sketch) […]

  What kind of show, in the end, is HOMELAND?  Focus groups are often asked simply to describe whatever it is they’ve just seen, and Homeland has tried to be a romance, a thriller, an action adventure, a story about politics and terrorism, a psychological drama, and more–all at once.  That it’s succeeded much of […]

  TOUCH:  Friday 9PM on FOX Tim Kring’s Heroes is a famous example of a hit series imploding in its second season, but his TOUCH–not nearly as big a success in its first version–is, at least, more intriguing after a Season 2 reboot. Touch started as a sort of New Age “Touched By An Autistic”.  […]

  MR. SELFRIDGE:  Sunday 9PM on PBS To get the obvious over with quickly, MR. SELFRIDGE, PBS’s attempt to find a partner for its blockbuster hit Downton Abbey, isn’t in that show’s league.  Instead it’s a merely pleasant traipse down another corner of early 20th-century British history. While Downton offers a cornucopia of sharply-drawn characters […]

  DEFIANCE:  Monday 9PM on Syfy Previously… on DEFIANCE:  Now that the usual post-apocalyptic interstellar warfare is over, a variety of alien races live alongside the remaining humans on Earth.  In the town that used to be St. Louis, renamed Defiance, recently elected Mayor Amanda Rosewater (Julie Benz) has appointed peripatetic ex-soldier Jeb Nolan (Grant […]

  As hard as it is to create a compelling, successful television series, it’s much harder to keep one going year after year, after cast changes and writer changes and timeslot changes and network management changes and all the other events that make a showrunner’s life a nonstop ulcer.  (Revenge, for one, barely managed to […]

  THE KILLING:  Sunday 9PM on AMC By its second season, THE KILLING was as ridiculed as any serious drama on television this side of Smash.  There were its mannerisms–just how many flights to her fiancee in California could Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) narrowly miss?–its perpetually gloomy, rainy atmospherics, its blind corner and red herring-laden […]