MAD MEN:  Sunday 10PM on AMC Fresh episodes of MAD MEN will likely still be airing more than a year from now, so all the obituaries for the series that have been appearing lately run the risk of sounding like “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead” when they’re repeated in 2015.  The only reason […]

  IMPASTOR:  Wednesday 10:30PM on TV Land (and Nick At Nite) Previously… on IMPASTOR:  Buddy Dobbs (Michael Rosenbaum), on the run from loansharks, considered suicide by jumping off a bridge, but small-town Lutheran minister Jonathan Barlow died instead while attempting to save him.  Barlow was on his way to a new posting in Ladnor, a […]

  NBC is all-in on CHICAGO FIRE.  Not only has it given the show a plum spot for the fall on Tuesdays with The Voice as its lead-in, it’s ordered a police-oriented spin-off for midseason.  All this enthusiasm is a little puzzling, giving that the show has been only a marginal success (its season average […]

  NASHVILLE is a superior network series, loaded with talent and powerful moments, but it can also drive you up a wall, beset as it is with sometimes infuriating shortcomings.  The same was true for tonight’s season finale, written and directed by series creator Callie Khouri. Some of the show’s problems are glaringly obvious.  Its […]

  For all that HBO’s WESTWORLD is deliberately obscure and oblique, one thing has become increasingly clear through the course of its second season:  series creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy expect viewers to decide for themselves what aspects of the show are features and which are bugs.  Most obviously, Westworld has no interest in […]

  FARGO:  Wednesday 10PM on FX Noah Hawley’s two FX series provide different models of the ways a television series can be ambitious.  Legion is so broad in its stylistic universe as to seem virtually without borders; its episodes ranged in tone and structure to such an extent that they eventually encompassed animated and black-and-white […]

> Since we last saw our rag-tag band of survivors, they’ve had to endure the loss of their leader, the man most responsible for mapping out their initial strategies and saving them along the way from all manner of deadly predators…   Oh, wait.  That’s THE WALKING DEAD series itself, where the vanished hero is Series […]

  YOUNGER:  Wednesday 10PM on TV Land TV Land’s flagship original series YOUNGER began to shake itself up at the end of Season 3, and the Season 4 premiere fruitfully continued that process.  Stories about Big Secrets, whether they’re being kept by superheroes or 40-year old publishing employees pretending to be in their 20s, reach […]