Among other things, the midseason finale of THE VAMPIRE DIARIES gets credit for the season’s most subversive use of Christmas carols, playing cheerily under ancient vampire Klaus (Joseph Morgan) as he first slaughtered a dozen vampire-werewolf hybrids, and then cold-bloodedly drowned Mayor Lockwood (Susan Walters) as a blow against her son Tyler (Michael Trevino), […]

  THE AMERICANS:  Wednesday 10PM on FX 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 […]

  CULT:  Tuesday 9PM on CW Previously… on CULT:  Stay with me here.  “Cult” is a fictional TV series that airs on a fictional version of the CW, in which the deranged followers of Billy Grimm (Rob Knepper) murder, torture and commit various other crimes at his behest, including the abduction of the sister of […]

  HANNIBAL:  Thursday 10PM on NBC – Potential DVR Alert Bryan Fuller has a very unusual sensibility, especially for network TV.  He’s attracted both to gruesome crime stories and elaborate visual tableaux, as he showed in his Wonderfalls and particularly Pushing Daisies, with its mix of candy-coated production design and bizarre murder mysteries–it was like […]

  FX’s THE AMERICANS has been, by a substantial margin, the best new show of this season.  And if tonight’s season finale was slightly less ambitious than we might have hoped in terms of delivering the shocking twists or cliffhangers that we now expect from our top serialized series, it still delivered an expert mix […]

  THE GOODWIN GAMES:  Monday 8:30PM on FOX – If Nothing Else Is On… Note:  we reviewed the original pilot for this show back in August.  Since then, however, it underwent fairly significant recasting and reshooting, so it seemed fair to give the new version another look. The term “busted pilot” is fairly well known, […]

  FALLING SKIES:  Sunday 10PM on TNT FALLING SKIES is, for TNT, the series Syfy needs and doesn’t seem to be able to pull off.  As futuristic adventure sagas go, there’s nothing innovative about it, or even stylish, and now that the original producers have departed, it’s no longer much interested in being an allegory.  […]

  DEXTER:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime Here we are, once again at the outset of the declared final season for a long-lived, successfully distinctive TV series.  The conclusion of DEXTER won’t compare to the upcoming end of Breaking Bad later this summer (or to next year’s exit of Mad Men) in terms of passionate expectations, […]