Since the TV cop show has come of age–a process that began back in the days of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, but has accelerated greatly in recent years–there have been repeated attempts to push the limits of the genre, to tell more novelistic stories that are as much about character and setting […]

  HELL ON WHEELS – Saturday 9PM on AMC Season 3 brings an upwardly mobile turn for HELL ON WHEELS.  Hero Cullen Bohannon’s (Anson Mount) dark mission of vengeance for the death of his wife during the Civil War, which propelled the action for the show’s first two seasons, is apparently over, and by the […]

  TOGETHERNESS:  Sunday 9:30PM on HBO – Potential DVR Alert With TOGETHERNESS, Mark and Jay Duplass join the pilgrimage of indie filmmakers to HBO, which now has a virtual Sundance Film Festival of its own every Sunday night with the new dramedy joining Girls and Looking.  Of the three, Togetherness appears on first glance to […]

  For scripted network shows, a summer season is like a dog year, far more weighty than the regular kind.  The mortality rate is so high that just getting a renewal is a considerable feat, and a show like Rookie Blue, extended to a 5th season, might as well be Meet the Press.  So THE […]

  It was a somewhat underpopulated 8th and final season for PSYCH.  Maggie Lawson, the show’s female lead Juliet O’Hara, was off shooting Back In the Game most of the time, and Kirsten Nelson’s Chief Vick of the Santa Barbara Police had been relieved of her duties at the end of Season 7, so both […]

  In their teardown season as new showrunners of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD, Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg didn’t solve all the problems inherent in the franchise, and the season was uneven, only partly for reasons of transition.  Still, they accomplished a lot, more or less creating a new series from the one that had […]

  UNDER THE DOME hasn’t been particularly important as TV drama, but it’s provided some vital information to the broadcast network business.  After years–decades, really–of treating summer as a repository for scripted burn-offs (this summer’s The Goodwin Games as well as flops like Do No Harm and 666 Park Avenue) and cheap international co-productions (Camp, Crossing Lines, Siberia, Motive, etc) […]

  THE BLACKLIST:  Monday 10PM on NBC THE BLACKLIST was a game-changing smash for NBC last season, in combination with The Voice solidifying the network’s hold on Mondays to such an extent that the night, along with Sunday Night Football, made up for all its shortcomings the rest of the week.  The show was a […]