BETTER CALL SAUL reached a milestone in the final scene of its fourth season, as Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) formally assumed the mantle of Saul Goodman, the character he’ll be in Breaking Bad.  As the prequel series journeys toward its destiny, though, this Season 4 turned out to be a ruthless essay on the […]

      With the spring decline of New Girl‘s ratings, 2 BROKE GIRLS became the only remaining breakout comedy hit of the 2011/12 broadcast season.  The truth is, it’s still not all that good.  Tonight’s season finale, written by co-creator/showrunner Michael Patrick King (the other co-creator, Whitney Cummings, famously had to drop down to […]

  FX probably shouldn’t hold its breath for THE AMERICANS to become a wider popular success than it is. The series, for all its excellence, was more grim in its 3rd season than ever–the sun barely even seemed to shine on its distressed, and distressing, characters.  There was intense drama, to be sure, and outbursts of shocking violence […]

  Even as ABC’s Agents of SHIELD suggests the limits of corporate/entertainment synergy, it’s been working out just fine for the same network’s ONCE UPON A TIME.  Whether the idea originated with the show’s network, studio or (as they claim) producers, melding Disney’s Frozen with the Once melenge of fairy tale, myth and pop culture […]

  SILICON VALLEY:  Sunday 10PM on HBO Previously… on SILICON VALLEY:  Richard Hendrix (Thomas Middleditch) is a computer programmer with dreams of inventing the next big billion-dollar thing–and he may have actually done it, with an algorithm that allows for compression and duplication of video, music, etc without loss of quality.  Offered $10M for his […]

  With a full season of experience and audience feedback under its belt, it’s not unusual for a TV series to improve in its second season.  What’s considerably less typical is for the reverse to happen.  Yet whether due to the addition of new showrunner Brad Kern (although series creators Sherri Cooper and Jennifer Levin […]

  MR. SELFRIDGE:  Sunday 9PM on PBS MR. SELFRIDGE, the solace for PBS viewers between editions of Downton Abbey, has returned for its second season.  It lacks the dramatic urgency of Downton and is altogether a more conventional piece of work–it’s literally a show that, set in 1914, climaxes its opening hour by having someone […]

  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 […]