The limits of critical adoration are demonstrated by LOUIE.  Despite possibly terabytes of raves and features about Louis C.K.’s show in every corner of the media all season, the ratings, especially since Anger Management finished its run, have been terrible, and last night’s season finale was watched by fewer than 450,000 people in its […]

  NIKITA:  Friday 9PM on CW WHERE WE WERE:  Vanquishing Division.  Percy is finally, truly dead, Amanda is gone, and Nikita (Maggie Q) and her cohorts–lover and now fiance Michael (Shane West), protege Alex (Lyndsy Fonseca), hacker Birkhoff (Aaron Stanford), the more bureaucratic Ryan (Noah Bean), as well as Sonya (Lyndie Greenwood), who had worked […]

  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 […]

  The success of ARROW was a big win for CW and for DC Comics this season.  The appeal of CW’s single-girl soaps was running thin, while DC has been reeling from the otherworldly success of arch-rival Marvel’s grand Avengers strategy.  Arrow has given them a franchise they both needed. The series started out terribly […]

  SEAN SAVES THE WORLD:  Thursday 9PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… This is the kind of sitcom SEAN SAVES THE WORLD is.  A co-worker of Sean (Sean Hayes), Liz (Megan Hilty), walks into his office already talking, not realizing that he’s actually on speakerphone with their new boss.  When she’s called […]

  No show enjoys running around in circles more than VEEP.  Armando Ianucci’s political sitcom glories in Vice-President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her staff of venal incompetents mistakenly navigating through 180, 360 and often 720 or more degrees of spin every week, usually managing to slam into whatever iceberg they’ve most been trying to […]

  Read All Our Fall Pilot Reports here and Midseason Pilot Reports here. BACK IN THE GAME:  Wednesday 8:30PM on ABC  – Worth A Look Unlike most of its characters, BACK IN THE GAME keeps its pitches pretty much in the strike zone, which in this case is a combination of The Bad News Bears […]