It was clear from the pilot of NBC’s GOOD GIRLS that the series had a trio of strong assets and some major challenges.  The strengths were its three stars, Christina Hendricks, Retta and Mae Whitman, each of them thoroughly capable of anchoring a show on her own, and together an Avengers-like powerhouse of warmth, […]

  If the first season of THE FOLLOWING stands for anything, it’s that the significant difference between the best cable dramas and the vast majority of their network counterparts hasn’t been about the ability to depict extreme violence.  The Following was as relentlessly violent as anything this side of The Walking Dead (and much more […]

  LEGION:  Tuesday 10PM on FX The first season of Noah Hawley’s LEGION was enthralling, and a bit of a disappointment.  Hawley’s adult off-shoot of the X-Man franchise toyed with narrative structure, temporal and spatial displacement, and extravagant shifts in tone, until it seemed like Hawley might blow up the entire superhero genre.  Instead, it […]

  It’s too easy to play the Hunger Games/”from hunger” card, so let’s just say that with one endearingly goofy exception, host Josh Hutcherson was barely even a presence on one of the weaker SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE episodes of the season.  His–and the show’s–one notable bit was a post-Update piece in which he (mostly) lip-synched […]

  John Ridley’s ABC anthology series AMERICAN CRIME has always worn its sackcloth and ashes in plain sight, but Season 3 was especially brutal.  It was eight hours of unceasing human misery, enough to make the insides curdle of even the most earnest devotee of serious TV drama.  Understandably, viewers fled, pushing the show’s ratings […]

  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 […]

  STATE OF AFFAIRS ended its season tonight with a cliffhanger that will almost certainly remain unresolved, although one might speculate whether the mysterious airstrike that was heading toward Charleston Tucker (Katherine Heigl) in Afghanistan might have been sent not by Victor Gantry (Adam Arkin), the perfidious head of a paramilitary conglomerate or President Constance […]

  MAJOR CRIMES has been doing for TNT what it was created to do–that is, fill the hole left by the departure of the network’s long-running hit The Closer–and it’s earned the Season 2 renewal it’s already received.  Putting aside a bump for last night’s season finale, it’s been getting around a 0.7 rating in […]