Under new showrunner John Wirth, the third season of HELL ON WHEELS was on the whole uneven, and tonight’s season finale unfortunately wasn’t a very promising way for the bubble show to end its year. Wirth’s biggest change to Hell was to largely abandon the show’s original premise, which had Cullen Bohannan (Anson Mount) […]

  For Jay Pharoah and Kenan Thompson–but especially Pharoah–this week must have felt like alternate-universe SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, because with Kerry Washington as host, suddenly he was the show’s featured leading man, a situation he probably shouldn’t expect to see again anytime soon.  Washington herself was an enormously enthusiastic host, very funny (despite a certain […]

  It’s been an odd, spotty half-season for THE VAMPIRE DIARIES.  For one thing, it’s been more like two mini-seasons:  the story of all-powerful, unkillable vampire-witch-whatever Silas, which would have been expected to climax in the fall finale, abruptly ended 7 episodes into the season–which was too bad, because with Silas as its Stefanganger (Paul […]

  The Season 2 finale of TNT’s MAJOR CRIMES, intended to pay off the show’s one serialized storyline, about Rusty (Graham Patrick Martin), the teen ward of series protagonist LAPD Captain Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell) and witness to a murder committed by imprisoned serial killer and attorney Philip Stroh (who was originally introduced back in […]

  THE RED ROAD:  Thursday 9PM on Sundance Channel – If Nothing Else Is On… “Ponderousness” is odd branding for a cable network with fledgling original programming to embrace, but after Top of the Lake, Rectify, The Returned and the new THE RED ROAD, it’s pretty clear that Sundance Channel is very comfortable with its […]

  FAKING IT:  Tuesday 10:30PM on MTV FAKING IT is intended as the companion piece to MTV’s hit scripted comedy Awkward., which serves as its lead-in, but on the basis of its pilot, it has nothing like the original comic voice of Lauren Iungerich’s show (of course, now that Iungerich has stepped away from Awkward., […]

  The headlines have all been in PERSON OF INTEREST‘s favor this past season.  As stories of massive worldwide surveillance by the NSA and other agencies have continued to surface, what not so long ago looked like a CBS entry into sci-fi has taken on the feel of just slightly exaggerated reality.  The series itself […]

  CHASING LIFE:  Tuesday 9PM on ABCFamily – Change the Channel ABCFamily is launching all its summer shows over the next week or two, so it appears to be luck rather than careful planning that’s resulted in its new CHASING LIFE, about a lovely young woman diagnosed with cancer, just a few days after the […]