After last week’s tumultuous, spectacular battle of Blackpool, tonight’s Season 2 finale of GAME OF THRONES was, necessarily, somewhat lower-key.  It served more as a coda, and as a transition to Season 3 (considering that there was no attempt at closure in any of the stories, it’s a good thing that […]

  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 […]

  After 5 seasons of declining success, if ONCE UPON A TIME were less synergistic for Disney/ABC (the movie studio used tonight’s 2-hour season premiere to showcase summer spectacles Alice Through The Looking Glass and The BFG), and if the rest of ABC’s non-Shonda Rhimes dramas were less mired in low ratings, series creators Edward […]

  DEVIOUS MAIDS:  Sunday 10PM on Lifetime Previously… on DEVIOUS MAIDS:  A quintet of maids toil for the vapid, selfish, and sometimes downright evil well-to-do of Beverly Hills.  Carmen (Roselyn Sanchez) hopes contact with her music-star boss will jump-start her own singing career.  Zoila (Judy Reyes) is trying to keep her daughter Valentina (Edy Ganem) […]

  Every year the Oscars flail around searching for a host, a theme, a tone–anything to make its annual 4 hours of primetime cohere instead of congeal–and every year THE TONY AWARDS make it look relatively easy.  This wasn’t a great year for Broadway–swamped with family- and tourist-friendly musical extravaganzas and star vehicles, its serious […]

  HELL ON WHEELS:  Saturday 9PM on AMC HELL ON WHEELS has found a cozy spot for itself on Saturday nights, where the older audience available for TV-watching has given it comfortable total viewer numbers, if less impressive 18-49s.  (AMC will be running reruns of Turn after this season’s Hell episodes, which may suggest where […]

> Disclaimer:  Network pilots now in circulation are not necessarily in the form that will air in the Fall.  Pilots are often reedited and rescored, and in some cases even recast or reshot.  So these critiques shouldn’t be taken as full reviews, but rather as a guide to the general style and content of the […]

  SUITS is USA Network’s last remaining scripted hit, yet it finds itself in a bind:  with tonight’s midpoint of Season 4, it’s taken its original premise–Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) having been hired as a law firm associate by partner Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), even though Harvey knew that Mike had never attended law […]