IZOMBIE:  Tuesday 9PM on CW Previously… on IZOMBIE:  Liv Moore (Rose McIver) was a go-getting Seattle hospital resident when she suffered an untimely death at a party on a boat, her arm slashed by a mysterious figure.  That hasn’t gotten her down, though:  an unusually sentient zombie, she’s taken a job at a morgue, […]

ONE BIG HAPPY:  Tuesday 9:30PM on NBC Previously… on ONE BIG HAPPY:  Luke (Nick Zano) and lesbian best buddy Lizzy (Elisha Cuthbert) have followed through on their vow to try and have a baby together if neither is with anyone else by age 30.  But the timing is off:  Lizzy finds out she’s pregnant just […]

  There’s a reason why serialized dramas usually have some sort of “franchise” powering them:  a mystery to be solved, patients to be cured, a quest to be undertaken, etc.  Generating compelling stories on a weekly basis out of something like ordinary life can become awfully difficult, and a series can quickly turn mundane.  THE […]

  Not to be cynical, but no show on TV could have an easier time coming up with a season-ending cliffhanger than CHASING LIFE, a YA soap whose heroine is battling leukemia.  For most of the back half of the series’ first season, April’s (Italia Ricci) cancer had been in remission, which left the show […]

  In its 4th season, the geist of GIRLS no longer seemed to be hitting the zeit the way it used to.  Ratings were down, and so was the sense of buzz.  Some of that was simply the fact that shows of the moment don’t stay that way forever, and HBO didn’t help by giving […]

  THE ROYALS:  Sunday 10PM on E! Previously… on THE ROYALS:  The (fictional) British monarchy is a mess.  The Prince of Wales has died in mysterious circumstances, and the next in line to the crown is now his brother Prince Liam (William Moseley), who’s falling for Ophelia (Merritt Patterson), the raised-in-America commoner daughter of the […]

  GLEE went out with dignity–and given that this was Glee, that was far from a sure thing.  Over its 6 years (at least 2 more than wisdom would have allowed), Glee made so many disastrous turns into overblown silliness, meanness (sometimes outright cruelty), inconsistency, repetition and camp that more than anything else, tonight’s series finale […]

IZOMBIE:  Tuesday 9PM on CW – Potential DVR Alert Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright’s clever IZOMBIE (based on a DC comic) brings back from the dead something very close to the premise of ABC’s lamented Pushing Daisies.  In that fantastical show, the hero had the magical ability to bring corpses back from the dead, but […]