ONCE UPON A TIME:  Sunday 8PM on ABC As everyone knows by now, Season 4 of ONCE UPON A TIME is aiming for a grand slam of corporate synergy, combining its Disney-owned network and Disney-owned TV series with Disney Animation’s biggest mega-buster in decades, the $1.3 Billion (and that’s just for ticket sales in […]

  THE ORIGINALS and its creator/showrunner Julie Plec have been fearless about plunging viewers of the New Orleans-set supernatural soap into a veritable bayou of mythology.  We’re half a season in, and already swamped by vampires, werewolves, vampire/werewolf hybrids, an impossible unborn hybrid baby, a teen super-witch, an assortment of garden-variety witches, and the occasional […]

  One of the ways that, even at a time overwhelmed with quality TV drama, Cinemax’s THE KNICK has proven itself extraordinary has been in its subversion of the accepted TV template.  Conventional wisdom has had it that the auteurs of television are its writer/producers, with the directors as skilled craftspeople devoted to realizing the […]

> Previously… on THE FIRM:  Mitch McDeere (Josh Lucas), having relocated with his family to the Canadian part of Washington DC, 10 years after the events in the book and movie, has associated his scrappy small practice with a new but equally evil big firm that’s particularly interested in him because of an accused murderer […]

> FX’s Elmore Leonard-inspired crime drama JUSTIFIED really hit its stride in its second season last year, and now it’s back, trying to build on that very solid success. WHERE WE LEFT OFF:  The redoubtable Mags Bennett (Emmy-winner Margo Martindale) has gone to her grave, and so has her corrupt sheriff son.  (Her other son, […]

  RAISING HOPE:  Friday 9PM on FOX With series creator Greg Garcia spending his time these days (God help him) at his new The Millers, there’s been a change of regime at RAISING HOPE, which had its belated Season 4 debut tonight with back-to-back episodes.  The new showrunner is Mike Mariano, who’s been with the […]

  WHISKEY CAVALIER:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC ABC capped Oscar Night with a bit of dessert, very much a trifle:  a “sneak preview” of WHISKEY CAVALIER, which will officially premiere on Wednesday night with the same episode.  The genre is Romantic Intrigue Lite, very much in the tradition of Charade, one of the classics of […]

The problem with making a show about someone dying of cancer is that no one really wants to watch a show about someone dying of cancer.  Viewers will roll along with the dark and disturbing, but by and large they draw the line at bleak and depressing.  So Walter White, on Breaking Bad, hasn’t had […]