ABC’s AMERICAN CRIME is Serious and Important, but how good is it?  John Ridley’s series takes on the biggest topics–all of them, it seems–from race to class to sexual orientation to school violence and the loss of privacy in the internet age, and not even Oscar-bait films wear a mantle of unrelieved misery quite […]

  Many remarkable things have happened in the world of television over the past few years, but none may be odder than the fact that a story about the 16th century Mary, Queen of Scots ran on network TV for four seasons.  Even more, while REIGN initially squeezed into the CW demographic by concentrating on […]

> Even though the Oscar race has had clear favorites in THE DESCENDANTS, THE ARTIST and THE HELP since last fall, the first 2 haven’t sparked any huge enthusiasm among the general public, where after almost 2 months, Descendants has yet to gross $50M, and Artist, which Harvey Weinstein hasn’t dared put into general release, […]

  GREY’S ANATOMY doesn’t get much attention these days, not even compared to its creator Shonda Rhimes’s shinier Scandal—Grey’s is just a soap–but after 10 years, it still knows how to pull off a big episode.  The fall finale, written by Co-Executive Producer William Harper and directed by Tony Phelan, effectively kicked off a long […]

  The Season 2 finale of Agents of SHIELD was the show trying its very, very hardest–and still not hitting the mark.  A great deal of work has gone into rescuing Agents since it plummeted from the heights of its enormous hype-driven premiere in Fall 2013, and it’s certainly a better series now than it […]

  One of the ways the emergence of Netflix as an important programming platform has changed the way we regard “television” is in its obliteration of the concept of a series “season” as something that takes place over an extended time.  When Netflix releases a full batch of episodes all at once, it’s more akin […]

  BEAUTY & THE BEAST:  Monday 9PM on CW Referring to any CW series as a “bubble show” is sort of a misnomer, because with the exceptions of The Vampire Diaries, Arrow and Supernatural, everything the network airs is pretty much on the bubble.  Even though BEAUTY & THE BEAST seemed to have hit something […]

  Although it’s part of the CW/Greg Berlanti DC Comics assembly line, BLACK LIGHTNING, created by Salim Akil, has been strikingly different from its comrades.  So far, it hasn’t noticeably been part of the shared universe formed by Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow, aside from its invocation of “meta-humans” to describe those […]