Hardly anyone who wasn’t earning a paycheck from Kevin Williamson’s THE FOLLOWING will miss it.  It was as close as any network series has ever come to torture porn, with at least one or two innocents being slaughtered or at least terrorized every week, and without the aesthetic artistry of Hannibal to justify its […]

MURDER IN THE FIRST:  Monday 10PM on TNT Unloved by most critics and viewers, MURDER IN THE FIRST was lucky to have survived to a second season on TNT.  The return came with a fair amount of revamping, in the apparent hope that the series would be more of a companion piece with its lead-in Major […]

In its second season, John Logan’s gothic horror mash-up PENNY DREADFUL remained an elaborate conceit that pays off only from time to time.  Logan has gathered together a host of characters for his saga.  Some hail from classics of the genre:  Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), his Monster (Rory Kinnear), and the latter’s intended Bride (Billie […]

  SUPERSTORE:  Monday 8PM (starting January 4) on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… If a weak form of The Office‘s DNA seems to flow through NBC’s new sitcom SUPERSTORE, which previewed tonight before beginning its regular run on January 4, it’s not a coincidence:  the series was created by Justin Spitzer, a writer/producer […]

  PERSON OF INTEREST was CBS’s most ambitious and elegantly constructed procedural, and its ratings in other circumstances would have been decent enough to keep it on the air beyond a 4 1/2-season run.  But the TV business changed around it, and marginal ratings can no longer sustain expensive series that don’t permit their networks […]

  The fourth and final season of Ray McKinnon’s Sundance series RECTIFY, perhaps the most universally acclaimed television program of the post-Sopranos era, was its most conventional.  There were few surreal stretches of memory and fantasy, the plot for the most part moved forward straightforwardly, and there were even bits of humor along the way, […]

  Vampires may live forever, but TV shows don’t, and tonight the coffin closed on THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, the pre-superhero champion of the then-fledgling CW network when it debuted 8 years ago.  In truth, the close of business was a season or two past due:  not only were the ratings way down from their peak, […]

  MR. MERCEDES:  Wednesday 8PM on Audience Network (DirecTV) – DVR Alert It’s been quite a week for the splintering of television.  FX announced that it, like AMC, would launch a pay version of its service, allowing viewers on certain platforms to watch its shows without commercials for a monthly fee.  Then Disney dropped a […]