THE MINDY PROJECT:  Tuesday 9:30PM on FOX After an uneven season and a half that seemed to slide from one genre and tone to the next on a nearly weekly basis (it’s a rom-com!  it’s a workplace comedy!), leaving supporting cast members in its wake, THE MINDY PROJECT took a huge leap forward with […]

  FX’s THE AMERICANS has been, by a substantial margin, the best new show of this season.  And if tonight’s season finale was slightly less ambitious than we might have hoped in terms of delivering the shocking twists or cliffhangers that we now expect from our top serialized series, it still delivered an expert mix […]

  THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC Based on everything we know about THE WALKING DEAD, it seemed a safe assumption after the Season 4 finale that we’d be spending a large chunk of Season 5 trapped with our heroes at Terminus, the supposed sanctuary they’d spent most of the season seeking that turned […]

  It helps if you think of BUNHEADS as a CG special effects spectacle, except in this case the CG special effects and spectacle are all in the sound of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s dialogue.  Either you love herrapid-fire, endlessly witty repartee or you find it stilted and artificial; if you’re a naysayer, you should probably find another show […]

  Has any great television series ever had the protracted, agonizing death of THE OFFICE?  We’re used to shows that stay on the air past their prime, and to those with disappointing or even disastrous finale episodes (the technical term for the latter is Episodus Lostus).  But watching The Office for the past two seasons […]

  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, […]

  The thing to remember, when charting the collapse of THE OFFICE, is that the producers weren’t taken by surprise.  Steve Carell made it clear early last season that he wouldn’t be returning, and the show had months to plan for his departure and The Office 2.0.  The abject failure that resulted is a remarkable […]

  Greg Garcia has made a successful niche for himself on network television as poet of the lower-middle-class, small-town, gently surrealist sitcom, first with My Name Is Earl and now with RAISING HOPE.  The only problem with Garcia’s type of show is that the constant requirement for more inventively conceptual, eccentric storylines can lead to […]