Even after a full season of RIVERDALE, it’s not entirely clear what the show is trying to accomplish.  The high-concept premise is clear enough:  take the fresh-faced characters from the Archie comics world, and set them loose in a dark, sexualized YA soap.  But beyond that, series creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (who’s also been involved […]

  No one can say THE CATCH didn’t try.  Today’s cancellation announcement concluded two seasons of seemingly constant adjustment and revision (probably attributable in part to ABC’s commitment to non-writing Executive Producer Shonda Rhimes), starting with a pilot that was largely junked and partly recast, and continuing with a change in showrunners and many tweaks […]

  The lesson of the 2d season of Showtime’s BILLIONS is that a show doesn’t have to dramatically reboot itself in order to improve.  Billions Season 2 had the same premise and core characters as Season 1:  hedge fund billionaire Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) and US Attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) remained ruthless adversaries, each […]

  John Ridley’s ABC anthology series AMERICAN CRIME has always worn its sackcloth and ashes in plain sight, but Season 3 was especially brutal.  It was eight hours of unceasing human misery, enough to make the insides curdle of even the most earnest devotee of serious TV drama.  Understandably, viewers fled, pushing the show’s ratings […]

  Although Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin are still present to provide a continuing center of gravity, the HOMELAND that concluded its sixth season tonight is almost unrecognizable from the one that premiered in 2011.  That series was a dazzling mix of doomed romance and psychological spy thriller, about a bipolar CIA agent who couldn’t […]

  THE WALKING DEAD is in danger of becoming TV’s version of The Phantom Menace: a gigantic hit that no one really likes.  The ratings, while still massive, were significantly down in Season 7, which premiered with the instantly-infamous episode that introduced villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who promptly clubbed two cast regulars to death […]

  BIG LITTLE LIES was a bait and switch of the highest order.  The show was marketed as a murder mystery, and the fragmentary flashforwards early on confirmed the idea that this was where the story was headed.  But the killing itself didn’t actually occur until the last 15 minutes of the 7th and final […]

  For a while there, it seemed as though the finale of GRIMM was on a crusade to make sure the show could never be rebooted, massacring almost the entire regular cast one by one, which in an age where IP is more important than anything else would have been a fairly brave move.  But […]