In recent years, Cameron Crowe has had trouble keeping his scripts coherent even when they only have to last 2 hours.  It probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise that giving him 10 hours to play with was asking for trouble, and much of his Showtime series ROADIES has been unfocused and self-indulgent, a […]

  After 5 seasons, 2 of them exclusively on DirecTV, DAMAGES and its saga of dueling attorneys Patty Hewes (Glenn Close) and Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) came to its close this week, mostly with a whimper.  There were no last minute shockeroos (Ellen wasn’t Patty’s long-lost daughter), just a final renunciation of Patty and all […]

  HUMANS packed more punch than its compendium of post-Blade Runner tropes initially suggested, but those strengths weren’t altogether reflected in tonight’s season finale.  At its best, Humans told the story of two troubled families, one human and one a group of illicitly sentient “synths,” and followed the members of each, through the course of […]

  It would have been impossible for the Season 2 finale of THE GOOD PLACE to match the gut-punch of Season 1’s climactic twist, partly because until it happened, we hadn’t even known to look for one.  The Good Place was a broadcast network sitcom, albeit a whimsical one, and its creator Michael Schur, while […]

  The remarkable thing is that GLEE was ever a giant mainstream hit in the first place.  When the books are closed on Kevin Reilly’s reign at FOX, great credit will be due to him for daring to go all in on such a strange, lovable, inconsistent mutant of a show, simultaneously a serious, sentimental […]

  Something nagged at the first two seasons of CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND, and it’s right there in the title.  Rebecca Bunch (series co-creator Rachel Bloom) was lovable and hilarious, but she was also, well, unhinged.  Bloom and co-creator Aline Brosh McKenna largely played Rebecca’s manipulations and stalking, and the damage she did to other people’s lives […]

  CROSSBONES, despite some hoopla when it was first announced, turned out to be a series hardly anyone wanted to watch.  Adjusting for the fact that Starz is only in 1/3 of US households, even that network’s Black Sails was ahead in the year’s piratical sweepstakes, despite Crossbones airing on NBC and featuring the series […]

  MADAM SECRETARY quietly had one of the most interesting paths of recent broadcast network dramas.  Airing of all places on CBS, it was a frankly political series that began its run in 2014 and ended 5 years later, bridging two entirely different eras of real-life US politics.  The show’s own center-left policies on social […]