The second season of Starz’s OUTLANDER was often disconcerting for a viewer unfamiliar with Diana Gabaldon’s bestselling novels.  That may be one reason why the series, embraced by Starz (along with the hit Power) as one of its signature properties, and gifted with a 2-season renewal order, didn’t fare particularly well in the ratings […]

  This was the first season of GAME OF THRONES A.N. (Ahead of the Novels), and we can’t know at this point how much series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were informed by what they know about the work novelist George R. R. Martin hasn’t yet published.  But Martin will be hard-pressed to come […]

  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 […]

  Effective showrunners learn from their mistakes, and the 4th and, as we now know, penultimate season of BBCAmerica’s ORPHAN BLACK was altogether more satisfying than Season 3.  Creator/showrunners Graeme Manson and John Fawcett had gotten ambitious in all the wrong ways last year, creating a line of male “Castor” clones (all played by Ari […]

  THE AMERICANS isn’t a show that indulges in many meta moments, but late in this Season 4 it gave one to Matthew Beeman (Daniel Flaherty), son of FBI agent Stan (Noah Emmerich), in one of his unwitting conversations with neighbor and incipient romantic interest Paige Jennings (Holly Taylor), the daughter of deep-cover Soviet spies […]

  Despite the fact that the producers didn’t know if the Season 4 finale of NASHVILLE would be the end of the series when it was written (and lead studio Lionsgate, in fact, is still trying to sell the show to another network or platform, proposing a Season 5 writers room that would be run […]

  ARROW had a somewhat unsuper fourth season.  That was partly due to its villain:  Damien Darhk, however enthusiastically played by Neal McDonough, was an all-smirk-all-the-time Big Bad in dapper suits, a Bond-ish villain whose added dimension of magic was very sub-Darth Vader, with much flicking of the wrist to send foes flying into nearby […]

  GOTHAM did a better job of navigating its clog of characters in its second season.  Bruno Heller’s mash-up of Batman origin story, the Dark Knight trilogy, 1930s-style cop drama, and all-around comic book freak-show still had at least one plotline too many–truthfully, no one would miss its Riddler, Edward Nygma (Cory Michael Smith), if […]