Although it’s part of the CW/Greg Berlanti DC Comics assembly line, BLACK LIGHTNING, created by Salim Akil, has been strikingly different from its comrades.  So far, it hasn’t noticeably been part of the shared universe formed by Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow, aside from its invocation of “meta-humans” to describe those […]

  THE WHISPERS never made much sense, and that went triple for tonight’s finale.  On a macro level, it was probably unwise to end the season with a cliffhanger, since reports are that although the ratings were no worse than middling, ABC had let the cast options lapse when it postponed the show to summer, […]

  Professional sports are so central to American culture, and so particularly critical to the television business, that it’s surprising the area had been largely ignored as the locale of a series until USA’s NECESSARY ROUGHNESS debuted.  Of course, since Roughness is a USA show, it’s mostly been content with superficial light drama, without any […]

    There’s no half-hour on network television more consistently accomplished than MODERN FAMILY.  The show may not reach for the demented highs of a Community (at least, you know, the old Community), 30 Rock or Happy Endings–it traffics instead in a heightened but very relatable emotional reality, and does so, virtually every week, with […]

The title of MAD MEN‘s Season 5 finale was “The Phantom,” and as is almost always the case with Matthew Weiner’s opus, it had several meanings.  (Weiner shared credit for the finale’s script with Jonathan Igla, and directed the episode himself.)  Most specifically, the phantom was that of Adam Whitman, Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) brother, […]

  So the rumors were true, and the title of HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER‘s Season 8 finale, “Something New,” meant what it sounded like it might mean, and the CBS promos weren’t lying or misleading:  in the final shot of the episode, we finally really actually saw the woman who next season will–unless this is […]

  Throughout its third season, reactions to GIRLS seemed to depend to a large extent on the particular vision of the series that viewers had.  Season 3 of Lena Dunham’s show was notably less conceptual and experimental than Season 2 had been, with its standalone episodes, abrupt shifts in tone and focus, sexual frankness unusual […]

  Well, at least human heroine Emery (Aimee Teegarden) and alien hero Roman (Matt Lanter) got to have sex before STAR-CROSSED came to its abbreviated end.  The series was among those to discover in the last few days that its season finale was actually its ultimate end, so its cliffhangers will never be resolved, and […]