Despite all the blood-drinkers, vengeful ghosts and homicidal maniacs on hand, the most frightening aspect of AMERICAN HORROR STORY: HOTEL may have been the sight of Lady Gaga picking up a Golden Globe for her blank imitation of a performance as the hotel’s Catherine-Deneuve-in-The Hunger-like mannequin murderess.  (Gaga, it turns out, is sadly Madonna-like […]

  Starz cut its losses quickly on FLESH AND BONE, which had been ordered as the first season of a continuing series, but was declared to be a finite miniseries before it had even started airing.  That late shift made tonight’s finale even more awkward and unsatisfying than it might have been, but Moira Walley-Beckett’s […]

  If HOMELAND hadn’t once been so good, it wouldn’t be so painful now to see what it’s become.  Season 5 was by no means terrible:  it was crisply produced, Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin remain enviable leads, and the plotting was no sillier than that of many other TV action-adventures, which could also have […]

  The first season of AMC’s INTO THE BADLANDS felt entirely predigested.  It was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by way of Game of Thrones by way of every post-apocalyptic Chosen One fantasy you’ve ever seen.  The Matrix was in the mix, and so was Star Wars, and Mad Max, and The Wizard of Oz, and […]

  In its second season, MTV’s FINDING CARTER made a disappointingly dim argument for sustaining itself beyond its initial premise.  The series remains well-acted, and it has its emotionally pursuasive moments, but its season was swallowed up by plot contrivances and melodrama. Melodrama has always been part of Finding Carter‘s DNA.  It began with the […]

  Noah Hawley handily retained his status as the Third Coen Brother with a second masterful season of FARGO.  This go-round may have been even more ambitious than the first:  not only did Hawley once again capture the spirit of the original film, but this time he added 1979-era period detail and an allegory of […]

  Nobody saw Season 2 of YOU’RE THE WORST coming.  Season 1 of Stephen Falk’s series had been high-risk enough, a rom-com that spat on the genre’s conventions while also quietly incorporating them, centered on a couple notable for their narcissism, self-destructiveness and general sense of delusion.  Falk, and his stars Aya Cash and Chris […]

  In an era when even network sitcoms often try to Say Something Meaningful, let’s take a moment to appreciate THE LEAGUE, which devoted 7 prosperous seasons to ingeniously and hilariously being nothing but rude.  Jeff Schaffer and Jackie Marcus Schaffer’s series gathered together a half-dozen expert comic minds (Mark Duplass, Katie Aselton, Nick Kroll, […]