There’s a reason CBS is as successful as it is.  PERSON OF INTEREST is just a procedural–albeit one with an unusually complicated premise–but it mixes solid plotting, well-paced action and just enough character backstory to give it a little substance, and the result is an hour of television that works.   Person starts with […]

> RINGER could have been a hell of a movie. It happens sometimes with TV shows.  Remember Daybreak, featuring Taye Diggs as a cop who had to relive the same day over and over again, Groundhog Day style, until he could solve the mystery and save his girlfriend?  It stared out with a nifty pilot, […]

  Few television series have worked so hard to be unlikeable as BOSS.  There had been some thought, after its initial off-putting season, that when Starz replaced series creator Farhad Safinia with Dee Johnson as showrunner, the aim might have been to water down some of the show’s bile, but such was clearly not the […]

  As a series, Cinemax’s BANSHEE has been notable for the sheer knock-down, drag-out-edness of its action scenes.  One episode started with a bungled robbery which led to a chase that must have lasted 10 minutes, and when hero ex-con turned fake-sheriff of Banshee, PA Lucas Hood (Antony Starr) faced down an MMA fighter who […]

  There was a sequence late in the one and only season of VEGAS that suggested what the show could have been.  It wasn’t a big deal:  deputy sheriff Dixon Lamb (Taylor Handley) needed a favor from the entertainment director of one of the casinos (Enver Gjokaj), who’d only grant it if he got some […]

  Even though nothing particularly thrilling happened on this seventh season of ARMY WIVES, it was a crucial season for Lifetime’s veteran drama.  The show completed the reboot it had begun in Season 6, and assuming an 8th stanza on the way–which seems fairly likely–the only original Army Wife from the show that debuted in […]

  Despite an abundance of first-rate acting, RAY DONOVAN may have been the biggest disappointment of the summer.  Ann Biderman’s dark family drama didn’t succeed at any of the things it seemed to be trying to do, and never lived up to the promise of its pilot. The show’s major failure was in the relationship […]

  Is the dullness of HBO’s LOOKING a breakthrough or a flaw?  That’s the question that’s been following the series since its premiere two months ago, and it’s been argued both ways. From the start, Looking has been presented as a show about gay men that would break the mold, different from forebears like Will […]