> It’s not all that unusual for a situation comedy to change directions in the midst of its initial season and emerge a different, and better, show:  The Office and Parks & Recreation both took that journey (the US Office was trying too hard at first to ape the Ricky Gervais original, and Parks was […]

  I speak–clearly–not as a fan:  ENLIGHTENED was less unbearable in its second season than it was in its first. The show does have its fans, meager in number (fewer than 300,000 viewers watched the initial airings of recent episodes, and only around 100,000 of those were under 50–no doubt those numbers go up when […]

  The all-knowing Machine at the heart of PERSON OF INTEREST turned positively chatty in last night’s Season 2 finale, providing real-time advice and assistance via phone and text services to just about anyone who asked it nicely.  (If you didn’t care for numbers, it would help you out via musical tones.)   The Machine, […]

  The second half of REVOLUTION‘s season tried to be interesting, God knows.  The initial run of episodes after the pilot mostly seemed to consist of our heroes trudging through forests, on the trail of militia-captured teen Danny Matheson, brother of heroine Charlie (Tracy Spiridakos) and nephew of Miles (Billy Burke).  But when Revolution returned […]

  ABC, which passed on DEVIOUS MAIDS and allowed it to be picked up by corporate sibling Lifetime, is probably lucky the cable network only programs the show during the summer off-season.  Maids, which of course is the brainchild of Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry, has been zeroing in on what was once the Housewives […]

  By the time it reaches four seasons on the air, even a first-rate show can find it difficult to sustain its initial burst of energy and creativity, and the same holds true on the other side of the Atlantic as well, as this year’s helping of Julian Fellowes’ DOWNTON ABBEY confirmed.  The show was […]

  With a full season of experience and audience feedback under its belt, it’s not unusual for a TV series to improve in its second season.  What’s considerably less typical is for the reverse to happen.  Yet whether due to the addition of new showrunner Brad Kern (although series creators Sherri Cooper and Jennifer Levin […]

  As tonight’s series finale of THE NEWSROOM served to remind us, Aaron Sorkin isn’t one to shy away from sentiment, and one would like to think that on some level he was touched by how many of us celebrated the news that his series was going to return for a delayed third season.  Even […]