Something nagged at the first two seasons of CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND, and it’s right there in the title.  Rebecca Bunch (series co-creator Rachel Bloom) was lovable and hilarious, but she was also, well, unhinged.  Bloom and co-creator Aline Brosh McKenna largely played Rebecca’s manipulations and stalking, and the damage she did to other people’s lives […]

  There was never a real-life game of thrones behind the scenes at GAME OF THRONES, and perhaps there should have been.  After six brilliant years adapting George R. R. Martin’s novels to television, series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss found themselves out of books and without a clear path to Martin’s ending.  (Reportedly, […]

    This year, the original Las Vegas-set CSI, about to begin its 12th season on the air, faced not one but two crossroads.  A couple of years earlier, the show’s original star William L. Petersen had decided a decade was enough, and decided not to renew his contract.  Conventional wisdom has it that an […]

    HATFIELDS & MCCOYS, already a blockbuster hit, kept its best and most compelling hours for last.  Although the conclusion of the 6-hour tale, directed throughout by Kevin Reynolds and with this installment written by Ted Mann and Ronald Parker, has its share of tense confrontations and large-scale action, it dwells more on the […]

Lena Dunham’s GIRLS has been all over the place this season, so it made sense that its season finale would come out of nowhere.   We knew last week that when Jessa (Jemima Kirke) got a talking-to from former employer Katherine (Kathryn Hahn) about growing up, it was making an impression–but who would have thought that […]

  ABC’s NASHVILLE has reached the midpoint of its season as one of the better dramas on network television, and also one of the more frustrating.  Particularly galling is that it seems to falter worst at the things other, less interesting shows do with much less effort. Plotting, for example.  Within the show’s mostly parallel […]

  As hard as it is to create a compelling, successful television series, it’s much harder to keep one going year after year, after cast changes and writer changes and timeslot changes and network management changes and all the other events that make a showrunner’s life a nonstop ulcer.  (Revenge, for one, barely managed to […]

  It’s a continuing paradox that a show could have as many colorful characters, so terrific a cast, as much plot and incident and history (not to mention sex and violence) and visual style as BOARDWALK EMPIRE does and yet so often feel like homework.  It’s a pulpy series that sometimes lets its morose sense […]