TYRANT went all the way back to the source for its main plotline this season, giving Bassam Al-Fayeed (Adam Rayner) a saga so Moses-like that he might as well have witnessed a burning bush along the way.  Bassam was sentenced to death for treason by his brother Jamal (Ashraf Barhom), ruler of a Middle […]

> Last night, of course, was not intended to be the end of LUCK.  The enormously high-profile show, created by David Milch and with production supervised by pilot director Michael Mann, and fearuring a cast headed by Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte, had already been renewed for a second season, with one of those instant […]

  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 […]

Tonight’s season finale of Lifetime’s very softcore (so soft it’s basically liquid) prostitution hit THE CLIENT LIST was more guilty than pleasure.  The hour, written by Producer Barbara Nance (from a story by Nance and star Jennifer Love Hewitt) and directed by Hewitt herself, was actually quite bewildering.  After last week’s climactic bombshell of Riley’s […]

  The first season of Freeform’s Marvel series CLOAK & DAGGER was from the measured pace school of serialized TV drama.  Joe Pokaski’s saga was essentially 10 hours of origin story, tracing Tandy Bowen (Olivia Holt) and Tyrone Johnson (Aubrey Joseph) from teen outcasts to budding superheroes, with only scattered uses of their powers until […]

VEEP has no particular interest in going anyplace, so its season finale tonight was more or less the same as any other episode.  This has made for a fun, but somewhat repetitive, ride over the show’s initial 8-episode season.  Every week Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) fails to accomplish anything at all, usually drilling […]

  When FX’s ATLANTA began its 2nd season at the beginning of March, it seemed like a big enough deal to note that with the departures of Louis C.K. and Ryan Murphy (for very different reasons), Atlanta‘s creator Donald Glover had ascended to being the emblematic creative face of the network.  But now, a bit […]

  Great TV dramas tend to arrive on our screens fully-formed.  (The same isn’t true of comedies, which sometimes take an entire season to find their voices.)  By the end of the first hours of The Sopranos, Mad Men, Deadwood, The West Wing, The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Shield, Lost–it was clear that we were […]