NASHVILLE doesn’t make more than a gesture these days toward having very much to say about the music industry, or the place of country music in American culture.  It’s simply a soap, and often an effective one; with this week’s renewal, it’s reached the promised land of a 4th season on the air, buffered […]

  The Season 2 finale of Agents of SHIELD was the show trying its very, very hardest–and still not hitting the mark.  A great deal of work has gone into rescuing Agents since it plummeted from the heights of its enormous hype-driven premiere in Fall 2013, and it’s certainly a better series now than it […]

  As we noted yesterday in writing about The Good Wife, churning out 22 hours per season is a tough challenge for any serialized network drama, especially one that concentrates on one central story, unlike, say the multiple plots of a show like Nashville.  The Originals would have fared better with a cable-sized 10 or […]

  Achieving the right tone is critical for any TV show, of course, but the task may be trickiest on JANE THE VIRGIN, with its mix of old-fashioned sentiment, broad comedy, melodramatic telenovela plotting and arch self-parody.  It’s quite an achievement of Jennie Snyder Urman, creator/showrunner of the US version of the show (who’d previously […]

  In its 6th season, THE GOOD WIFE continued to delightfully flout every depressing lesson the rest of network television tells us.  Under the remarkable stewardship of Robert and Michelle King, the series turns out seasons that are distinctive, moving, sharply funny, phenomenally intelligent and have an eye for the bigger moral and political picture, […]

  Season 4 of ONCE UPON A TIME was a rather misshapen one.  The Fall cycle was a tie-in to Disney’s blockbuster Frozen (creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz swore it was their idea and not a corporate mandate), and although it didn’t bring out the best in the series, it delivered in the ratings.  […]

  Like many visitors to the Hamptons, REVENGE stayed too long at the party, and what had once been an amusingly twisted soap eventually became repetitious and silly.  The series would have been better served as an American Horror Story/True Detective type anthology that told its story and rebooted the next season.  As it was, […]

  FX probably shouldn’t hold its breath for THE AMERICANS to become a wider popular success than it is. The series, for all its excellence, was more grim in its 3rd season than ever–the sun barely even seemed to shine on its distressed, and distressing, characters.  There was intense drama, to be sure, and outbursts of shocking violence […]