Throughout its first season, COPPER has almost never been as vivid as it seemed like it should be.  The show’s premise and auspices were promising:  the lead producers were Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, who apart from their illustrious solo credits, had combined as a team for the seminal cop show Homicide:  Life On […]

  Rob Thomas and Dianne Ruggiero-Wright’s CW series IZOMBIE is a show that would benefit from a season order shorter than the 19 hours it had to deliver this year–and with its less than stellar ratings, that might be exactly what it gets next season.  As it was, this season was overextended, with too many […]

  The second season of Lena Dunham’s GIRLS has been as polarizing as anything on TV since the conclusion of Lost; with its relatively low viewership, it’s sometimes felt as though literally every person who watches the show has been writing about it.  The season finale, written by Dunham with fellow Executive Producer Judd Apatow […]

  One of the many ways in which broadcast networks have started to resemble their cable counterparts is in the structure of a series season.  For years, cable has aired its shows, especially serialized series, in clearly-defined, repeat-free mini-seasons, with different programming in those slots during hiatus periods, rather than following the historical broadcast model […]

  There was no way BONES could top its season finale from last year, when the show finally addressed its eternal Will They Or Won’t They? about Dr. Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and FBI Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) by cleverly disclosing that they already had, and in fact that Brennan was pregnant with Booth’s […]

> HBO can afford to keep little-watched shows like In Treatment and Treme around, because they’re not selling advertising–they’re selling a brand.  People who will only watch True Blood and Entourage feel better about being subscribers when they know they’ve got access to excellence at other hours too.  TNT, though, needs eyeballs that sponsors will […]

  For scripted network shows, a summer season is like a dog year, far more weighty than the regular kind.  The mortality rate is so high that just getting a renewal is a considerable feat, and a show like Rookie Blue, extended to a 5th season, might as well be Meet the Press.  So THE […]

  Magic was one ingredient that MAGIC CITY lacked, and so despite its not-insubstantial virtues, tonight’s Season 2 finale also marked its finish as a series.  The low-rated show was a passion project of its creator Mitch Glazer, built around his own childhood memories about mostly Jewish gangsters in the lavish Miami Beach hotels of […]