FRANKLIN & BASH made a few cosmetic changes for its third summer on TNT, but nothing to disrupt the show’s basic air of genial dishevelment.  The most high-profile move was bringing in Heather Locklear as new senior partner Rachel King in the show’s law firm of Infeld Daniels King, although once it had her, […]

  Graham Yost has done an exceptionally smart job of expanding upon Elmore Leonard’s original fiction and showrunning FX’s JUSTIFIED over the past five years, and he knows, as the song says, when to fold em.  There was little doubt that Justified lost some of the spring in its step in this 5th season, and […]

  HART OF DIXIE barely survived the hunger games known as network scheduling season this year–it won’t be back until midseason, with an abbreviated (and probably final) set of episodes, and even then only so it can hit the 4-season mark that increases syndication prices.  The show’s ratings were passable at best when it aired […]

  The season finale (if it’s lucky) of TNT’s mediocre MURDER IN THE FIRST was rather sad, pallid proof that the powerhouse writer/producer Steven Bochco has been outstripped by the genre he helped invent, the serialized adult crime drama.  Murder In the First tried, sometimes painfully, to be newfangled, throwing in the latest in basic […]

  Tonight’s Season 2 finale of SLEEPY HOLLOW conspicuously concluded in a way that could also serve as a series finale, a distinct possibility because this underwhelming season has left the series with ratings down 40% from last year’s heyday (and less than half of its original hit premiere).  The finale turned out to be […]

  One of NBC’s many puzzling decisions this year was the choice to hand over its most important timeslot for launching dramas, the post-The Voice hour on Mondays, to the merely serviceable summer medical soap THE NIGHT SHIFT.  The series had done well enough against weak off-season competition, but there was nothing to suggest that it […]

  Although it regrouped somewhat in its last few episodes, Season 7 of THE VAMPIRE DIARIES was mostly an awkward and ungainly one.  Some readjustment was foreseeable after leading lady Nina Dobrev decided not to return, but by the end of Season 6, series co-creator Julie Plec and showrunner Caroline Dries seemed to have a […]

  The fourth and final season of Ray McKinnon’s Sundance series RECTIFY, perhaps the most universally acclaimed television program of the post-Sopranos era, was its most conventional.  There were few surreal stretches of memory and fantasy, the plot for the most part moved forward straightforwardly, and there were even bits of humor along the way, […]