A return visit to SIRENS after having seen its initial episodes revealed that the series, produced and co-created (with Bob Fisher) for US television by Denis Leary, had become even more like Rescue Me without fires, now including that show’s Lenny Clarke and John Scurti recurring as the fathers of the two main characters.  […]

  GLEE went out with dignity–and given that this was Glee, that was far from a sure thing.  Over its 6 years (at least 2 more than wisdom would have allowed), Glee made so many disastrous turns into overblown silliness, meanness (sometimes outright cruelty), inconsistency, repetition and camp that more than anything else, tonight’s series finale […]

> The title “Best Drama On Network Television” used to mean a lot more than it does these days (what’s the competition?  Parenthood has lovely moments but also its share of contrivances; Fringe and The Vampire Diaries are terrific niche shows), but for whatever it’s still worth, THE GOOD WIFE continues to own the crown.   […]

  It’s impossible to discuss the season finale of NURSE JACKIE–or, as it turns out, its entire fifth season–without talking about its final minute, so I’ll skip to the next paragraph to ward off anyone who unwisely wandered into the SPOILER territory of a season finale review. Here we are.  The question is whether its […]

  The second season of BATES MOTEL has been two largely separate series, and one of them is well worth watching.  That’s the one about teenaged Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore), the sensitive and high-strung taxidermy enthusiast who is in the process of becoming a serial killer of women, and his relationship with his intemperate, unstable, […]

  The fourth (and as it turns out penultimate) season of AMC’s HELL ON WHEELS was its most conventional and choppily focused.  Under showrunner John Wirth (the show’s 3rd in that post), the neo-western has abandoned its original concept of post-Civil War protagonist Cullen Bohannan (Anson Mount) as a man of murderous vengeance and turned […]

  From the viewpoint of its newly-concluded third season, the first 2 years of Starz’s BLACK SAILS feel like a very long and somewhat misguided prologue to where the series is now.  With Michael Bay as its leading Executive Producer, Black Sails was presented as a yarn of 18th century sea piracy, built around the […]

  DESIGNATED SURVIVOR has been running through showrunners like breath mints (a fourth is scheduled to join the show for Season 2, and reportedly every script makes its way through star/executive producer Kiefer Sutherland as well), so it’s not much of a surprise that the tone and even the genre of the show has wobbled […]