As tonight’s series finale of THE NEWSROOM served to remind us, Aaron Sorkin isn’t one to shy away from sentiment, and one would like to think that on some level he was touched by how many of us celebrated the news that his series was going to return for a delayed third season.  Even […]

  This season, HAVEN delved deeply into its own mythology, with mixed results.  Haven‘s own situation is unclear, existentially speaking:  it received a super-sized 26-episode order from Syfy earlier this year, with 13 episodes to air in 2014 and the rest at some as-yet undetermined date next year that could end up being in the […]

  As zombie shows go, Z NATION exists very far in the shadow of The Walking Dead in every way, from ratings to quality.  And yet Syfy’s good-humored rip-off can be seen as the show Walking Dead fans sometimes wish that blockbuster would be:  pulpier, faster and more singlemindedly splatterific, with little interest in existential […]

  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 […]

  BOARDWALK EMPIRE was, from its start, HBO at its best and most frustrating.  The show was sumptuously produced, on a scale that no other small-screen purveyor of content could match, famously including the recreation of a chunk of the 1920’s-era Atlantic City boardwalk.  Its ambitious were enormous, ranging eventually through four decades and at […]

  The ratings dipped badly for FRANKLIN & BASH in its 4th season, and if it stays on TNT’s air, it will likely be because the network has too many other problems (Dallas is already gone, Falling Skies is entering its final season, and neither Murder In the First nor Legends launched well) to cancel […]

  Audiences of TV drama have the luxury these days of being spoiled, and that raises the question:  what separates a great series from one that’s merely very good?  WGN America’s MANHATTAN had an original, intriguing premise and setting, exploring the scientific and personal tensions amid the creation of the world’s first atomic bomb at […]

  One of the ways that, even at a time overwhelmed with quality TV drama, Cinemax’s THE KNICK has proven itself extraordinary has been in its subversion of the accepted TV template.  Conventional wisdom has had it that the auteurs of television are its writer/producers, with the directors as skilled craftspeople devoted to realizing the […]