Every year at about this time, Marvel faces a contradiction.  Even as it has a giant movie dominating multiplexes worldwide (this year, of course, it’s Captain America: Civil War, which is approaching the $1 billion mark), its TV business struggles.  Over the past few weeks, network cousin ABC has canceled hiatus series Agent Carter, […]

  The first season of CW’s musical-comedy CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND was by far the most daring and distinctive show on broadcast television, but a nagging question remained:  what could it do for an encore?  It wasn’t clear how long the story could follow Rebecca Bunch (series co-creator Rachel Bloom) in her stalking of one-time summer camp […]

  ORPHAN BLACK is destined to be remembered more for the showcase it gave to the astonishing Tatiana Maslany than for its own narrative, although of course one couldn’t have existed without the other.  Series creators Graeme Manson and John Fawcett deserve credit not just for their tricky concept of a biological thriller that featured […]

  Behind the scenes events threatened to overtake the narrative of THE AFFAIR this season.  Midway through the run, Showtime announced that next year’s Season 5 would be the series finale, making the current season something of a preface to the end.  It then developed that original lead actress Ruth Wilson had asked the producers […]

  Although both fairy-tale inspired dramas that were introduced to network TV last fall have been renewed for 2d seasons, there’s no comparison in quality between Once Upon A Time and GRIMM.  Once has created a captivating, complex narrative of parallel universes and the loves and hates that reach across them, while Grimm is far […]

> Some shows find their creative voices during the course of their first season–but even after a super-sized order of 24 episodes that ended last night, UP ALL NIGHT is still floundering. On paper, Up All Night seemed to have everything going for it.  Its Executive Producer/godfather was Lorne Michaels, and it was created by […]

  MAJOR CRIMES has been doing for TNT what it was created to do–that is, fill the hole left by the departure of the network’s long-running hit The Closer–and it’s earned the Season 2 renewal it’s already received.  Putting aside a bump for last night’s season finale, it’s been getting around a 0.7 rating in […]

  Starz’s DA VINCI’S DEMONS was unsatisfactory in just about every respect, all the way through to tonight’s Season 1 finale, a cluster of cliffhangers that resolved almost nothing.  Watching the end of Season 1, it was fairly clear that this had been envisioned and probably budgeted by Starz and its production partner the BBC […]