The final season of AMC’s HELL ON WHEELS was a sprawl, made worse by the network’s decision to play the season in two chunks separated by a year.  This last stretch of 7 episodes was particularly choppy.  One hour was a virtual two-hander for hero Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount) and arch-foe The Swede (Christopher […]

  Showtime’s BILLIONS has cultivated one of the most recognizable signatures on television, from its rudely epigrammatic dialogue, to its love/hate relationship with its ruthless, narcissistic characters, to its very narrative devices.  Tonight’s Season 4 finale, written by series co-creators David Levien and Brian Koppelman and directed by experienced Billions hand Colin Bucksey, was precisely […]

    On paper, THE SECRET CIRCLE seemed to have everything going for it.  It was a ready-made companion piece to CW’s one big hit The Vampire Diaries–produced by Vampire‘s Kevin Williamson, based on another series of books by Vampire author L.J. Smith.  The ensemble cast was led by Britt Robetrson, previously the personable star […]

> WARNING:  Spoilers Abound That expelled breath heard around the country this evening was a collective sigh of relief:  HOMELAND‘s season finale didn’t collapse.  On the contrary, it delivered a satisfying conclusion that resolved Season 1 storylines while setting the stage for an intriguing, and somewhat different, Season 2. No recent show has walked a […]

  A return to COMMON LAW for its season finale didn’t show any appreciable improvement from its unimpressive early episodes.  Standards at USA Network aren’t exactly at the level of Sunday night on HBO, but Common Law is below par even for USA, a mix of very routine cop show with shticky comedy that’s only […]

  ARROW, CW’s successful new superhero action series, has found its own best secret identity as a quasi-soap, a fact imperfectly illustrated by tonight’s midseason finale. The tactic of conveying a comic book saga through soapiness isn’t a crazy one–the Spider-Man franchise, in both its recent incarnations, has been as much romance as spectacle, and […]

  GO ON is a genuine bubble show–not just in its ratings (which are strong when it has The Voice as a lead-in and barely acceptable when it doesn’t), but in its quality.  The series wobbles from episode to episode and even between storylines in a single episode, sometimes smart and charming and equally often […]

  FALLING SKIES told a somewhat different story this season under showrunner Remi Aubuchon than it had in its first two years, and the changes worked fairly well for the most part.  Tom Mason (Noah Wyle) and his plucky band of rebels against the evil alien Espheni, instead of roaming the east coast, were based […]