With a full season of experience and audience feedback under its belt, it’s not unusual for a TV series to improve in its second season.  What’s considerably less typical is for the reverse to happen.  Yet whether due to the addition of new showrunner Brad Kern (although series creators Sherri Cooper and Jennifer Levin […]

  NBC was so eager to get UNDATEABLE off its schedule that the network unceremoniously threw 4 episodes onto tonight’s line-up, 1 rerun and 3 new half-hours culminating in the season finale.  That treatment was a bit unfair, because although Adam Sztykiel’s series is easy to damn with faint praise, it managed the summer show […]

  In its 6th season, NURSE JACKIE went all the way back to square one.  There were cosmetic differences, of course–Jackie Peyton (Edie Falco) is now divorced, and increasingly alienated from her daughters Grace (Ruby Jerins) and Fiona (Mackenzie Aladjem).  But for the most part, the season was Jackie redux, as she cunningly (and sometimes […]

  If nothing else, this first half of 2014 has been marked as The Year of Eva Green.  Green will probably never be a mainstream Hollywood star–there’s something too feral and broken about her for wide audiences to be comfortable in her presence–but in 300:  Rise Of An Empire and in Showtime’s PENNY DREADFUL, she’s […]

  CALIFORNICATION knew going in that this 7th season would be its last, and we’ve grown used to series in that position, from Breaking Bad to Friends to–God help us–Lost, making a special effort to provide a final run with extra impact, tying up loose ends and providing a summation of what the show has […]

  FARGO was great television of a kind we’ve never really seen before.  Neither a prequel nor a sequel nor a remake, not even a true spin-off, this was more like a reincarnation of the Coen Brothers’ classic movie, as though the writer Noah Hawley had allowed himself to be inhabited by the filmmakers’ idiosyncratic […]

  Voting is going on right now for this year’s Emmy nominations, and LOUIE is on the ballot as a “comedy.”  It’s not the only show to squeeze into a category where it may not truly belong–Orange Is the New Black and Shameless are “comedies” too, and the 8-episodes-and-done True Detective has decided that it’s […]

  Season 4 of HBO’s epic GAME OF THRONES had the good fortune to cover the back half of George R. R. Martin’s third novel in the series, “A Storm of Swords,” which is perhaps the most thrill-packed few hundred pages in the entire saga.  That made for a 10-hour ride with few chances for […]