BONES brought out the big guns for its Season 8 finale–a long-awaited marriage proposal from Brennan (Emily Deschanel) to Booth (David Boreanaz), and the return of the show’s arch-villain, Christopher Pelant (Andrew Leeds).  Pelant is both a genius-level computer hacker and a serial killer who, the last time we saw him, had stolen Hodgins’ […]

  When a show is as successful as AMC’s THE WALKING DEAD, it can afford to spend virtually the entire back half of a season as little more than a lead-up to the next.  But can it also provide no satisfaction at all when it reaches the end of the season finale?  Of course, Walking […]

  No mainstream comic book saga revels in its darkness quite as much as FOX’s GOTHAM.  Its sheer viciousness is particularly impressive since it exists in a universe of broadcast standards and practices that now seems positively antiquated.  Nevertheless, just about every character in the show’s Gotham City is or has been a violent psychopath, […]

  After an entire season, it’s still not clear just what AMC’s PREACHER intends to be, but it’s been a dazzling ride all the same, sort of a Quentin Tarantino version of a Coen Brothers version of a Luis Bunuel version of the apocalypse.  Every episode has had at least one remarkable set-piece sequence, and […]

  Anyone who saw the ONCE UPON A TIME pilot and thought the series would be worth watching only “if nothing else is on” would surely have to be an idiot–and in this case, that idiot was me.  I couldn’t see how the conceit of a show that intercut between a fairy tale kingdom and […]

  BETTER CALL SAUL reminds us that a gripping tale about well-drawn characters can hold audiences even if it’s not the story they thought they wanted to see.  Although it’s an off-shoot of Breaking Bad, Saul rarely has high-octane action sequences to compare with Bad‘s.  Much of the time, it exists entirely outside conventional genre, […]

  Effective showrunners learn from their mistakes, and the 4th and, as we now know, penultimate season of BBCAmerica’s ORPHAN BLACK was altogether more satisfying than Season 3.  Creator/showrunners Graeme Manson and John Fawcett had gotten ambitious in all the wrong ways last year, creating a line of male “Castor” clones (all played by Ari […]

  In all ways but one, GRIMM had a highly enjoyable third season.  Its one significant flaw came when it tried to cultivate a deeper mythology than the events in Portland where it’s set.  That took the show away from its core characters, while the plot elements it used–mysterious keys, a puzzle map, a nobility […]