The final scene of ALMOST HUMAN‘s season typified what a behind-the-scenes mess the entire run had been.  The occasion was a sequence where human police detective circa 2048 John Kennex (Karl Urban) and his cyborg partner Dorian (Michael Ealy) expressed their appreciation for one another, Dorian because Kennex had spoken on his behalf at […]

  It seems fair to ask just what the hell happened to NEW GIRL this season.  A series that seemed to spring out of its pilot womb in complete command of its oddball voice and marvelous cast could suddenly barely take a step in the right direction, the laughs dried up, and the ratings plunged:  […]

  Season 1 of CW’s THE 100 worked better than logic suggested it should, considering that it was basically a thrift shop of plotlines and tropes from other, more ambitious fantasies, some aimed at teens (The Hunger Games, Lord of the Flies), some not (Lost, Battlestar Galactica).  The post-apocalyptic survival stories moved briskly, sparked by […]

  UNDER THE DOME went rather bonkers in its second season, apparently flummoxed by the fact that it existed at all.  Dome had originally been conceived as a limited summer series that, like the Stephen King novel which inspired it, would have a beginning, middle and end.  But the show became a sensational hit, the […]

  In its 5th season, SHAMELESS recognized that some of its younger Gallaghers were now old enough to be corrupted, which resulted in strong storylines for Carl (Ethan Cutkosky), whose drug dealing ended up putting him (and his half-nephew, if that’s a thing) in juvie, and especially Debbie (Emma Kenney), who discovered love and sex […]

  HALT AND CATCH FIRE is in part a show about the cold realities of business, and business logic suggests that a third season for the series is unlikely.  The ratings, cool in Season 1, were icy this year; the show neither occupied the zeitgeist nor found any love from Emmy voters; AMC’s recent renewal […]

  PERSON OF INTEREST was CBS’s most ambitious and elegantly constructed procedural, and its ratings in other circumstances would have been decent enough to keep it on the air beyond a 4 1/2-season run.  But the TV business changed around it, and marginal ratings can no longer sustain expensive series that don’t permit their networks […]

  The lesson of the 2d season of Showtime’s BILLIONS is that a show doesn’t have to dramatically reboot itself in order to improve.  Billions Season 2 had the same premise and core characters as Season 1:  hedge fund billionaire Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) and US Attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) remained ruthless adversaries, each […]