Road trip!  It was a decidedly odd way for COPPER to exit the scene, even if last night’s episode was intended just as a season finale, not as an end to the entire series.  (BBCAmerica didn’t cancel the low-rated show until last week.)  But nevertheless, our hero Kevin Corcoran (Tom Weston-Jones) and his pals, […]

  After three seasons on the air, it seems fair to say that–paraphrasing Star Wars—Homeland isn’t the show we were looking for.  That doesn’t make it a bad series, or an unentertaining one.  But it’s not the successor to Mad Men and Breaking Bad in the pantheon of truly great television dramas that it at […]

  Although it regrouped somewhat in its last few episodes, Season 7 of THE VAMPIRE DIARIES was mostly an awkward and ungainly one.  Some readjustment was foreseeable after leading lady Nina Dobrev decided not to return, but by the end of Season 6, series co-creator Julie Plec and showrunner Caroline Dries seemed to have a […]

  Like its central hero, Dr. Lee Rosen (David Strathairn), ALPHAS spent most of its Season 2 finale staggering about in a daze, apparently bleeding to death.  And–SPOILER ALERT— also like Rosen, as well as everyone else who had the misfortune to be in Grand Central Station at the close of the episode aside from […]

  THE GIRLFRIENDS’ GUIDE TO DIVORCE has made its way, at least somewhat, past a very shaky start–not so much in the ratings, which have remained mediocre (although steady enough for Bravo to declare its first scripted 1-hour a win and order another season), but dramatically.  At the start, Girlfriends pandered all too blatantly to […]

  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 […]

  What is it with endings?  Why do they rattle the brains of even the greatest of television’s creative minds?  Half-endings, too, which is what tonight’s finish to the first half of MAD MEN‘s 7th and final season was, the remaining 7 hours to sit on an AMC shelf until a year from now.  (That […]

  FX’s THE AMERICANS has been, by a substantial margin, the best new show of this season.  And if tonight’s season finale was slightly less ambitious than we might have hoped in terms of delivering the shocking twists or cliffhangers that we now expect from our top serialized series, it still delivered an expert mix […]