“There are no good guys,” titular Chancellor of post-apocalyptic Earth Abby Griffin (Paige Turco) told her teenage daughter Clarke (Eliza Taylor), who had supplanted her as de facto warrior queen of humanity, toward the end of THE 100’s Season 2 finale tonight.  Abby was trying to comfort Clarke, who had just massacred men, women and children […]

  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 […]

  There was a trainwreck quality to the final season of Showtime’s THE AFFAIR, although it managed to gather itself with some grace for tonight’s series finale, which ended with a remarkably happy conclusion for a show that was mostly built on shifting perspectives of interpersonal misery. The Affair probably shouldn’t have returned for a […]

  Season 2 of FOX’s WAYWARD PINES wouldn’t have felt out of place on Syfy, and that’s not a compliment.  Season 1 had a strong cast (Matt Dillon, Carla Gugino, Toby Jones, Juliette Lewis) and a clever twist, revealed halfway through:  the bucolic yet sinister titular town was actually the last outpost of humanity, its […]

  Over the course of the season, THE NEW NORMAL toned down its most disastrous miscalculation, which can be summarized in two words:  Ellen Barkin.  Not Barkin the very fine actress, of course, but the character she was called upon to play, Jane Forrest, the conservative Republican midwesterner grandmother who had raised Goldie Clemmons (Georgia […]

  It’s a little churlish, in the face of tonight’s mostly splendid Season 4 finale of THE GOOD WIFE, to point out that for the most part, the rest of the season didn’t quite live up to its high level of quality.  We will, unavoidably, get to that.  But let’s start by talking about what a […]

  The gap between British and US airings of DOWNTON ABBEY gives rise to some dislocations.  The series airs each fall in England, but PBS holds it for January-February because it doesn’t want to compete with the start of the new network season here.  (Although at this point the Downton audience is so large and […]

  There was a scene in tonight’s Season 3 finale of SCANDAL where Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) and Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry) sat together after a shocking death and, in a manner that was remarkably low-key for this series, talked about the fact that they’d become such monsters that when the death occurred, their minds […]