I’m not sure when THE NEIGHBORS started winning me over.  I dismissed the pilot as an overbroad, gimmicky, mostly witless rehash of 3d Rock From the Sun, but as quickly as an October episode where Zabvronian alien Jackie Joyner-Kersee (Toks Olagundoye), who usually speaks with a British accent that would put her in good […]

  Throughout its third season, reactions to GIRLS seemed to depend to a large extent on the particular vision of the series that viewers had.  Season 3 of Lena Dunham’s show was notably less conceptual and experimental than Season 2 had been, with its standalone episodes, abrupt shifts in tone and focus, sexual frankness unusual […]

  It’s impossible to discuss the season finale of NURSE JACKIE–or, as it turns out, its entire fifth season–without talking about its final minute, so I’ll skip to the next paragraph to ward off anyone who unwisely wandered into the SPOILER territory of a season finale review. Here we are.  The question is whether its […]

  MR. SELFRIDGE, which might as well be called “Downton Abbey Won’t Be Back For 10 Months, So What Else Are You Gonna Watch?”, concluded its second, very earnest season on PBS tonight.  World War I came to Mr. Selfridge this season, much as it had to Downton, and the result was a less bustling […]

  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 […]

  The first season of Showtime’s EPISODES was hobbled by its own agenda, but in its much better Season 2, the series relaxed into a very solid sitcom.  The show, written throughout by Must-See-TV veterans David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik (Klarik’s credits date back to Mad About You, and Crane was co-creator of an obscure […]

  In its first season, Marc Maron’s self-created series MARON was more of an uneven experiment than a cohesive series.  Maron tried on several different formats in the course of its 10 episodes on IFC–mordant day in the life, surreal Louie-ish flights of fancy, naturalistic multiepisode story arc–and while some tries were better than others, […]

  A very busy season of NECESSARY ROUGHNESS came to an end tonight with an unusually far-fetched hour.  The show isn’t exactly known for its hard-hitting realism, but this episode, written by series creators Liz Kruger and Craig Shapiro, and directed by David Grossman, really piled on the melodramatic contrivances. The main storyline continued the […]