Some smart shifts in emphasis have left HART OF DIXIE in fine shape as it reaches the midpoint of its second season, changes that were evident in tonight’s midseason finale, written by series creator Leila Gerstein and directed by Patrick Norris. Season 1 of Hart was essentially Gilmore Girls meets “Southern Exposure,” the travails […]

  COUGAR TOWN survived its trip from ABC to the wilds of cable, as well as the day-to-day departure of series co-creator and original showrunner Bill Lawrence, with its charms mostly intact, even if the show is starting to feel a bit predictable around the edges.  While not a breakout performer for TBS (it didn’t […]

  I get it:  teen vampires, ick.  THE VAMPIRE DIARIES is never going to win a major Emmy–it’s never even going to win a Golden Globe.  But there isn’t a long-running show on television that hums along as smoothly, and this fourth season was no exception.  Under the guiding hand of co-creator/showrunner Julie Plec, Vampire […]

  Season 4 of HAVEN was its most ambitious by far.  Under showrunners Matt McGuinness and Gabrielle Stanton, the series delved into its own mythology more deeply than it ever has before, moving past its initial rote Trouble-of-the-week structure to introduce some important new characters while radically shifting others.  All was not revealed, of course, […]

  Would ONCE UPON A TIME IN WONDERLAND have fared better if scheduled as originally planned, in the role of Sunday 8PM filler between the two half-seasons of its parent Once Upon A Time, instead of being sent to fend for itself on Thursdays?  In the short term, probably so, as Once fans might well […]

  Watching Shonda Rhimes’ SCANDAL has more than once been likened to an addiction, and as with a drug, the danger is that users will build up a tolerance over time, requiring more and more to achieve the same high.  In the case of Scandal, that high is from endless, crazy, jaw-dropping, WTF plot twists.  […]

  FX’s THE STRAIN is doing something that The Walking Dead and its cohorts in the undead genre won’t:  telling a (more or less) coherent story from beginning to end, and exiting when it’s over.  During this third season, it was announced that next year, despite ratings that are still more than acceptable (if far […]

  Many remarkable things have happened in the world of television over the past few years, but none may be odder than the fact that a story about the 16th century Mary, Queen of Scots ran on network TV for four seasons.  Even more, while REIGN initially squeezed into the CW demographic by concentrating on […]