Aided by a compatible WWE Smackdown lead-in and a red state-friendly storyline, SHOOTER has been a sturdy performer for USA, already renewed for a second summer season.  The series is low-ambition compared to USA’s Mr Robot or even Suits or Colony (or the awful Falling Water, for that matter), but series creator John Hlavin […]

  The most tantalizing question of the Summer 2018 TV season is whether Jesse Armstrong, the creator of HBO’s slow-boil triumph SUCCESSION, knew what he was doing all along, or if the first 3-4 episodes were as uncertain as they seemed at the time.  In that beginning phase, Succession felt like Billions for The Gang […]

  John Ridley’s ABC anthology series AMERICAN CRIME has always worn its sackcloth and ashes in plain sight, but Season 3 was especially brutal.  It was eight hours of unceasing human misery, enough to make the insides curdle of even the most earnest devotee of serious TV drama.  Understandably, viewers fled, pushing the show’s ratings […]

  The ratings for BALLERS have more than justified its renewal by HBO, but the pieces of the series have yet to fit together.  Most of the show’s creative team hails from Entourage, and Ballers embraces the same bimbos-and-bling lifestyle porn and breezy pace, but having Dwayne Johnson as its central attraction has proved to […]

  When a show is as successful as AMC’s THE WALKING DEAD, it can afford to spend virtually the entire back half of a season as little more than a lead-up to the next.  But can it also provide no satisfaction at all when it reaches the end of the season finale?  Of course, Walking […]

  “Go big or go home” isn’t a sentiment that’s usually associated with the second year of a successful TV series.  More often, it’s “Do the same thing again,” possibly appended with “… only bigger.”  But Sam Esmail, the creator of MR. ROBOT (and this season, also the director of all its episodes), knows no […]

  I’M DYING UP HERE certainly wasn’t the worst show of the summer, but it did make one wonder how it had made its way through the development process and onto Showtime’s air.  Series creator Dave Flebotte’s take on the nonfiction book by William Knoedelseder was almost defiantly uncommercial.  The book detailed the 1970s LA […]

  Barring unusual financial or political considerations, David E. Kelley’s MONDAY MORNINGS–which has had wretched ratings since its debut–aired its final episode on TNT with tonight’s technically season finale, so we won’t spend a lot of time poking around the body.  Returning to the show after its first month of episodes, hardly anything seemed to […]