Do Westworld‘s creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have free will?  This third season of HBO’s was supposed to be fundamentally different from the first two, and certainly things changed in some key ways.  The action was set almost entirely in the “real world” and not the titular park, there were important new characters […]

  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 […]

  As everyone knows by now, although ONCE UPON A TIME has been renewed for a 7th season, tonight’s 2-hour “Final Battle” episode marked the end of the series as we’ve known it.  Only 3 members of the core cast are returning–Lara Parrilla’s Regina, Robert Carlyle’s Rumplestiltskin, and Colin O’Donoghue’s Hook–and as we learned in […]

  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 […]

  People take their GAME OF THRONES very seriously.  That’s not a new phenomenon, of course–the term “fanboy” was invented to describe audience members obsessed with their chosen (usually fantasy/sci-fi adventure) sagas, and that level of commitment predates the word and applies to all genders–but this season, the level of debate reached a new height.  […]

  Tina Fey’s 30 ROCK left the building very much the way it entered 7 years ago:  with a million gags (at least ten thousand of them meta), a bit of sentiment (usually followed instantly by undercutting silliness), and a gnawing taste for the hand that fed it. If there was any surprise in the […]

  TREME thrives on its idiosyncracies–if “thrive” is the word for a show that hardly anyone watches–and one of those is its limited interest in engaging in a “season finale.”  Thus, tonight’s close of Season 3, written by series creators David Simon and Eric Overmeyer (from a story by Simon and Anthony Bourdain–yes, that one) […]

  When FX’s ATLANTA began its 2nd season at the beginning of March, it seemed like a big enough deal to note that with the departures of Louis C.K. and Ryan Murphy (for very different reasons), Atlanta‘s creator Donald Glover had ascended to being the emblematic creative face of the network.  But now, a bit […]