Season 1 of CW’s THE 100 worked better than logic suggested it should, considering that it was basically a thrift shop of plotlines and tropes from other, more ambitious fantasies, some aimed at teens (The Hunger Games, Lord of the Flies), some not (Lost, Battlestar Galactica). The post-apocalyptic survival stories moved briskly, sparked by […]
The final hour of PARKS & RECREATION was more conceptual than one might have expected, in a way that made it feel more like an epilogue than a conclusion. Written by series co-creator/showrunner Michael Schur and star/producer Amy Poehler, and directed by Schur, it was an omnibus of flash-forwards, advancing the action as much […]
Hardly anyone in America watched THE DIVIDE this summer, and it wasn’t because the series was some kind of bleak, off-putting experiment in reinventing the form of television drama, taking pleasure in alienating all but the most esoteric viewers. On the contrary, the series was a big-tent crime melodrama that energized its traditional format with […]
The curtain rang down on the 4th season of WHITE COLLAR tonight, an unusually labored one. The show still has a fair amount of style and charm, but it’s starting to feel as shackled as Neal Caffrey’s ankle bracelet (and harder to slip out of). Partly the series is a victim of its own […]
At what point does unconventional storytelling become perversity for its own sake, a collection of curlicued narratives that operate like the showrunner version of The Emperor’s New Clothes? It’s a question that came up often in connection with Damon Lindelof’s Lost, especially toward the end of its ultimately frustrating run, and even though THE […]
The peril of dotting a season finale with cliffhangers is that if the show is canceled, they’ll never be resolved. That may very well be the dilemma for fans of NBC’s summer drama CROSSING LINES, which closed its season tonight with a 2-hour finale that was entirely open-ended. One can never be sure with […]
GREY’S ANATOMY is no longer Shonda Rhimes’ brightest, shiniest toy, but in a way her skills as a producer are most evident in the way that her first hit hums along, now in its 2d decade on the air. That’s incredibly difficult for a serialized drama, especially one that started off as being about […]
It helps if you think of BUNHEADS as a CG special effects spectacle, except in this case the CG special effects and spectacle are all in the sound of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s dialogue. Either you love herrapid-fire, endlessly witty repartee or you find it stilted and artificial; if you’re a naysayer, you should probably find another show […]