Hardly anyone has been watching KIDDING, which makes Showtime’s decision to renew the show for a second season a sign of their commitment either to indie movie sensibility or to being in business with Jim Carrey.  In either case, the renewal gives the series a year to decide whether to work past its seemingly […]

  BETTER CALL SAUL reached a milestone in the final scene of its fourth season, as Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) formally assumed the mantle of Saul Goodman, the character he’ll be in Breaking Bad.  As the prequel series journeys toward its destiny, though, this Season 4 turned out to be a ruthless essay on the […]

  In their teardown season as new showrunners of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD, Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg didn’t solve all the problems inherent in the franchise, and the season was uneven, only partly for reasons of transition.  Still, they accomplished a lot, more or less creating a new series from the one that had […]

  The HBO miniseries version of Gillian Flynn’s novel SHARP OBJECTS proved to be a fascinating exercise in adaptation.  Although the TV credits reported the show to be “created by” showrunner Marti Noxon, it was clearly the result of a close collaboration between Noxon, Flynn (not just a producer on the project but one of […]

  The first season of YELLOWSTONE was a feat of auteurship.  Every episode of the recently-rebooted Paramount Network’s prestige series was written and directed solely by series creator Taylor Sheridan, something not even David Lynch or Sam Esmail can claim.  The result was 10 hours of television that qualified, to an extent rarely seen, as […]

  Behind the scenes events threatened to overtake the narrative of THE AFFAIR this season.  Midway through the run, Showtime announced that next year’s Season 5 would be the series finale, making the current season something of a preface to the end.  It then developed that original lead actress Ruth Wilson had asked the producers […]

  CW’s THE 100 has set its bar fairly high fover the years, and on those terms, Season 5 wasn’t quite up to par.  The central crisis–our protagonists had to face off against a pack of vicious thawed-out convicts–was uncomfortably close to a Direct-to-VOD premise, and the climactic arrival of yet another nuclear holocaust struck […]

  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 […]