Season 4 of ONCE UPON A TIME was a rather misshapen one.  The Fall cycle was a tie-in to Disney’s blockbuster Frozen (creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz swore it was their idea and not a corporate mandate), and although it didn’t bring out the best in the series, it delivered in the ratings.  […]

  HUMANS packed more punch than its compendium of post-Blade Runner tropes initially suggested, but those strengths weren’t altogether reflected in tonight’s season finale.  At its best, Humans told the story of two troubled families, one human and one a group of illicitly sentient “synths,” and followed the members of each, through the course of […]

  DESIGNATED SURVIVOR has been running through showrunners like breath mints (a fourth is scheduled to join the show for Season 2, and reportedly every script makes its way through star/executive producer Kiefer Sutherland as well), so it’s not much of a surprise that the tone and even the genre of the show has wobbled […]

  The bar for crazy was so high when it came to the series finale of SCANDAL that its general sense of anti-climax may well have been inevitable  Not Shonda Rhimes’s biggest hit (that would be Grey’s Anatomy, still purring well into its 2nd decade), but perhaps her signature series, Scandal was the grand opera […]

  AGENTS OF SHIELD has been given one more final season after the sixth that concluded tonight, and that will bring to an end an extended footnote to Marvel’s cultural domination of our moment.  Agents was the project most caught up in the territorial strife between Marvel Television and the increasingly all-powerful Marvel Cinematic Universe, […]

  It is, make no mistake, a wonderful thing that FOX (with the financial cooperation of studio Warner Bros) is bringing FRINGE, one of television’s most distinctive and imaginative shows, back for a 5th and final 13-episode season.  It also has to be said, though, that Season 4 wasn’t the show’s best.  (Note:  SPOILERS will […]

> WARNING:  Scaaaarrrry Spoilers Within You have to give AMERICAN HORROR STORY the credit of its crazy, crazy convictions.  Ryan Murphy and his gang of producers followed through on where the last few episodes appeared to be going, and the result will be a second season presumably very different from its first. It didn’t take […]

  With far less fanfare than last night’s farewell to The Closer, tonight TNT rang down the season’s curtain on FRANKLIN & BASH, a show that can barely be bothered to remember that a season finale is different from any other episode.  This isn’t a series very interested in story arcs or even continuity; it […]