Very little about STITCHERS has made sense, and that includes ABCFamily’s decision to renew it for another season, despite ratings that have been lousy even with Pretty Little Liars as its lead-in.  The word is that the network desperately wants to be in the procedural business, and Stitchers is the only show it’s got […]

  “Universes” are all the rage among studios and networks these days, thanks to the rise of the Marvel/Disney empire.  DC/Warners is trying to duplicate that success (its movie and TV universes are somewhat confusingly separate, and its main accomplishment so far is all but colonizing the CW network through Greg Berlanti’s quartet of series), […]

  Movies have the advantage over TV when it comes to telling gimmicky stories, because a movie only has to sustain the gimmick for 2 hours, and then it’s done.  YOUNGER could have been an effortless feature vehicle for [fill in the rom-com star blank], but after 12 half-hour episodes, the effort is already showing […]

  TNT’s MAJOR CRIMES, like its predecessor The Closer, belongs to the “procedural-plus” subgenre, with a crime to be solved every week combined with a secondary amount of continuing serialized plot.  However, there was very little of the “plus” to be found in tonight’s season finale (really a half-season finale, with the show scheduled to resume […]

  When people say that an original film or television series has the feel of a novel, it’s usually meant as a high compliment.  (The Wire is probably the definitive example of this in television.)  But Sundance Channel’s first scripted series RECTIFY was a reminder that not all novels, however earnest and well-meant, are worth […]

It isn’t the preference of networks and producers for obvious reasons, but for viewers, there can be something particularly thrilling about a series that finds its greatness after its first season.  Shows like Mad Men, The West Wing, Breaking Bad or for that matter Friends came out of the box fully-formed, and they’re all unquestionably […]

  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 […]

  OUTLANDER overcame a shaky conceptual start to become a thoroughly compelling historical romance, and probably the best original series Starz has aired thus far.  There’s still something fundamentally odd about the fact that the underlying plot gimmick, the trip in time that heroine Claire (Caitriona Balfe) has taken from 1945 Scotland to 1743, has […]