In its second season, HBO’s SUCCESSION found an exquisite middle ground between Dallas and Shakespeare.  The show is still a somewhat rareified taste–it’s routinely been the lowest-rated show in the network’s current Sunday line-up–but as evidenced by its surprise writing Emmy a few weeks ago, its quality is recognized. The Season 2 finale, written […]

  In fairness, I should note up front that I didn’t keep up with THE CARRIE DIARIES very often after its season premiere, so this won’t pretend to be an authoritative look at its second season.  Still, checking back in for its season (for now) finale, the mild growing-up tale I found wasn’t very different […]

  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, […]

  WHITE COLLAR didn’t do anything very remarkable with its final season.  Only 6 episodes were ordered, and the season was almost entirely serialized, although it did find time for one tangential hour that allowed us to meet Mozzie’s (Willie Garson) con woman ex-wife.  The main storyline tried to gritty the show up a bit, as […]

  HBO’s RUN turned out to be a treatise on the limitations of the elevator pitch.  Everything about the show that could be described between the lobby of an office building and, say, its 20th floor (let’s assume the occupants were socially distanced) seemed irresistible.  The premise:  a pair of onetime lovers follow through on […]

  MADAM SECRETARY quietly had one of the most interesting paths of recent broadcast network dramas.  Airing of all places on CBS, it was a frankly political series that began its run in 2014 and ended 5 years later, bridging two entirely different eras of real-life US politics.  The show’s own center-left policies on social […]

  TYRANT wasn’t the summer’s worst show, but it’s been the most piercing disappointment of the mini-season,  wasting a potentially thrilling premise–behind the scenes at a Middle Eastern military dictatorship–that seemed perfectly suited to FX, one that could combine the network’s trademark narrative energy and ambition with prestige (series co-developer Howard Gordon is also a […]

  Starz’s DA VINCI’S DEMONS was unsatisfactory in just about every respect, all the way through to tonight’s Season 1 finale, a cluster of cliffhangers that resolved almost nothing.  Watching the end of Season 1, it was fairly clear that this had been envisioned and probably budgeted by Starz and its production partner the BBC […]