This year’s COVEN season of AMERICAN HORROR STORY was as cohesive as the proudly bizarre  series is ever likely to get.  That entailed a slight shortage of the WTF variety moments that have made the two previous seasons memorable–no aliens, no fiendish medical experiments, no appearances by Anne Frank–but there was something to be […]

  SLEEPY HOLLOW has grown into one of the (few) pleasant surprises of the fall network season, a keenly judged mix of supernatural folderol, increasingly well-drawn characters and light time-travel comedy.  Enough of a hit to already have been renewed for next season, the show’s first fall term culminated in a barnburner of a season […]

  All the way to the very end, BETRAYAL couldn’t get it right.  Although it hasn’t technically been canceled (as a matter of policy, networks don’t give up their legal rights to shows until the last possible moment), the show’s ratings have been so awful that a renewal is massively unlikely, and for most of […]

  The Season 2 finale of TNT’s MAJOR CRIMES, intended to pay off the show’s one serialized storyline, about Rusty (Graham Patrick Martin), the teen ward of series protagonist LAPD Captain Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell) and witness to a murder committed by imprisoned serial killer and attorney Philip Stroh (who was originally introduced back in […]

  The failures of HOSTAGES were many, and they separate into two dimensions.  One–the more important to CBS–was commercial; the show proved to be dead in the water from the night it premiered against the launch of The Blacklist.  Despite a summer of heavy promotion, NBC and James Spader wiped the floor with Hostages, and […]

  TV is a little poorer for the loss of TREME, a series that never fully received the appreciation–from viewers or critics–that it deserved.  Even a bit watered down from its usual density in a last season of only 5 hours (well, 5 1/3 with tonight’s supersized finale), it was a unique mix of New […]

  HBO’s GETTING ON was generally close to unwatchable, and that’s meant as sort of a compliment.  Even in the world of pay-TV, where ratings aren’t always at the forefront of a network’s expectations, there’s usually some concession to conventional entertainment value, especially in a show that purports to be a comedy of sorts.  But Getting […]

  There was one last super-powerful conspiracy for NIKITA (Maggie Q) to bring down in tonight’s series finale, and a climactic showdown with arch-villainess Amanda (Melinda Clarke) to survive, as CW’s low-rated yet hard-to-kill action series finally came to an end after a truncated 4th mini-season. The final episode (fittingly entitled “Canceled”), written by Executive […]