Achieving the right tone is critical for any TV show, of course, but the task may be trickiest on JANE THE VIRGIN, with its mix of old-fashioned sentiment, broad comedy, melodramatic telenovela plotting and arch self-parody.  It’s quite an achievement of Jennie Snyder Urman, creator/showrunner of the US version of the show (who’d previously […]

  Although it regrouped somewhat in its last few episodes, Season 7 of THE VAMPIRE DIARIES was mostly an awkward and ungainly one.  Some readjustment was foreseeable after leading lady Nina Dobrev decided not to return, but by the end of Season 6, series co-creator Julie Plec and showrunner Caroline Dries seemed to have a […]

  The braintrust behind AMERICAN HORROR STORY, headed by series creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, seemed to think their work was done when they came up with the FREAK SHOW subtitle for this season.  Despite the limitless psychopaths on hand and the abundant graphic violence, this was by far the least frightening of Horror […]

> But first–a nod to the sly marketing department at AMC, which cleverly lampooned its own predicament of trying to persuade at least some of the hordes of WALKING DEAD fans to stay tuned to the network next week for a very different show.  The result was a pair of lighthearted promos for Mad Men […]

  Only in the world of RAY DONOVAN would a season’s (more or less) happy ending commence with the chainsaw dismemberment of corpses, but that’s Showtime’s twisted family saga.  The headline of Season 6 was the show’s relocation from Los Angeles to New York, which hardly seemed affect its DNA at all.  In fact, at […]

  FINDING CARTER was the surprise of the summer TV season,.  Hailing from the wilds of MTV, a network rarely known for its dramatic chops, the series, created by Emily Silver and show-run by Terri Minsky, has told a compelling story through a remarkably well-drawn set of characters, both teen and adult.  Last night’s Season […]

  There was never a real-life game of thrones behind the scenes at GAME OF THRONES, and perhaps there should have been.  After six brilliant years adapting George R. R. Martin’s novels to television, series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss found themselves out of books and without a clear path to Martin’s ending.  (Reportedly, […]

  ABC’s NASHVILLE has reached the midpoint of its season as one of the better dramas on network television, and also one of the more frustrating.  Particularly galling is that it seems to falter worst at the things other, less interesting shows do with much less effort. Plotting, for example.  Within the show’s mostly parallel […]