HART OF DIXIE barely survived the hunger games known as network scheduling season this year–it won’t be back until midseason, with an abbreviated (and probably final) set of episodes, and even then only so it can hit the 4-season mark that increases syndication prices.  The show’s ratings were passable at best when it aired […]

  There’s a reason why serialized dramas usually have some sort of “franchise” powering them:  a mystery to be solved, patients to be cured, a quest to be undertaken, etc.  Generating compelling stories on a weekly basis out of something like ordinary life can become awfully difficult, and a series can quickly turn mundane.  THE […]

> After a full season, it’s still not clear just what HOUSE OF LIES is. The season finale, written and directed by series creator Matthew Carnahan, centered on what became the show’s main storyline in the latter part of its run:  the attempted takeover of the management consulting firm that employs Marty Kaan (Don Cheadle) […]

  I speak–clearly–not as a fan:  ENLIGHTENED was less unbearable in its second season than it was in its first. The show does have its fans, meager in number (fewer than 300,000 viewers watched the initial airings of recent episodes, and only around 100,000 of those were under 50–no doubt those numbers go up when […]

  HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER is an edifice built on two foundations:  the acting of Viola Davis as the show’s brilliant and complex criminal attorney Annalise Keating, and the ability of series creator Peter Nowalk and his writing/producing staff to come up with compelling non-stop plot twists.  In Season 2, Davis as usual […]

  There are many things that divide Americans these days, but the same thought may have gone through much of the nation’s mind tonight:  Is it truly over?  Can we finally move on from the Negan storyline on The Walking Dead?  And the answer is… probably? After 2 seasons of slow-burning nihilism (more than that, […]

  In its first season, Marc Maron’s self-created series MARON was more of an uneven experiment than a cohesive series.  Maron tried on several different formats in the course of its 10 episodes on IFC–mordant day in the life, surreal Louie-ish flights of fancy, naturalistic multiepisode story arc–and while some tries were better than others, […]

  Under new showrunner John Wirth, the third season of HELL ON WHEELS was on the whole uneven, and tonight’s season finale unfortunately wasn’t a very promising way for the bubble show to end its year. Wirth’s biggest change to Hell was to largely abandon the show’s original premise, which had Cullen Bohannan (Anson Mount) […]