ROOKIE BLUE did a solid job of wrapping up its fourth season and setting up cliffhangers for Season 5 (already ordered) with last night’s episode.  Although the Grey’s Anatomy-with-guns police soap has never had the level of success as its medical forebear, it’s been a steady summer performer for ABC, and this season successfully saw it […]

  Even among procedurals, ABC’s Canadian summer series MOTIVE was a bare-bones example of the genre–it was virtually abstract.  The show had a single gimmick:  at the start of each episode, the killer and victim were identified, so in theory the only mystery was why this person killed that one.  (Sometimes, as in the first […]

  Whenever The Killing feels badly about how abused it gets for being a lame murder mystery dotted with time-wasting red herrings, it can look over at TWISTED to boost its morale.  With the help of the biggest lead-in ABCFamily has to offer in Pretty Little Liars, Twisted managed to keep its ratings decent enough […]

  In its second season, A&E’s neo-western LONGMIRE has become a superior procedural-plus, effectively knitting together both its frontier and cop genres and its crime-of-the-week and serialized storylines with an increased sense of character and some understated humor.  Tonight’s season finale, written by series creators Hunt Baldwin and John Coveny (based on a series of […]

  The renovations on Season 3 of NECESSARY ROUGHNESS worked out quite well.  The series jettisoned its original setting and much of its supporting cast, moving Dr. Dani Santino (Callie Thorne) from her job as in-house therapist to the NY Hawks football team to the high-powered V3 talent agency run by new regular (for this […]

  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 […]

  This was, for the most part, a solid rebuilding season for TRUE BLOOD.  The show survived a replacement in showrunners when series creator Alan Ball stepped down after 5 years–and then a replacement of that replacement–with show veteran Brian Buckner ultimately taking over.  Under his direction, the series took a smart step or two […]

  The peril of dotting a season finale with cliffhangers is that if the show is canceled, they’ll never be resolved.  That may very well be the dilemma for fans of NBC’s summer drama CROSSING LINES, which closed its season tonight with a 2-hour finale that was entirely open-ended.  One can never be sure with […]