NASHVILLE doesn’t make more than a gesture these days toward having very much to say about the music industry, or the place of country music in American culture.  It’s simply a soap, and often an effective one; with this week’s renewal, it’s reached the promised land of a 4th season on the air, buffered […]

  Last year FX gave THE AMERICANS showrunners Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg a final 2-season order, and from the vantage point of Season 5’s finale, it seems clear that they’ve approached this stretch as a single 23-episode arc, broken more or less in half by a year’s break.  Season 5 was not, in itself, […]

  Unwise bargains were a staple of ONCE UPON A TIME from the very beginning, so it was sadly appropriate that series creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz entered into one themselves in order to convince ABC to order a 7th season for the show.  In return, the network demanded a slashed license fee, which […]

  Damon Lindelof is fascinated by the elements of storytelling, sometimes to the detriment of the story itself.  It was fitting that a motif of WATCHMEN, both in its Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons 1987 graphic novel version and in Lindelof’s HBO sequel/spin-off, was the construction of watches, because this new version could feel like a fantastically […]

  It’s appropriate for GOSSIP GIRL, of all shows, that news about it be conveyed via online buzz.  That buzz says that the series’ upcoming 6th season will be shortened and final–and really, it’s time.  Past time, in fact.  The show has reached that point where its characters are simply being moved around like chess […]

> 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 […]

Here’s what Aaron Sorkin’s THE NEWSROOM is, for better and very often for worse:  a deadly serious, indeed doggedly self-righteous, primer on how news should be reported and, by extension, how America should be governed, that also includes a Sex and the City gag/salute/parody so moronically shameless that even the people who make the very […]

  After 6 years and a 55-minute clip show retrospective, and bearing enough promos for The Carrie Diaries for that show to establish a network of its own, GOSSIP GIRL came to a breezy, mostly satisfying end by concentrating on its original basics:  Blair and Chuck (Leighton Meester and Ed Westwick), Serena and Dan (Blake […]