The people on SCANDAL just can’t talk fast enough.  There’s so much invective they need to get out of their mouths, so much self-justification and passionate, furious strategizing, so much spin, that the words don’t just flow, they flood–a tsunami of verbiage.  When a rare quiet scene arrives, two people so angry or done […]

  The idea of planting Mary, Queen of Scots in the middle of the CW line-up, a 16th century monarch among the network’s assortment of wisecracking vampires, werewolves, demons and other supernatural creatures, seemed half-crazy when the network picked up REIGN last fall, but the series has built strongly through the course of the season […]

  Season 2 of FOX’s WAYWARD PINES wouldn’t have felt out of place on Syfy, and that’s not a compliment.  Season 1 had a strong cast (Matt Dillon, Carla Gugino, Toby Jones, Juliette Lewis) and a clever twist, revealed halfway through:  the bucolic yet sinister titular town was actually the last outpost of humanity, its […]

  It’s odd for a successful TV series to be asked to justify its continued existence, but that’s where HBO’s BIG LITTLE LIES found itself after the network looked at the Season 1 ratings (not just high but steadily rising, which is almost unheard-of these days), and expanded the show from its original one-time-only limited […]

  Will THE GOOD WIFE be remembered as the last great broadcast network drama?  It’s impossible to know for sure, but it seems like a good bet.  Other shows will make the attempt, of course:  ABC’s American Crime, which may or may not return for a 3rd season, has been filled with ambition, even if […]

  HBO’s RUN turned out to be a treatise on the limitations of the elevator pitch.  Everything about the show that could be described between the lobby of an office building and, say, its 20th floor (let’s assume the occupants were socially distanced) seemed irresistible.  The premise:  a pair of onetime lovers follow through on […]

  For a while there, it seemed as though the finale of GRIMM was on a crusade to make sure the show could never be rebooted, massacring almost the entire regular cast one by one, which in an age where IP is more important than anything else would have been a fairly brave move.  But […]

  STATE OF AFFAIRS ended its season tonight with a cliffhanger that will almost certainly remain unresolved, although one might speculate whether the mysterious airstrike that was heading toward Charleston Tucker (Katherine Heigl) in Afghanistan might have been sent not by Victor Gantry (Adam Arkin), the perfidious head of a paramilitary conglomerate or President Constance […]