Every so often, a show comes along that makes you want to run up to random people in the street and yell “Why aren’t you watching this?”  right in their uncomprehending faces.  ORPHAN BLACK probably wasn’t–OK, wasn’t–the season’s best new show; The Americans, for one, was more layered and expertly crafted.  But Orphan, airing in […]

  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 […]

  REVENGE, in its second season, demonstrates the perils of stretching a good thing too far.  (Also being stretched:  ABC’s concept of a “fall finale,” since unlike shows like Revolution and The Walking Dead that won’t be returning until February or March, Revenge will be back after the holidays.) Revenge started with a premise that […]

  The fifth season of THE VAMPIRE DIARIES was great fun as usual, although also a bit sloppier than the norm.  That could well be the result of series mastermind Julie Plec having to spread her time between Diaries, the new Originals, and whatever her duties were on The Tomorrow People, of which she was […]

  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 […]

  FOX’s PITCH, co-creator Dan Fogelman’s (with Rick Singer) “other” fall series–he also has a little project called This Is Us–is a modestly engaging drama that deserves another, you know, at bat.  Unfortunately, “modest” also describes its ratings–and that’s being kind–so fill in your further baseball analogies here about tonight’s season finale being two outs […]

  Starz cut its losses quickly on FLESH AND BONE, which had been ordered as the first season of a continuing series, but was declared to be a finite miniseries before it had even started airing.  That late shift made tonight’s finale even more awkward and unsatisfying than it might have been, but Moira Walley-Beckett’s […]

  In this era of peak TV, there are more shows than ever that we devour, that we obsess about and are thrilled by and that shock us and tear us apart.  There are fewer, however, that we simply love.  Julian Fellowes’s DOWNTON ABBEY was a canny mix of the old-fashioned and new-fangled, aristocracy porn […]