PERSON OF INTEREST was CBS’s most ambitious and elegantly constructed procedural, and its ratings in other circumstances would have been decent enough to keep it on the air beyond a 4 1/2-season run.  But the TV business changed around it, and marginal ratings can no longer sustain expensive series that don’t permit their networks […]

  The lesson of the 2d season of Showtime’s BILLIONS is that a show doesn’t have to dramatically reboot itself in order to improve.  Billions Season 2 had the same premise and core characters as Season 1:  hedge fund billionaire Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) and US Attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) remained ruthless adversaries, each […]

  It would have been impossible for the Season 2 finale of THE GOOD PLACE to match the gut-punch of Season 1’s climactic twist, partly because until it happened, we hadn’t even known to look for one.  The Good Place was a broadcast network sitcom, albeit a whimsical one, and its creator Michael Schur, while […]

  It seems as though just about all the impact of TV’s May finales has been subsumed into the maw that is Game of Thrones–even including The Big Bang Theory, itself one of the signature hits of the last decade.  One of the victims is HBO’s own VEEP, a multi-Emmy-winning jewel in the network’s crown, […]

      It’s not all that unusual for a TV comedy to improve during the course of its first season, as it discovers its distinctive comic voice (that was the case with Happy Endings, and The Office as well).  What’s less typical is a sitcom finding its soul.  Parks & Recreation comes to mind, […]

    Even by CW standards–and this is a network where shows that could barely hold a slot in basic cable get renewed–THE LA COMPLEX is a clear flop, watched by about  2/10 of 1% of the 18-49 year old audience and less than half a million people in total. So although it’s been reported […]

And finally, after 2 seasons, 26 hours of television, seemingly a hundred red herrings, and enough rain to float the SS Poseidon, THE KILLING revealed who killed Rosie Larsen.  The only thing that was ever worth spoiling on this show is going to be revealed here, so if you’re reading this without having watched, a […]

  Having blown up the initial premise of their show in its Season 1 finale, ONCE UPON A TIME creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz have inventively plotted a Season 2 that came to a satisfying Act 1 culmination in the show’s Fall Finale episode, which they wrote and which was directed by Ralph Hemecker.  […]