The HBO miniseries version of Gillian Flynn’s novel SHARP OBJECTS proved to be a fascinating exercise in adaptation.  Although the TV credits reported the show to be “created by” showrunner Marti Noxon, it was clearly the result of a close collaboration between Noxon, Flynn (not just a producer on the project but one of […]

  HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER is an edifice built on two foundations:  the acting of Viola Davis as the show’s brilliant and complex criminal attorney Annalise Keating, and the ability of series creator Peter Nowalk and his writing/producing staff to come up with compelling non-stop plot twists.  In Season 2, Davis as usual […]

  Nothing ever came up roses for SMASH, and tonight, after two misbegotten NBC seasons, on a holiday weekend buried against reruns and NASCAR, the show’s Broadway curtain came down for the last time.  The saddest thing about its passing, of course, is the enormous waste it represented:  of a truly distinctive setting and topic; […]

Lena Dunham’s GIRLS has been all over the place this season, so it made sense that its season finale would come out of nowhere.   We knew last week that when Jessa (Jemima Kirke) got a talking-to from former employer Katherine (Kathryn Hahn) about growing up, it was making an impression–but who would have thought that […]

  If nothing else, this first half of 2014 has been marked as The Year of Eva Green.  Green will probably never be a mainstream Hollywood star–there’s something too feral and broken about her for wide audiences to be comfortable in her presence–but in 300:  Rise Of An Empire and in Showtime’s PENNY DREADFUL, she’s […]

  Only in the world of RAY DONOVAN would a season’s (more or less) happy ending commence with the chainsaw dismemberment of corpses, but that’s Showtime’s twisted family saga.  The headline of Season 6 was the show’s relocation from Los Angeles to New York, which hardly seemed affect its DNA at all.  In fact, at […]

  No, honestly:  what the hell was that? All snark aside, it was admirable and really long past due for USA Network to try to get out of the “characters welcome,” franchise-centric box it had put itself into.  When people start using the phrase “well, it was sort of like a USA show” as disparagement, […]

  The past two seasons of FALLING SKIES have been something of a wreck, all the way through to tonight’s flat finale, and with its ratings echoing the show’s title, it’s hard to regard the show’s departure with much beyond relief.  Under showrunner David Eick, Season 4 featured a spectacularly wrongheaded series of plotlines that […]