A suburbanite with money troubles gets into the drug business, gradually becoming corrupt, paranoid and power-hungry, increasingly alienated from family and former life… Not to take anything away from Breaking Bad, which is one of TV’s great shows–but WEEDS was there first. For 8 seasons, Jenji Kohan’s dramedy about the pot trade has been […]

  It’s easy enough to say that the phrase “stranger than fiction” would have had to be invented to describe the murder trial of OJ Simpson if it didn’t already exist, but still, the natural tendency of Hollywood is to gild the non-fictional lily, making melodrama out of drama.  When it was announced that THE […]

  It’s easy to overlook the ingeniousness of Dan Fogelman’s THIS IS US, the season’s only broadcast network smash hit.  On its face, the show is a familiar, even old-fashioned family soap, in which the various members of a clan are constantly beset by romantic, professional or medical problems–The Fosters with older siblings.  But Fogelman’s […]

  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.  […]

  The 2nd season of HELL ON WHEELS was different, and perhaps somewhat better, than its first.  (Behind the scenes, experienced producer John Shiban was brought on to showrun with series creators Joe and Tony Gayton.)  If the show manages to come back for a 3rd season, it appears that incarnation will be yet another […]

  SUPERGIRL undertook a journey this season more unusual than its own heroine’s passage from Krypton to Earth, transferring from CBS to CW.  It suffered little if any damage in the process–other than in the ratings, since CBS’s universe of viewers is far larger than the one at its new home.  Budgets were reportedly slashed, […]

  TV is a little poorer for the loss of TREME, a series that never fully received the appreciation–from viewers or critics–that it deserved.  Even a bit watered down from its usual density in a last season of only 5 hours (well, 5 1/3 with tonight’s supersized finale), it was a unique mix of New […]

  THE CRAZY ONES was conspicuously missing from CBS’s long list of early 2014-15 series renewals, and of course it’s faint praise to say that the show isn’t as bad as that sounds.  It’s the case, though:  The Crazy Ones resisted the temptation to be merely “The Robin Williams Show,” and at its best it’s […]