MTV’s FINDING CARTER is another high-concept series challenged by its concept losing some of its height.  The original impetus for the story was teenager Carter (Kathryn Prescott) being rescued from a kidnapping at the hands of Lori (Milena Govich) that Carter didn’t even know had happened, because Lori had taken her at the age […]

  BLINDSPOT has, in a sense, been coasting on the first five minutes of its pilot for an entire season.  That sequence was the most heavily hyped of summer 2015:  a bag dumped into the middle of Times Square turned out, when cautiously opened, to contain a gorgeous, naked amnesiac woman who would be known […]

  The Matrix is one of the many pop culture properties that have influenced Noah Hawley’s LEGION, and Legion has been something of a matrix itself.  Behind its surface and around its edges, the shape of a much more conventional Marvel comic-book adventure story has lurked from the start, and with the final two episodes […]

  USA’s THE SINNER was a genuine if moderate sleeper of this summer’s TV season, not a breakout hit but consistently rating ahead of its lead-in, the veteran Suits, and it’s not entirely clear why.  The show marked the return to TV of Jessica Biel, playing the seemingly ordinary Cora Tannetti, who committed a violent […]

  In its short (7 episode) first season, DON’T TRUST THE B___ IN APT 23 hasn’t yet proven itself the equal of Happy Endings, the show it replaced in ABC’s prime post-Modern Family timeslot.  However, the show has enough going for it to be a funny, entertaining ride (and besides, it took Happy most of […]

VEEP has no particular interest in going anyplace, so its season finale tonight was more or less the same as any other episode.  This has made for a fun, but somewhat repetitive, ride over the show’s initial 8-episode season.  Every week Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) fails to accomplish anything at all, usually drilling […]

  Cable’s USA Network has the reputation of being a place where procedurals basically repeat variations on the same episode over and over for years, until the series finally dies of old age.  That’s certainly the case with some of the network’s stalwarts like Psych and Burn Notice, but recently USA has shown a welcome […]

  Greg Garcia has made a successful niche for himself on network television as poet of the lower-middle-class, small-town, gently surrealist sitcom, first with My Name Is Earl and now with RAISING HOPE.  The only problem with Garcia’s type of show is that the constant requirement for more inventively conceptual, eccentric storylines can lead to […]