In this new era of serialized television drama, plot–and the skill with which it’s doled out–is more important than ever.  An overall clumsiness with the handling of its storylines is what’s held back Lifetime’s WITCHES OF EAST END from being more than a pleasant diversion, and tonight’s season finale was sadly no exception.  The […]

  Hail and farewell to RAISING HOPE, that gently surreal bundle of quirky comedy that may have been too downscale to ever quite hit the pop culture jackpot.  The writing was discernible on the wall when series creator Greg Garcia left before the start of Season 4 to create The Millers and then FOX switched […]

  The braintrust behind AMERICAN HORROR STORY, headed by series creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, seemed to think their work was done when they came up with the FREAK SHOW subtitle for this season.  Despite the limitless psychopaths on hand and the abundant graphic violence, this was by far the least frightening of Horror […]

  At the close of its 6th season, THE VAMPIRE DIARIES finds itself at a crossroads.  The ratings are way down, and for the first time since it premiered, the series isn’t one of CW’s biggest hits, but just a mid-range performer.  Viewers didn’t seem to respond to the witch-centric narrative of the season, or […]

  VINYL watchers, HBO feels your pain.  Late in a run that matched low ratings with little buzz or critical enthusiasm, the network took the unusual step of not just firing co-creator/showrunner Terence Winter, but of publicizing that decision before Season 1 even finished airing, despite the fact that HBO and Winter have a history […]

  Donald Glover’s ATLANTA would have been unimaginable on a mainstream television outlet just a few years ago–let alone as a show that could achieve success in the ratings.  It’s very much a post-Louie series (both air on FX), with its disregard of typical TV format and structure, but even Louie, for all its brilliant […]

  It’s been fascinating to watch AMERICAN GODS play out side-by-side with David Lynch’s rebooted Twin Peaks on the past several Sunday nights, because Bryan Fuller (who created the TV version of Gods with Michael Green from Neil Gaiman’s novel) may be this generation’s most overtly Lynchian TV artist.  Fuller and Lynch are both besotted […]

  In its second season, Noah Hawley’s FX series LEGION largely became a delivery system for set-pieces.  Some of these sequences, to be sure, were dazzling:  Hawley has become a whiz with aspect ratios, split screens, stylized sets, skewed camera angles, eccentric music choices, and all manner of visual and aural devices–at one point, he […]