Michelle Ashford’s series MASTERS OF SEX has been the extraordinary surprise of the fall television season.  It seemed, on its face, to be dauntingly unpromising.  In telling the story of sex researchers William Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) in the 1950s, surely it would be smarmy or else dull, too much […]

Although IN PLAIN SIGHT was never one of USA’s breakout hits or signature shows like Monk or Burn Notice, it gave the network 5 sturdy seasons, holding down slots on 3 different nights in the course of its run, and tonight it made a dignified exit from the network. The final episode, written by series […]

  One never knows, but the rebranding of its network probably doesn’t bode well for RECOVERY ROAD.  The recently-renamed Freeform, which has over the last few months canceled Chasing Life and Switched At Birth, while renewing Stitchers and Shadowhunters, seems to be moving in the direction of heroine-led fantasy-adventures and procedurals, rather than the YA […]

  There were a lot of nips and tucks in the now-concluded 2d season of USA’s FAIRLY LEGAL.  The show overall had a less comedic feel, and the heroine, Kate Reed (Sarah Shahi), was turned into more of an adult, which is to say a conventional TV protagonist.  Kate is still a mediator who works […]

  THE WHISPERS never made much sense, and that went triple for tonight’s finale.  On a macro level, it was probably unwise to end the season with a cliffhanger, since reports are that although the ratings were no worse than middling, ABC had let the cast options lapse when it postponed the show to summer, […]

  When FX’s ATLANTA began its 2nd season at the beginning of March, it seemed like a big enough deal to note that with the departures of Louis C.K. and Ryan Murphy (for very different reasons), Atlanta‘s creator Donald Glover had ascended to being the emblematic creative face of the network.  But now, a bit […]

  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.  […]

  FRANKLIN & BASH made a few cosmetic changes for its third summer on TNT, but nothing to disrupt the show’s basic air of genial dishevelment.  The most high-profile move was bringing in Heather Locklear as new senior partner Rachel King in the show’s law firm of Infeld Daniels King, although once it had her, […]