In its sixth season, Showtime’s CALIFORNICATION barely tried to achieve forward motion.  Every year, occasional novelist and full-time satyr Hank Moody (David Duchovny) toys with reform (which barely lasts an episode), and amidst his always-busy substance abuse and sexual exploits, he pines for his lost love and ex-wife Karen (Natascha McElhone), the (mostly) level-headed […]

  In the post-Homeland era of Showtime, SHAMELESS, the network’s Parenthood on crack, has been pushed even farther to the background–and to be sure, the two shows aren’t comparable in terms of seriousness of purpose or blazing quality.  Nor does Shameless have the tabloid zing of Dexter‘s plots.  Nevertheless, apart from being a steady, reliable performer […]

  Season 4 of  JUSTIFIED may or may not have been its best so far–Margo Martindale’s Mags Bennett still towers over Season 2–but it was unquestionably the most thrillingly novelistic, true to the show’s original source in the writing of Elmore Leonard.  The series, created and run by Graham Yost (who’s also been supervising The Americans […]

  Over the course of the season, THE NEW NORMAL toned down its most disastrous miscalculation, which can be summarized in two words:  Ellen Barkin.  Not Barkin the very fine actress, of course, but the character she was called upon to play, Jane Forrest, the conservative Republican midwesterner grandmother who had raised Goldie Clemmons (Georgia […]

  The biters and the Governor took their toll on the humans who remained in Season 3 of THE WALKING DEAD, but the show’s potentially most damaging casualty may have been at AMC’s own hand, when it decided to get rid of showrunner Glen Mazzara, for reasons neither side has disclosed or–remarkably–even leaked.  His season […]

  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 […]

  I’m not sure when THE NEIGHBORS started winning me over.  I dismissed the pilot as an overbroad, gimmicky, mostly witless rehash of 3d Rock From the Sun, but as quickly as an October episode where Zabvronian alien Jackie Joyner-Kersee (Toks Olagundoye), who usually speaks with a British accent that would put her in good […]

  Whatever one may say about WHITNEY and whether it’s a sitcom that deserves to reach a Season 3, it’s clear that NBC and its producers (including star Whitney Cummings herself) heard the complaints about the show’s original version.  Season 2 wasn’t officially a reboot, but it featured an assortment of changes in style and tone.  Both Whitney and […]