In its 6th season, NURSE JACKIE went all the way back to square one.  There were cosmetic differences, of course–Jackie Peyton (Edie Falco) is now divorced, and increasingly alienated from her daughters Grace (Ruby Jerins) and Fiona (Mackenzie Aladjem).  But for the most part, the season was Jackie redux, as she cunningly (and sometimes […]

  As zombie shows go, Z NATION exists very far in the shadow of The Walking Dead in every way, from ratings to quality.  And yet Syfy’s good-humored rip-off can be seen as the show Walking Dead fans sometimes wish that blockbuster would be:  pulpier, faster and more singlemindedly splatterific, with little interest in existential […]

  Achieving the right tone is critical for any TV show, of course, but the task may be trickiest on JANE THE VIRGIN, with its mix of old-fashioned sentiment, broad comedy, melodramatic telenovela plotting and arch self-parody.  It’s quite an achievement of Jennie Snyder Urman, creator/showrunner of the US version of the show (who’d previously […]

  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 […]

  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, […]

  It was clear from the pilot of NBC’s GOOD GIRLS that the series had a trio of strong assets and some major challenges.  The strengths were its three stars, Christina Hendricks, Retta and Mae Whitman, each of them thoroughly capable of anchoring a show on her own, and together an Avengers-like powerhouse of warmth, […]

  Anyone who saw the ONCE UPON A TIME pilot and thought the series would be worth watching only “if nothing else is on” would surely have to be an idiot–and in this case, that idiot was me.  I couldn’t see how the conceit of a show that intercut between a fairy tale kingdom and […]

> PARENTHOOD is sort of the Bizarro version of a broadcast network drama:  it shines when addressing the kind of tiny moments of human interaction that just about every other show on TV can’t be bothered to notice, but it sometimes falters when attempting the Big Event Episode that’s bread and butter for most series. […]