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 […]

  There are many things that divide Americans these days, but the same thought may have gone through much of the nation’s mind tonight:  Is it truly over?  Can we finally move on from the Negan storyline on The Walking Dead?  And the answer is… probably? After 2 seasons of slow-burning nihilism (more than that, […]

  Some smart shifts in emphasis have left HART OF DIXIE in fine shape as it reaches the midpoint of its second season, changes that were evident in tonight’s midseason finale, written by series creator Leila Gerstein and directed by Patrick Norris. Season 1 of Hart was essentially Gilmore Girls meets “Southern Exposure,” the travails […]

  GLEE went out with dignity–and given that this was Glee, that was far from a sure thing.  Over its 6 years (at least 2 more than wisdom would have allowed), Glee made so many disastrous turns into overblown silliness, meanness (sometimes outright cruelty), inconsistency, repetition and camp that more than anything else, tonight’s series finale […]

      The crazier SCANDAL has gotten, the better it’s been.  Although the Shonda Rhimes soap only had a 7-episode run this Spring, it’s managed to find its footing quickly.  The first few episodes were forgettably glib, scandal-of-the-week hours that were far-fetched and overly jocular (the worst was the one about the Supreme Court […]

  As tonight’s series finale of THE NEWSROOM served to remind us, Aaron Sorkin isn’t one to shy away from sentiment, and one would like to think that on some level he was touched by how many of us celebrated the news that his series was going to return for a delayed third season.  Even […]

  BONNIE & CLYDE saved its most idiotic inspiration for the end.  Up until its last few minutes, the second half of the Lifetime/A&E/History miniseries was perhaps marginally better than its first (which we dealt with in yesterday’s review).  There was less chatty posthumous narration from Clyde (Emile Hirsch) this time around, a greater role […]

  It was a somewhat underpopulated 8th and final season for PSYCH.  Maggie Lawson, the show’s female lead Juliet O’Hara, was off shooting Back In the Game most of the time, and Kirsten Nelson’s Chief Vick of the Santa Barbara Police had been relieved of her duties at the end of Season 7, so both […]