ARROW had a somewhat unsuper fourth season.  That was partly due to its villain:  Damien Darhk, however enthusiastically played by Neal McDonough, was an all-smirk-all-the-time Big Bad in dapper suits, a Bond-ish villain whose added dimension of magic was very sub-Darth Vader, with much flicking of the wrist to send foes flying into nearby […]

  David Simon is unquestionably a pivotal figure in the history of contemporary TV, yet he’s never been associated with a mainstream hit.  From Homicide: Life On The Street to The Wire to Treme to Show Me A Hero, his work has been critically praised and sometimes honored, but viewers haven’t flocked to them on […]

  Last year, the cop novel “The Whites” was published as the work of Harry Brandt–except that “Harry Brandt” was actually a pseudonym for Richard Price.  This seemed odd at first, because unlike, say, JK Rowling deciding to write detective stories, crime novels were already Richard Price’s bread and butter, in celebrated works of fiction […]

  Over the course of its season, NBC’s SHADES OF BLUE muddled its way from being a broadcast network-lite version of a gritty cable cop drama to a more conventional heist thriller.  It was flawed in both contexts, but more able to carry its weight as the latter. The series, created by Adi Hasak, was […]

  To be sure, NBC’s THE GOOD PLACE hasn’t had much competition in the category of Most Imaginative Broadcast Sitcom this season.  (Really, there’s just The Last Man On Earth, which has been having a monotonous and somewhat off-putting Season 2.)  Still, while the half-hour form (you can’t really call many of the shows “comedies” […]

  MR. SELFRIDGE, which might as well be called “Downton Abbey Won’t Be Back For 10 Months, So What Else Are You Gonna Watch?”, concluded its second, very earnest season on PBS tonight.  World War I came to Mr. Selfridge this season, much as it had to Downton, and the result was a less bustling […]

  MADAM SECRETARY quietly had one of the most interesting paths of recent broadcast network dramas.  Airing of all places on CBS, it was a frankly political series that began its run in 2014 and ended 5 years later, bridging two entirely different eras of real-life US politics.  The show’s own center-left policies on social […]

  When people say that an original film or television series has the feel of a novel, it’s usually meant as a high compliment.  (The Wire is probably the definitive example of this in television.)  But Sundance Channel’s first scripted series RECTIFY was a reminder that not all novels, however earnest and well-meant, are worth […]