Remarkably little happened during the first season of POWER.  (It’s already been renewed for a second session, that is if you continue to believe that Starz doesn’t give 2-year orders that pretend to be 1-year terms plus instant renewals.)  Sure, sex was had and people (mostly anonymous) were killed, but at a time when […]

  WHITE COLLAR lost a little of its charm this season (or half-season, depending on how you characterize USA’s bifurcated order pattern).  The should-FBI-agent-Peter Burke (Tim DeKay)-trust-former-thief-Neal Caffrey (Matt Bomer)-and-vice-versa dynamic became repetitious and circular, with each of them switching places by the week, and some of the romance dropped out of the show’s spirit.  […]

  Although frequently tortuous to watch, TOP OF THE LAKE wasn’t really Snob TV, where a Famous Filmmaker slums their way through a series.  It’s more that narrative has never been of particular interest to Jane Campion, even in her best films like The Piano or Holy Smoke, and giving her 6 hours to play […]

  Luckily for ELEMENTARY, appearances by the BBC’s celebrated Sherlock are so sporadic and brief (this season’s 3 episodes were the first in 2 years), that the two series only infrequently need to be judged against one another.  Those comparisons aren’t to Elementary‘s advantage in terms of conceptual brilliance and sheer inspiration, but then Elementary […]

  TV’s summer of 2016 was notable for a splendidly entertaining and emotionally satisfying 1980s-themed horror thriller.  Unfortunately for Freeform and DEAD OF SUMMER, it was Netflix’s Stranger Things.  Dead, which ended a low-rated season tonight, did have its moments, though, especially in its grand guignol final episodes. The general pattern of the series was […]

  Few television series have worked so hard to be unlikeable as BOSS.  There had been some thought, after its initial off-putting season, that when Starz replaced series creator Farhad Safinia with Dee Johnson as showrunner, the aim might have been to water down some of the show’s bile, but such was clearly not the […]

  A very busy season of NECESSARY ROUGHNESS came to an end tonight with an unusually far-fetched hour.  The show isn’t exactly known for its hard-hitting realism, but this episode, written by series creators Liz Kruger and Craig Shapiro, and directed by David Grossman, really piled on the melodramatic contrivances. The main storyline continued the […]

  HOMELAND‘s season 7 was a mess, but a more entertaining one than recent editions have been.  There were even a few episodes toward the middle of the season that brought back memories of the truly great series it had been in its early glory years.  At this point, though, we’ll settle for less, and […]