A suburbanite with money troubles gets into the drug business, gradually becoming corrupt, paranoid and power-hungry, increasingly alienated from family and former life… Not to take anything away from Breaking Bad, which is one of TV’s great shows–but WEEDS was there first. For 8 seasons, Jenji Kohan’s dramedy about the pot trade has been […]

        After last week’s tumultuous, spectacular battle of Blackpool, tonight’s Season 2 finale of GAME OF THRONES was, necessarily, somewhat lower-key.  It served more as a coda, and as a transition to Season 3 (considering that there was no attempt at closure in any of the stories, it’s a good thing that […]

  REVENGE, in its second season, demonstrates the perils of stretching a good thing too far.  (Also being stretched:  ABC’s concept of a “fall finale,” since unlike shows like Revolution and The Walking Dead that won’t be returning until February or March, Revenge will be back after the holidays.) Revenge started with a premise that […]

  SCANDAL is full of characters who take one step over the line of ethics and morality, sometimes for what they’ve convinced themselves are the best possible reasons, only to find themselves in a morass they can’t escape.  The same has come to be true of the series itself, which took its fatal step when […]

  Aided by a compatible WWE Smackdown lead-in and a red state-friendly storyline, SHOOTER has been a sturdy performer for USA, already renewed for a second summer season.  The series is low-ambition compared to USA’s Mr Robot or even Suits or Colony (or the awful Falling Water, for that matter), but series creator John Hlavin […]

  The second half of BUNHEADS‘s first (and potentially only) season seemed designed to drive even fans of Amy Sherman-Palladino a little crazy.  The auteur delights in having her characters dance on the head of conversational pins, and if her non-stop dialogue is to be more than mere verbal choreography, it’s critical that the scenes […]

  Even the explosion that briefly rocked the Season 5 finale of ROOKIE BLUE was of modest proportions, in keeping with the ambitions of the veteran Canadian summer series, licensed by ABC for American air.  It was a mid-sized bang that hardly injured heroine Andy McNally (Missy Peregrym) at all, and that described this season […]

  The first season of BATES MOTEL pulled one of the season’s more interesting sleights of hand.  In theory a prequel to Psycho, more often than not it used the source material as pretext for a quite different kind of series.  (Unlike Hannibal, which for all its distinctive, archly disgusting visuals and doomy mood has […]