The original CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION turned the corner on its 14th season tonight, and at its age, the show has little interest in reinventing itself beyond the bare minimum.  The days when William L. Petersen starred and people like Jerry Stahl were writing dark-humored, sometimes transgressive episodes are long past, and after a […]

  MISTRESSES faced some challenges in its 3rd season.  Two were interrelated:  for budget reasons, the network and studio decided to relocate the production to Vancouver, and that prompted marquee star Alyssa Milano to disengage from her contract.  Season 3 didn’t really suffer from these changes, since Milano’s character Savi had a relatively weak role […]

  EUREKA, while never a breakout hit, was a sturdy performer for 5 years on Syfy–and one of the increasingly small number of shows on its air that was actually science-fiction, as opposed to superhero fantasy, horror, reality, paranormal thriller, or whatever else the network is trying to use to broaden its brand (while actually […]

  Under showrunner Scott M. Gimple, this fifth season of THE WALKING DEAD became steadily better as drama than the series has ever been, drawing closer to deserving its phenomenal level of ratings as still (even after the arrival of Empire) TV’s biggest non-football success.  Gimple and his team have greatly improved the show’s eternal […]

  Although it’s part of the CW/Greg Berlanti DC Comics assembly line, BLACK LIGHTNING, created by Salim Akil, has been strikingly different from its comrades.  So far, it hasn’t noticeably been part of the shared universe formed by Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow, aside from its invocation of “meta-humans” to describe those […]

  I’M DYING UP HERE certainly wasn’t the worst show of the summer, but it did make one wonder how it had made its way through the development process and onto Showtime’s air.  Series creator Dave Flebotte’s take on the nonfiction book by William Knoedelseder was almost defiantly uncommercial.  The book detailed the 1970s LA […]

  TYRANT wasn’t the summer’s worst show, but it’s been the most piercing disappointment of the mini-season,  wasting a potentially thrilling premise–behind the scenes at a Middle Eastern military dictatorship–that seemed perfectly suited to FX, one that could combine the network’s trademark narrative energy and ambition with prestige (series co-developer Howard Gordon is also a […]

  From the viewpoint of its newly-concluded third season, the first 2 years of Starz’s BLACK SAILS feel like a very long and somewhat misguided prologue to where the series is now.  With Michael Bay as its leading Executive Producer, Black Sails was presented as a yarn of 18th century sea piracy, built around the […]