Season 4 of THE ORIGINALS had the chance to emerge from the shadow of its departing parent The Vampire Diaries–there was even a 5-year time jump to distance the two shows–but it didn’t really happen.  For most of its length, the season was a variation of the same pattern that Originals has followed since […]

  FX’s just-concluded third season of Noah Hawley’s FARGO was its most divisive, and the criticisms came from a number of directions.  One segment was simply done with Hawley’s theme-and variations approach to the Coen Brothers’ original film, in which each season tells a new story, but one that always features a disruptive representative of […]

  BETTER CALL SAUL reminds us that a gripping tale about well-drawn characters can hold audiences even if it’s not the story they thought they wanted to see.  Although it’s an off-shoot of Breaking Bad, Saul rarely has high-octane action sequences to compare with Bad‘s.  Much of the time, it exists entirely outside conventional genre, […]

  It’s been fascinating to watch AMERICAN GODS play out side-by-side with David Lynch’s rebooted Twin Peaks on the past several Sunday nights, because Bryan Fuller (who created the TV version of Gods with Michael Green from Neil Gaiman’s novel) may be this generation’s most overtly Lynchian TV artist.  Fuller and Lynch are both besotted […]

  Many remarkable things have happened in the world of television over the past few years, but none may be odder than the fact that a story about the 16th century Mary, Queen of Scots ran on network TV for four seasons.  Even more, while REIGN initially squeezed into the CW demographic by concentrating on […]

  No mainstream comic book saga revels in its darkness quite as much as FOX’s GOTHAM.  Its sheer viciousness is particularly impressive since it exists in a universe of broadcast standards and practices that now seems positively antiquated.  Nevertheless, just about every character in the show’s Gotham City is or has been a violent psychopath, […]

  There was a lot of attention paid to the amount of attention paid to the series finale of HBO’s THE LEFTOVERS, almost all of it because its co-creator was Damon Lindelof, and the last time he brought a series to its conclusion, it didn’t go so well.  But in many ways The Leftovers was […]

  Last year FX gave THE AMERICANS showrunners Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg a final 2-season order, and from the vantage point of Season 5’s finale, it seems clear that they’ve approached this stretch as a single 23-episode arc, broken more or less in half by a year’s break.  Season 5 was not, in itself, […]