The peril of dotting a season finale with cliffhangers is that if the show is canceled, they’ll never be resolved.  That may very well be the dilemma for fans of NBC’s summer drama CROSSING LINES, which closed its season tonight with a 2-hour finale that was entirely open-ended.  One can never be sure with […]

  Hardly anyone in America watched THE DIVIDE this summer, and it wasn’t because the series was some kind of bleak, off-putting experiment in reinventing the form of television drama, taking pleasure in alienating all but the most esoteric viewers.  On the contrary, the series was a big-tent crime melodrama that energized its traditional format with […]

  All the way to the very end, BETRAYAL couldn’t get it right.  Although it hasn’t technically been canceled (as a matter of policy, networks don’t give up their legal rights to shows until the last possible moment), the show’s ratings have been so awful that a renewal is massively unlikely, and for most of […]

  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 […]

  The HBO miniseries version of Gillian Flynn’s novel SHARP OBJECTS proved to be a fascinating exercise in adaptation.  Although the TV credits reported the show to be “created by” showrunner Marti Noxon, it was clearly the result of a close collaboration between Noxon, Flynn (not just a producer on the project but one of […]

  Rob Thomas and Dianne Ruggiero-Wright’s CW series IZOMBIE is a show that would benefit from a season order shorter than the 19 hours it had to deliver this year–and with its less than stellar ratings, that might be exactly what it gets next season.  As it was, this season was overextended, with too many […]

  For all that HBO’s WESTWORLD is deliberately obscure and oblique, one thing has become increasingly clear through the course of its second season:  series creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy expect viewers to decide for themselves what aspects of the show are features and which are bugs.  Most obviously, Westworld has no interest in […]

  THE ASTRONAUT WIVES CLUB never achieved much in the way of lift-off, and although ABC knew it was coming–there was a reason it was pushed to a summer run as the lead-in to Mistresses–the show’s flat quality must have initially taken the network by surprise.  On paper, the show seemed like it was exactly […]