To say that in its fifth and final season 90210 was running on fumes would be to disparage fumes.  The show, after a very bumpy start in which it ran through several developers and showrunners and tried far too hard to stoke memories of its Beverly Hills, 90210 forebear, settled in for a moderately entertaining […]

  The most paranormal thing about FRINGE, in the end, was that it actually survived 5 seasons on the air, as very possibly the lowest-rated series to be regularly renewed in the history of network television.  (Made possible by budget restrictions and Warner Bros Television’s willingness to accept sharply lowered license fees because of the […]

  The problem with having your main character “go dark” is that she actually has to get somewhere.  In the Season 4 finale of COVERT AFFAIRS, Annie Walker (Piper Perabo) finally seemed to cross a line by coldbloodedly shooting her season-plus nemesis Henry Wilcox (Gregory Itzin) to death in a Hong Kong alley, but like […]

  TV is a little poorer for the loss of TREME, a series that never fully received the appreciation–from viewers or critics–that it deserved.  Even a bit watered down from its usual density in a last season of only 5 hours (well, 5 1/3 with tonight’s supersized finale), it was a unique mix of New […]

  I’m not sure when THE NEIGHBORS started winning me over.  I dismissed the pilot as an overbroad, gimmicky, mostly witless rehash of 3d Rock From the Sun, but as quickly as an October episode where Zabvronian alien Jackie Joyner-Kersee (Toks Olagundoye), who usually speaks with a British accent that would put her in good […]

  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 […]

  The people on SCANDAL just can’t talk fast enough.  There’s so much invective they need to get out of their mouths, so much self-justification and passionate, furious strategizing, so much spin, that the words don’t just flow, they flood–a tsunami of verbiage.  When a rare quiet scene arrives, two people so angry or done […]

  A return visit to SIRENS after having seen its initial episodes revealed that the series, produced and co-created (with Bob Fisher) for US television by Denis Leary, had become even more like Rescue Me without fires, now including that show’s Lenny Clarke and John Scurti recurring as the fathers of the two main characters.  […]