> Creatively, last night’s season finale of BREAKING BAD was extraordinary in almost every way (how long till the final 16 episodes start airing?).  In the ratings, according to TV By the Numbers it did quite well, but not quite up to the mark of its season premiere (around a 0.9 rating as opposed to […]

  TRUE BLOOD:  Sunday 9PM on HBO You don’t typically associate HBO with “guilty pleasure”–even its genre shows, from The Sopranos to Boardwalk Empire to Game of Thrones, have the weight of dramas determined to reinvent their forms–but TRUE BLOOD has been the exception.  An all-you-can-eat buffet of vampires, werewolves, sex, political satire, more sex, shapeshifters, witches, yet more sex, faeries, […]

  HAPPY ENDINGS:  Tuesday 9PM on ABC WHERE WE WERE:  Chicago, where six of the oddest balls on television hang out.  When last seen, Alex (Elisha Cuthbert) and Dave (Zachary Knighton), who started the whole show off when she deserted him at the altar, were secretly back to seeing each other again.  Brad (Damon Wayans, […]

  LAW & ORDER:  SVU:  Wednesday 9PM on NBC WHERE WE WERE:  A turf war between escort services run by Delia (Brooke Smith) and Ganzel (Peter Jacobson) turned murderous, leading to the death of a prostitute and the former Governor of NY.  Detectives Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Amaro (Danny Pino) were on the case, along […]

  CHICAGO FIRE:  Tuesday 10PM on NBC At a time when network programmers’ fingers are ever-jumpier on their cancellation buttons, NBC has done an unusually good job nurturing CHICAGO FIRE into a success.  The show, which mixes firefighting procedural plots with more serialized storylines, got a slow start, but it was noticeably boosted whenever it […]

> Michael Scott is really gone.  Technically, that’s been true since a few episodes before the end of THE OFFICE‘s last season, but with tonight’s season premiere, Office 2.0, the most well-publicized reboot of the new season, began to tell us what it’s going to be.   Which is, for now at least, a somewhat jarring […]

  THE GOOD PLACE:  Thursday 8:30PM on NBC starting 9/28 The Season 1 finale of NBC’s THE GOOD PLACE was a tough act to follow.  Michael Schur’s series pulled off the plot twist of the season, which turned out on further examination to have been hiding in plain sight all along.  We learned (2016-17 spoiler […]

  BEAUTY & THE BEAST:  Monday 9PM on CW Referring to any CW series as a “bubble show” is sort of a misnomer, because with the exceptions of The Vampire Diaries, Arrow and Supernatural, everything the network airs is pretty much on the bubble.  Even though BEAUTY & THE BEAST seemed to have hit something […]