Season 1 of THE MAGICIANS had plenty of flaws, but lack of ambition wasn’t one of them. In a way unseen on Syfy since the days of Battlestar Galactica, The Magicians wanted to be about everything: Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, Doctor Who, the very concept of the supernatural as escapist entertainment, the […]
GREY’S ANATOMY doesn’t get much attention these days, not even compared to its creator Shonda Rhimes’s shinier Scandal—Grey’s is just a soap–but after 10 years, it still knows how to pull off a big episode. The fall finale, written by Co-Executive Producer William Harper and directed by Tony Phelan, effectively kicked off a long […]
This season, HAVEN delved deeply into its own mythology, with mixed results. Haven‘s own situation is unclear, existentially speaking: it received a super-sized 26-episode order from Syfy earlier this year, with 13 episodes to air in 2014 and the rest at some as-yet undetermined date next year that could end up being in the […]
The crises on HART OF DIXIE, perhaps the most amiable hour on network television, tend to be fairly low-intensity, and tonight’s midseason finale–a Hanukkah episode, of all things, not something you often see on a show where the main characters aren’t Jewish–was no exception. The major dramatic development of the hour came when the […]
VINYL watchers, HBO feels your pain. Late in a run that matched low ratings with little buzz or critical enthusiasm, the network took the unusual step of not just firing co-creator/showrunner Terence Winter, but of publicizing that decision before Season 1 even finished airing, despite the fact that HBO and Winter have a history […]
The concept of a “finale” as an event calling for special plot revelations and narrative shockers is almost irrelevant to SCANDAL, where every episode brings massive twists. This is a show, after all, set in a world where the sitting President and Vice President of the United States have now recently committed murder–and not […]
Even as ABC’s Agents of SHIELD suggests the limits of corporate/entertainment synergy, it’s been working out just fine for the same network’s ONCE UPON A TIME. Whether the idea originated with the show’s network, studio or (as they claim) producers, melding Disney’s Frozen with the Once melenge of fairy tale, myth and pop culture […]
New showrunner Brad Kern (working with series creators Sherri Cooper and Jennifer Levin) has made plenty of changes to BEAUTY & THE BEAST, but mostly they haven’t been improvements. The gothic romanticism of Season 1 (and every other rendition of the tale) has been largely gone, replaced by a colder action-movie aesthetic. Season 2 […]