Season 4 of ONCE UPON A TIME was a rather misshapen one.  The Fall cycle was a tie-in to Disney’s blockbuster Frozen (creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz swore it was their idea and not a corporate mandate), and although it didn’t bring out the best in the series, it delivered in the ratings.  […]

  What is it with endings?  Why do they rattle the brains of even the greatest of television’s creative minds?  Half-endings, too, which is what tonight’s finish to the first half of MAD MEN‘s 7th and final season was, the remaining 7 hours to sit on an AMC shelf until a year from now.  (That […]

  Damon Lindelof is fascinated by the elements of storytelling, sometimes to the detriment of the story itself.  It was fitting that a motif of WATCHMEN, both in its Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons 1987 graphic novel version and in Lindelof’s HBO sequel/spin-off, was the construction of watches, because this new version could feel like a fantastically […]

  The fourth season of NBC’s THIS IS US wasn’t a standout, relatively speaking, which in a way made the expertise of its execution more clear.  Even when it’s in second gear, Dan Fogelman’s series is constructed and acted so well that it holds its grip on viewers quite well  (This Is Us looked particularly […]

  GLEE went out with dignity–and given that this was Glee, that was far from a sure thing.  Over its 6 years (at least 2 more than wisdom would have allowed), Glee made so many disastrous turns into overblown silliness, meanness (sometimes outright cruelty), inconsistency, repetition and camp that more than anything else, tonight’s series finale […]

  THE FOSTERS had a very busy first season (or half-season, depending on whether you count ABCFamily’s practice of ordering 10 summer episodes and then 10 more for winter as one season or two). There was, to begin with, the basic situation of the Foster family itself, with two lesbian parents, Lena (Sherri Saum) and Stef […]

  Rarely has a TV series crashed as quickly and completely as ABC’s RESURRECTION.  It premiered just 10 months ago with a 3.8 rating in the 18-49 demo, yet last week it managed only an 0.8 (actually up a tenth from the previous week).  In other words, 80% of the audience that was initially enthusiastic about […]

  After a season or two where it seemed as though JUSTIFIED had run past its best days, burdened with villains and tangents unworthy of it, Graham Yost’s crime drama returned with a vintage 6th and final saga that brought the series back to its prime.  The show’s last rodeo may not have been as […]