Asking the Wrong Questions

Well, here we are at the end of another fall TV season.  There are still a few stragglers who will be making their bows in November, but for the most part the networks have delivered their bounty and it is... not great.  Of all the shows I've written about, the only ones I'm still watching are The Flash and How to Get Away With Murder (though the latter is already beginning to wear me down, its twisty plot and soapy shenanigans not doing quite enough to make up for the emptiness of its characters).  As it turned out, however, some of the more interesting work of the new season debuted relatively late, so at least we're closing out these reviews on a high note. Jane the Virgin - The premise of the CW's new hit dramedy should send any thinking person--especially women--running for the hills.  Having been raised her whole life by her strict grandmother to believe that the unplanned loss of her virginity will mar her irreparably (and having had the example of her i...

After a bunch of dramas, our second batch of new shows is made up almost entirely of comedies.  I don't tend to review comedies in these round-ups, because much more than dramas they need the time to build up their world and characters before you can really get a sense of what they're capable of (think back to almost any classic comedy of the last two decades and I think you'll find that the first half-season, at least, is mostly teething episodes--there are a handful of early Friends episodes, for example, that I've never bothered to watch, and I was a devoted fan of that show in my teens).  But somehow, most of the new comedies this falls have made for meaty discussion, so whether or not any of these shows pan out--and my hit rate for comedies has been pretty dismal in the past--I did end up having things to say about them.  (Progress report on previously-discussed shows: I've given up on Forever , and I think that Madam Secretary will be going the same way this...

Even if we're not quite there, it feels as if we're on the verge of a golden age for televised novel adaptations.  For years, irate book fans responded to every bowdlerized, incoherent film adaptation of their favorite works by claiming that TV was the natural medium of book adaptations--the famous "miniseries on HBO" meme, which keeps cropping up despite the fact that there are so many other channels and content venues producing good material (and that HBO doesn't actually make that many miniseries).  But unlike British TV, which has never met a bestselling or classic novel it couldn't turn into a six-part mini, American TV has been slow to catch up, only reaching for novels as its source material if it could wring them of everything but their basic concept and turn them into a procedural.  Slowly but surely, however, this seems to be changing.  True Blood blazed the trail, and Game of Thrones 's mega-success proved that there was gold in them thar books...