All Shows

We come not to praise Rome, but to bury it. For two seasons, we watched everyman protagonists Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo as they Forrest Gumped their way through two decades of Roman history without aging a day. They lived through Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, his assassination, and Mark Antony’s eventual defeat by Octavian. This was an HBO version of events, where the “B” stands for “blood, beheadings, boobies, boinking, and blue language.” But when the crushing expense of all those sets, costumes, props, and extras (and only one major battle) caught up, Rome was history in more ways than one.

No one could have expected that this WB-cum-UPN show about approximately four-to-seven-or-so aliens living undercover in New Mexico would capture the hearts and minds of America for three stunning years of blazing success. And then it didn’t. So everyone was right. Relive three years of Max’s rapid aging, Michael’s rapid waist-expansion, and Liz’s voice-over profundities right here.

Was this glacially paced code-breaker drama just AMC’s way of punishing us for not watching their Prisoner remake?

Donnie Wahlberg was framed for murder, so he took his family on the run and moved to where nobody could find him. Including viewers. Smooth move, Ex-lax.

Forgettable.

Time for us to scrub out.

Kevin Williamson’s take on vampires created one of The CW’s most compelling dramas ever. His take on witches? Not so much.

Dear diary, they liked me better on Doctor Who.

This stupid, fluffy, and sometimes stale “comedy” with the shelf life of an open bag of chips on a rainy day made a heroine out of a neurotic, skinny shrieker-monkey who had bad affairs for reasons inexplicable to her three mismatched friends, Slutty, Prissy, and Bossy. Long-term plot “questions” were resolved neatly in the finale (Charlotte got a baby! Samantha found love! Big’s name is John! And Miranda’s heart grew three sizes that day!), but no one ever answered the questions of what wardrobe wrangler Pat Fields was smoking and whether she soaked it in formaldehyde. We didn’t like the show, really, but sometimes we did. Mostly, we rolled our eyes so much that our drugstore mascara left marks on our brow bones, and thanked the stars above that we never, ever left the house looking like that.

Despite William H. Macy and Emmy Rossum’s performances, we’re not ashamed to say we preferred the original UK version.

A cut above.

Chekhov once wrote: “Even in Siberia there is happiness.” Chekhov was wrong.

FOX took what could have been a mildly entertaining concept (two wealthy socialites try to make it in rural Arkansas) and ran it into the ground by putting episodes on nearly every night and cobbling together extra episodes out of scant new footage. The people yawned.

There once were six strangers, whose lives were somehow intertwined. Mae, Carlos, Whitney, Laura, Steven, and Damien would all end up affecting each other’s lives and making a difference — or so we heard. Word on the street is that the show really picked up around Episode 5, but the flaw in that plan is that no one would be watching after Episode 2. And so, while ABC continues to follow their touching and heartfelt stories, TWoP bids adieu to focus on shows that people actually care about watching.

After five seasons, 63 episodes, three regular recappers, and more onscreen deaths than we care to count, HBO and series creator Alan Ball laid to rest this corpse-opera about the fabulous, funereal Fishers and the fouled-up folks who tried to love them. That’s right, the show’s dead and buried. In the ground. Tits-up. This, to coin a phrase, is an ex-show. But you can still dig the recaps.