I liked her too (and for reasons known only to himself, Kelley clearly preferred her to Jessalyn Gilsig). But I thought making Ryan's character a lawyer was a cheat — a way to drag stories into the comfort zone of the courtroom instead of resolving them in the school, where they originated.

Not only that, but as far as I could tell, the mortality & morbidity conferences took place whenever Alfred Molina felt like having one, not just on Monday mornings. So, apart from being confusing, the title made no sense.
(That said, I thought it was Kelley's most promising work in a while. Molina and Ving Rhames…

That was an aborted crossover that Kelley & Chris Carter engineered, but one of the networks torpedoed.

Alas, it's more pragmatic than that — a lot of them are owned by Fox, whose commitment to home video has lagged behind some of the other studios' throughout the DVD era. NYPD BLUE just got sublicensed to Shout Factory, so I guess there's a slim chance more MTM or DEK shows could follow. The real mystery to me is…

One of Kelley's producers pointed out that he would write "up" one side of an issue in one act and then "down" the other side in the next. By BOSTON LEGAL he was settling for easier targets, a move that was only partially justified by the political landscape.
Check out the supporting guest cast in that first John…

Doniger was great with those depth of field shots. The only other really visual PEYTON director was Harvey Hart, who joined the rotation after they added the third weekly segment. Hart was even more obsessed with framing action within foreground objects, but it felt more superficial when he did it; with Doniger it…

Yes, that was Fox's attempt to make lightning strike twice, and I think the failure of LONG HOT SUMMER (coupled with PEYTON's ratings drop) is what put the kibosh on both serials and melodramas. Both THE INVADERS and FELONY SQUAD were originally conceived as twice-a-week shows but by the time they went before the…

One addendum I wanted to mention is that the clips were chosen specifically to illustrate some of the points I made about the series. In particular, the first one is worth watching. It opens with a three-and-a-half minute single-take shot, featuring about 15 principal actors with speaking parts and a bunch of…

Basically no, apart from a smattering of YouTube clips. But the first 65 episodes were released on DVD, and Netflix does carry those.

I've seen them all, Mac, more than once.  We just have different opinions!  Not that there's anything wrong with that, as they say.

Yes.

In my case, I tried to choose the best examples of different kinds of stories THE FUGITIVE told (and, also, episodes that I wanted to write about).  I didn't pick any turkeys but I didn't try to think in terms of all-time favorites, either.  For instance, "Come Watch Me Die" is top-ten worthy, but it's kind of similar…

Exactly.  They were still figuring out how to "end" a series.  Today it seems insane to squander momentum by running a finale after three months of reruns.  (It'd be hilarious if AMC said, "Here, watch these seven again, come back in December for the end of BREAKING BAD!")  But at the time they were concerned that no…

Morse is especially great in the finale — you can see him realize as soon as he gets the one-armed man's rap sheet that he had it wrong the whole time.  There's nothing in the dialogue about it, either; it's all subtext, and he's playing it that way for the rest of the episode.

Gerard was a very complex character — any time he articulates his reasons for obsessing over Kimble, it's hard to tell how much he really believes and how much is rationalization.  I think one of the clearest indications that the show considered Gerard to be a nutjob is in the interactions he has with Donna Taft…

A number of shows aped THE FUGITIVE's man-on-the-run format, even when there wasn't necessarily something to run from: THE INVADERS, THE IMMORTAL, etc.

Right.  Lots of plot backflips there which, today, would enrage people along the lines of the LOST or BSG finales.  Although the first half of the two-part finale, which finally brings Kimble into Gerard's clutches, is really gripping.  Maybe they should've just ended it there, with a freeze-frame on Kimble and a…

But I would argue that Dutch and Claudette WERE the equals of Vic, in terms of the complexity of the characters and the quality of the performances.  And I liked the fact that each of the three had crime-solving skills, and approaches, that the other two lacked; that kept you from ever identifying too wholly with (or…

That's a good point. In an earlier, even more dyspeptic draft of this piece, I had a line comparing BB's use of fate/coincidence (specifically in reference to the plane crash) very unfavorably to the kind of butterfly-effect, everything-is-connected structure of less-profound-than-they-think-they-are movies like CRASH…

I read it differently though: Walt was a sociopath from the beginning, and his fanatical attachment to his family is simply possessiveness. (And keep in mind, Walt makes a move on the hot principal, although lust is probably not the primary motive, just as the "love" he expresses for Skyler and Walt Jr. seems to be a…