PopMatters' Scores

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For 500 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 34% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 61% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 9.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average TV Show review score: 58
Highest review score: 100 The Flag
Lowest review score: 0 Get This Party Started: Season 1
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 187 out of 187
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 187
  3. Negative: 0 out of 187
187 tv reviews
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  1. Falling Skies: Season 1
    Falling Skies' mix of compelling individuals helps to make its early use of formula less troublesome than it might have been. Later episodes develop interesting and diverse motives, as the 2nd Mass begins to figure out what the aliens are up to and how to fight them more effectively.
  2. The Mindy Project: Season 2
    These couple of episodes give hope that Kaling the writer means to continue to skewer her character’s fantasies with the same combination of intelligence and acid wit as before.
  3. The Following: Season 1
    Referencing literary works and imitating horror films may seem derivative, but by drawing from the familiar, The Following obviates the need for extensive exposition and jumps right into the action.
  4. The Strain: Season 2
    The Strain reifies its connections between political and melodramatic themes with the gory action for which the series is best known--the monsters’ neck-piercing six-foot tongues, the silver bullets’ exploding effects--in kitschy evidence during the battle against that takes up the bulk of the storage facility scene.
  5. Gotham: Season 1
    Some of the characters aren’t able to achieve the same balance between fantasy and realism as the rest of the show.... Thankfully, Mooney isn’t as central a figure here as Bullock or Gordon, who together are fully capable of carrying the series, even without young Bruce. Logue gives an especially strong performance as Bullock, an exhausted, veteran crime-fighter who remains likable and charismatic even as his various failings seem inevitable.
  6. The Good Guys: Season 1
    The Good Guys, true to its genre, presents an opposition between order and anarchy and asks the audience to embrace the apparently crazy cop who, in the tradition of American pragmatism, cuts through the red tape to get things done.
  7. 24 Hours in the ER: Season 1
    We are afforded perspectives on staff and patients alike. But, this ER runs almost too smoothly.
  8. Political Animals: Season 1
    It's more interesting when Elaine takes aim at the easy-target man's world she inhabits.
  9. The Good Wife: Season 4
    This being The Good Wife, a show renowned for complicating what might seem obvious, Alicia's new position as a kind of moral compass leads to a new series of dilemmas. Some of these are predictably topical.
  10. Hell on Wheels: Season 1
    Stick with it through the second episode: it gets moving quickly in the subsequent episodes, and turns into a grim frontier revenge saga, with intriguing personalities and interconnecting storylines.
  11. Todd Margaret: Season 1
    It's surprising that he's [Cross] written a sitcom so reliant on physical comedy, and cast himself in the rather one-dimensional, repetitive main role. The show's best lines possess a crackling absurdity.
  12. Ethel: Season 1
    Again and again, Ethel insists she doesn't like to "talk about" her self, doesn't like to be introspective. And so the film offers images for the rest of us to parse, public performances that may or may not reveal what we want to see.
  13. Anna Nicole
    Bruckner takes on the role with gusto, and she and Harron together create someone whose unthinking commitment to the pursuit of “F-U-N” (in Anna’s phrasing) achieves something close to sublimity.
  14. The Killing: Season 2
    It's more subtly, and more forcefully too, a quest for understanding, specifically an understanding of how the world works.
  15. The Amazing Race: Season 17
    The Amazing Race typically features interesting contestants from a variety of backgrounds and thrown into a high-pressure, high stakes race set in unfamiliar environments. This opening leg of Season 17 feels like a warm-up for difficulties to come.
  16. Sleepy Hollow: Season 2
    Even with selective choices of what reality to include in its fiction, Sleepy Hollow is effective, biting like a vampire, infecting with simultaneous thrill and dread.
  17. A Gifted Man : Season 1
    The general integrity of the first episode offers some hope that it won't become a Procedure of the Week melodrama.
  18. Game of Thrones: Season 2
    The new episodes present an almost a too intricate meditation on power. Game of Thrones demands that you pay attention or be left behind.
  19. Cane: Season 1
    The soap operatic set-up is both efficient and florid, laying out both familial continuity and class distinctions.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heroes: Season 3
    In their certitude, the villains are more compelling than their wishy-washy heroic counterparts. The real excitement of “Villains” is its promise to expand the series’ assortment of baddies: their unabashed queerness and freakery make for more fun.
  21. Gracepoint: Season 1
    A compelling mystery, it maintains a measured pace, inviting viewers’ patience.
  22. Community: Season 2
    It was disappointing that this premiere lacked a lot of fun, usually Community's strong suit. Still, it reminded us of the distinct joys of the first season, offering cartoonish physical comedy, densely written jokes, and obscure pop culture references.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hawthorne: Season 1
    While some subplots are trite (a nurse turns down a paramedic’s romantic overtures, saying she’s “damaged goods"), the premiere hums along whenever Hawthorne is driving it.
  24. Bored to Death: Season 3
    Despite its gratuitous nudity, double-crossing gunplay, and growing pile of corpses, Bored to Death is a remarkably gentle show and its characters surprisingly lovable.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Tudors: Season 3
    This relationship between king and subjects is the driving concern of Season Three, and marks a welcome departure from the show’s previous focus on the personal drives and desires of Henry VIII.
  26. Inside Men: Season 1
    A lean moral thriller, Inside Men considers the core impulses of such justification, and draws out severe implications with considerable skill.
  27. Whitechapel: Season 1
    Even if it slips into generic tropes here and there, Whitechapel's own veneer of nicely crafted entertainment remains intact.
  28. Dollhouse: Season 1
    Even as Dollhouse sounds like other TV shows and movies, it is also utterly strange, its premise literally ridiculous and intriguingly metaphorical.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Death Comes to Pemberley: Season 1
    Death Comes to Pemberley works so well because the characters are so perfectly realized. Affairs, unwed pregnancies, and murder all abound, but at the heart of the series is the story of a marriage.
  30. The Knick: Season 1
    While the designated flawed hero John espouses an essential grasp of the purpose of medicine and the workings of disease (“Despite what you may believe,” he tells Cornelia, “Sickness isn’t a result of poor character, germs don’t examine your bankbook”), he’s also stymied, by his own prejudices as well as money concerns. That these might take him in different directions suggests the series has some sense of the difficulty of medicine then and still.
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