Single Ladies

Brothers & Sisters was an American television drama series that aired on ABC from 2006 to 2011, following the lives of the Walker family who run a successful business in Los Angeles.

"Parade's End" is a British television miniseries that aired in 2012. It is based on a series of novels by Ford Madox Ford and is set during World War I. The story revolves around a wealthy Englishman named Christopher Tietjens, who is in a troubled marriage with his adulterous wife, Sylvia. He also falls in love with a young suffragette named Valentine Wannop, who becomes his confidante and ally during the war.

Intensely cerebral, narrated more or less in the style of a Latin American magic-realist novel which shows the conclusion before the story begins, "Damages" TV show strangely fulfills the immanent promise in cable television programming, appealing very strongly to what the poet Milton called "fit audience though few." "Damages" series'unmistakable style, sophistication, and subtle sizzle are spellbinding, and the writers have crafted heroes you love to love and villains you love to hate with a team of attorneys working both sides of the continental divide between good and evil. Unabashedly stealing its premise from the Bernie Madoff case, "Damages" asks and answers, "What if you were Madoff's antagonist?" Glenn Close plays Patty Hewes, the high-powered and equally high-priced attorney determined to bring down ponzi-schemer Louis Tobin, portrayed by Len Cariou. The word "perfect" appears in most critics' discussions of their performances. A New York Times reviewer aptly summarized, "It's impossible to overestimate how delicious Ms. Close is as this fiercely driven, mercurial and manipulative woman. " In a stroke of casting genius, the producers chose Lily Tomlin to quicken the character of Mrs. Tobin, long-suffering wife of the arch-villain; the audience remains in suspense about her true colors and motives, suspecting she may be "Damages'" answer to Lady Macbeth. Martin Short also stars as Tobin's family attorney.

One of two intense medical dramas NBC introduced in the fall of 2009, "Mercy" had all the advantages its one-named rival "Trauma" did not. First, it had talent behind the scenes. Liz Heldens from "Friday Night Lights" created the show and led the writers, proving once again that the best way to dramatize the real world is to show it realistically"”ugliness and all. Second, it had attitude and guts to stay true to its revolutionary premise, the well-informed notion "that nurses remain [not only] more generous caregivers, but that they are more intuitively apt, smarter, more committed and as technically able as their [physician] superiors, with none of the accompanying arrogance." In a winner-take-all ER smackdown, you always would go all-in with the Mercy Hospital nurses. The main character, nurse Veronica Flanagan Callahan, has just returned from a tour in Iraq, where she clearly learned more in each day than the pompous, presumptuous doctors learned in all five years of medical school. Of course, Veronica gets neither the respect nor the reward she deserves, but "Mercy" dangles the possibility of true love as just recompense for Veronica's skill and compassion. Taylor Schilling plays Veronica with exactly the right balance of toughness and vulnerability, skillfully juxtaposing her consummate skill as a nurse with her intrepid ingenuousness in matters of the heart. If only "Mercy" had survived into a second season, all the tangled threads in the story might have come to their proper denouement. If only.

You could think of "Pretty Little Liars" TV show as "Gossip Girl" goes to the suburbs, except that the vapid world of Park Avenue apartments is, frankly, really boring compared to Rosewood, Pennsylvania. Based on a series of young adult novels by the same name, "Pretty Little Liars" shows the genuinely dramatic, morally-challenged lives of four teen-age girls, a cliquish little group"”Hannah, Aria, Emily, and Spencer. They could be renegades from the American Girls doll collection, except that they are frighteningly rich and more-than-tragically flawed. Hannah, for example, shoplifts, inviting her mother to complain, "I buy you everything you need to be popular," and leaving everyone to assume that's the last word on the subject. Conscience lives somewhere well beyond the city limits, exacting big penalties from those who transgress. As the show opens, Ali, leader and style-setter of the group, disappears a la "Blair Witch." The real action begins, though, three years after Ali's mysterious disappearance, when the "Pretty Little Liars" begin receiving text messages that very strongly suggest someone is watching them"”especially in their most compromising moments. Adding piquancy and spice to the digital displays, the sender signs them cryptically "A."

Jon Hamm stars as a hedge-fund manager secretly unraveling who makes increasingly desperate choices to maintain his perfect suburban facade in this sleek Apple TV+ drama.