Welcome to Random Roles, wherein we talk to actors about the characters who defined their careers. The catch: They don’t know beforehand what roles we’ll ask them to talk about.

After seeing how much fun little sibling The CW is having with its Arrow adventures and hand-me-down Flash costumes (and actors), CBS is following the course of so many other older brothers and getting back into superheroes. Today, the network made a series commitment to Supergirl, an adaptation of the popular DC…

The season finale of Defiance may be the first episode of television to indicate a post-Game Of Thrones mentality in television. HBO's phenomenon will likely have a major effect on television, and the most obvious of those effects will probably be following its lead in killing off major characters. It's with that in…

It took AMC six years to find a commercial success commensurate to the critical accolades earned by those twin towers of prestige television, Mad Men and Breaking Bad. But in the early months of 2013, the network watched as The Walking Dead became the biggest show on television, a ratings-dominating force to be…

Arrow is already a strong contender for the title of TV’s most ludicrously convoluted backstory. In his five years lost on that island, Oliver Queen mastered archery, which is fairly easy to believe, since otherwise there wouldn’t be a show. But he also became fluent in multiple languages, picked up enough technical…

The New Normal debuts tonight on NBC at 10 p.m. Eastern. It moves to its regular timeslot—9:30 p.m. Eastern—on Tuesday.

Some consider the STARZ hit Spartacus a glorified skin-and-sin show. Others might dismiss it as a low-budget swords-and-scandal saga. But beneath the show’s veneer is a beating heart that transcends genre and speaks to issues of power, loyalty, corruption, and people’s innermost desires. Lucy Lawless, who plays…

There’s money in superheroes. Tights and superpowers are all the rage in Hollywood, thanks to the success of the Batman and Iron Man movies, among others, so is it any surprise that television is trying to grab a piece of the action? But instead of looking to comics for working examples of strong serialized superhero…

This fall, we’ve got so many writers who’ve seen these pilots that we thought getting two takes on each show would be helpful to you. The first review is the “official” TV Club review, and the grade applies to it. But we’ve also found another reviewer to offer their own take on the program. Today, Rowan Kaiser, who’ll…

What makes for a superhero story? If your answer is “a bunch of crazy stuff that happens!” congratulations! You could be a writer for No Ordinary Family (or The Cape). On the other hand, cancellation is likely, so that's probably not an option. Still, after the excessive care taken by No Ordinary Family in its first…

Give this much to No Ordinary Family: the threat of cancellation has helped it realize the kind of show that it wants to be. And that kind of show is a balls-out, borderline-nonsensical, generic superhero show. Which, I will grant, is by-and-large much better than the first half of the season's generic family drama,…

The last time No Ordinary Family went into a lengthy hiatus, over most of December, it had almost as much plot and quality momentum as it did before this month's hiatus. It came back with an immediate retraction of its cliffhanger (Daphne losing her memory) and a really terrible episode as well. As a reward, it…

Perhaps No Ordinary Family tried too hard to appeal to the masses at its beginning and didn't actually manage to appeal to anyone. That's a pretty accurate analysis of its first half-season, and it's one which Michael Chiklis shares. If the last few episodes are any indication (and given that it's sweeps month, they…

No Ordinary Family hasn't decided what it wanted to be. It's worked as three different shows. The one that it's been pitched as, and has attempted most commonly, is the hour-long dramedy about the American family discovering itself via superpowers. As a pilot and origin story, this worked pretty well, but it's borne…

What kind of show No Ordinary Family wants to be has always been somewhat debatable. I've been pretty certain that it wanted to be a sitcom, but as soon as I wrote a few hundred words on the subject, they've gone in different directions with each episode since. But someday soon, it will be unleashed! That day is not…

What can you do?

Television is an inherently artificial medium. Well, most media are, but television has it worst. The combined pressures of episode length and serialization give it a specificity of form that, say, novels and films lack, since they're done when they're done and can add or subtract scenes much more easily than a…

Tonight's No Ordinary Family was not promising. It was just a handful of episodes ago that we had the sitcom trope of a plot with the family coming to visit. Back then, it was evil in-laws. This time, it's a deadbeat brother. It's not like one is any less cliché than the other, so doing them so close to one another is…

In Which No Ordinary Family Descends Into Self-Parody…

So this is what it looks like when No Ordinary Family tries. Instead of intentionally spinning its wheels, tonight's episode went half-speed ahead. No angst about whether powers should or shouldn't be used. More importantly, the Silver Age comics vibe from the pilot is back. The main characters are actually having fun…