Before The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling had a fruitful career writing teleplays in the early 1950’s. One of his earliest successes, Patterns (1955), was aired on a program named Kraft Television Theatre. The popularity of the play was so enormous that a second encore performance was aired the same week of its release, and it was written as a feature film the following year. Given its impressive history and my love of Serling’s writing, I was really looking forward to watching the the film. However, I was surprised that I did not enjoy myself as much as I was expecting. While the film demonstrates a lot of great dramatic moments that Serling is known for, the simplicity of the editing and camerawork really made the piece underwhelming. Certain images had so much potential to be utilized to service the actual plot, but it ultimately felt as if director Fielder Cook relied too heavily on the story’s earlier success as a teleplay.

Patterns tells the story of Fred Staples, an engineer brought into a large industrial company Ramsey & Co. in order to bring about new ideas and policies. He immediately produces a friendship with Bill Briggs, the company’s vice president. As Staples becomes acclimated to the company, he discovers that Walter Ramsey, the company’s president, has brought him on as competition to Briggs. From here, Ramsey begins to play multiple mind games with Staples and Briggs in an effort to force Briggs into a resignation. The film’s conflict becomes a battle between corporate practices and simple human decency.

Shonda Rhimes now has a fourth series running on ABC this past season. Joining Scandal, Grey's Anatomy, and How To Get Away With Murder is the new series The Catch. The series is based on a series of novels by Kate Atkinson and was actually created by Jennifer Schuur. And while The Catch distinguishes itself rather nicely from the usual Rhimes formula, you can still expect the bed-jumping antics that Rhimes is so obsessed with. It's the one thing that all four shows have in common. It doesn't matter whether she's a writer, creator, or just a producer; there's never been an episode of a series with her name on it that doesn't have plenty of sex. In this case it's a sad distraction from what turned out to be a rather clever show.

Alice Vaughan (Enos) helps run one of L.A.'s elite private investigation and security firms. She was engaged to Christopher Hall (Krause) whom she has been with for a year. In the pilot it all comes crashing down. Christopher's real name is Ben Jones, and he's been running a con the entire year. He's gotten close to Alice in order to put himself and his partner Margot (Walger) in a position to steal from the firm and its wealthy clients. The sting backfires and the firm is saved, but that's not going to be the end of the story. Alice decides she's going to track him down and put him away for what he tried to do. But when she does track him down in the middle of another sting, he claims his feelings for her were real and tries to warn her against digging too deep.

The title might be a bit misleading. Alicia is not so "good" these days. She's tougher and more willing to make the hard choices. She's more cutthroat in court and even when it comes to asserting her position in the firm and with her cheating husband. This is not the "stand by your man" show it might have appeared to be when it began. It's evolved, and that only makes for better television. And now that it has finally come to an end, it's easy to see that Alicia is now just as calculating and manipulative as her husband ever was. If the show was going to stay on the air, there might have been need for the title to change. Of course, I always took it as ironic anyway. Fans will have all the time in the world now to debate such subjects.

The series is not really a lawyer procedural, at least not on the surface. The show was never about anything else but Alicia and the people who would come in and out of her orbit. Of course, one of the most important of these was always Will Gardner, played by Josh Charles. For the first five years the show was about their complicated relationship. For most of that time there was a back-and-forth both in Alicia's feelings and in her sometimes illogical actions. But Charles left the show in Season 5, and there has absolutely been a bit of a void in both the show and Alicia's life. She has become far more cold and calculating. It's almost as if the last bit of feeling died with Will. She's still dealing with it in the final season. Fans of Josh Charles and his character will be overjoyed to hear that he had a return for the final episode. Of course, he's just an image in Alicia's head, but fans will respond to that material. In fact, it leads to the season's best episode as Alicia daydreams about how her life would have gone with both Peter (Noth) and Will and a new player. That new player is Jason Crouse, and he's played by Supernatural Daddy Jeffrey Dean Morgan.