A guy–almost always a middle-aged white guy–walks out onto a stage and delivers a 10 or 15 minute stand-up routine about current events, to the cameras and a live audience of a few hundred people.  Then he sits behind a desk and for another 10 minutes or so, he does a pre-scripted (sometimes pre-taped) […]

  BELIEVE:  Sunday 9PM on NBC Previously… on BELIEVE:  10-year old Bo Adams (Johnny Sequoyah) is one special little girl, with superpowers that include telekinesis and the ability to foretell the future and read people’s minds.  Her powers, like those of so many Chosen Ones before her, can be used to help, but they also […]

  MAD MEN:  Sunday 10PM on AMC Fresh episodes of MAD MEN will likely still be airing more than a year from now, so all the obituaries for the series that have been appearing lately run the risk of sounding like “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead” when they’re repeated in 2015.  The only reason […]

  It seems fair to ask just what the hell happened to NEW GIRL this season.  A series that seemed to spring out of its pilot womb in complete command of its oddball voice and marvelous cast could suddenly barely take a step in the right direction, the laughs dried up, and the ratings plunged:  […]

  In its second season, THE AMERICANS continued to be a expertly crafted saga of betrayals, both political and personal.  Tonight’s chilling season finale, written by series creator Joe Weisberg and his co-showrunner Joel Fields, and directed by Daniel Sackheim, brought all its themes together brilliantly, and set the stage for what should be an […]

  Season 4 of HBO’s epic GAME OF THRONES had the good fortune to cover the back half of George R. R. Martin’s third novel in the series, “A Storm of Swords,” which is perhaps the most thrill-packed few hundred pages in the entire saga.  That made for a 10-hour ride with few chances for […]

  EXTANT:  Wednesday 9PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… CBS’s EXTANT has been at the center of a Hollywood tentpole-sized marketing campaign for months, so it’s a bit disappointing to find that the show itself is just a moderately compelling hodgepodge of sci-fi motifs, without even the ambitious scale of the network’s […]

  DOMINION has performed well enough in the ratings that there’s a fair chance of it being renewed (especially since it’s evidently produced on the cheap).  This is fairly remarkable, since even by the currently debased standards of Syfy, the post-apocalyptic Biblical sci-fi fantasy is notably awful (it makes its lead-in, the merely not-bad Defiance, […]