UNCLE BUCK:  Tuesday 9PM on ABC – Change the Channel ABC’s UNCLE BUCK is exactly what you’d expect from a network sitcom left on the shelf for the entire regular broadcast season, then unloaded two at a time during the summer.  As ABC sitcoms go, it is to Black-ish what Family Tools briefly was […]

> This year’s WONDER WOMAN pilot did not fly under the radar.  Produced by Warner Bros Television for NBC, it was the subject of speculation before it was even placed with a network, scrutiny while it was being produced, and analysis after it had been rejected.  With the exception of Terra Nova and Smash, it […]

  After a season or two where it seemed as though JUSTIFIED had run past its best days, burdened with villains and tangents unworthy of it, Graham Yost’s crime drama returned with a vintage 6th and final saga that brought the series back to its prime.  The show’s last rodeo may not have been as […]

  PROOF:  Tuesday 10PM on TNT Previously… on PROOF:  Brilliant, brusque cardiac surgeon Cat Tyler (Jennifer Beals), struggling with the death of her son and her own near-death experience, is recruited by dying billionaire Ivan Turing (Matthew Modine) to provide scientific proof of what, if anything, happens after death.  She sets off with intern Zedan […]

  FREAKY TALES (no distrib):  The writer/directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have returned from their profitable but unbeloved sojourn in the land of Captain Marvel to their indie roots with Freaky Tales.  While heartfelt and entertaining, the effort is also intensely derivative.  Fleck was a child of 1987 Oakland, where Freaky Tales takes place, and it’s a […]

  The fourth (and as it turns out penultimate) season of AMC’s HELL ON WHEELS was its most conventional and choppily focused.  Under showrunner John Wirth (the show’s 3rd in that post), the neo-western has abandoned its original concept of post-Civil War protagonist Cullen Bohannan (Anson Mount) as a man of murderous vengeance and turned […]

> GAME OF THRONES:  Sundays 9PM on HBO Bend the knee, everyone:  GAME OF THRONES is back. WHERE WE WERE:  Reeling from the decapitation of Eddard Stark, who until the loss of his head had seemed to be the stalwart hero of the entire saga.  It was sociopathic teenage King Joffrey (Jack Gleeson), supposedly the […]

  In its second season, MTV’s FINDING CARTER made a disappointingly dim argument for sustaining itself beyond its initial premise.  The series remains well-acted, and it has its emotionally pursuasive moments, but its season was swallowed up by plot contrivances and melodrama. Melodrama has always been part of Finding Carter‘s DNA.  It began with the […]