PARTNERS:  Monday 9PM on FX – Change the Channel Anyone who’s seen the promos on FX over the past several weeks has known what was coming:  PARTNERS is a sitcom with the charm of an IRS audit.  It’s really less a TV show than an illustrated business deal, the latest in the assembly line […]

  MANHATTAN:  Sunday 10PM on WGN America Previously… on MANHATTAN:  Starting in 1943, the New Mexico desert housed a mysterious, ultra-secret military and scientific operation code-named The Manhattan Project, its mission to create the first atomic bomb (or as they called it, the “gadget”).  There were two opposing designs for the gadget.  The better-funded and […]

  A serialized drama without major stars, a familiar genre or a grabby premise simply can’t afford to take half its season figuring itself out.  (Having a title that says absolutely nothing about what the series is about doesn’t help either.)  That almost certainly sealed the fate of HALT AND CATCH FIRE–although it’s AMC, so […]

  Remarkably little happened during the first season of POWER.  (It’s already been renewed for a second session, that is if you continue to believe that Starz doesn’t give 2-year orders that pretend to be 1-year terms plus instant renewals.)  Sure, sex was had and people (mostly anonymous) were killed, but at a time when […]

  HELL ON WHEELS:  Saturday 9PM on AMC HELL ON WHEELS has found a cozy spot for itself on Saturday nights, where the older audience available for TV-watching has given it comfortable total viewer numbers, if less impressive 18-49s.  (AMC will be running reruns of Turn after this season’s Hell episodes, which may suggest where […]

  CROSSBONES, despite some hoopla when it was first announced, turned out to be a series hardly anyone wanted to watch.  Adjusting for the fact that Starz is only in 1/3 of US households, even that network’s Black Sails was ahead in the year’s piratical sweepstakes, despite Crossbones airing on NBC and featuring the series […]

  THE FLASH:  Tuesday 8PM on CW starting October 7 – If Nothing Else Is On… PLAYERS:  Series Creators/Executive Producers Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg and Geoff Johns, the first 2 of whom are also creators of Arrow, from which this Flash is a spin-off (he was introduced in an Arrow arc, and Stephen Amell makes […]

  BAD JUDGE:  Thursdays 9PM on NBC starting October 2 – Change the Channel PLAYERS:  Non-Writing Executive Producers Will Ferrell and Adam McKay (and Anne Heche).  Star Kate Walsh.  Series creator Chad Kultgen (mostly a novelist–Jason Reitman’s new dramedy movie Men, Women & Children is based on his book–although he was also a writer on, […]