Sometimes one piece of casting is what it takes to turn a TV series around, and for SALEM, that was the arrival, about midway through the season’s 13 episodes, of Stephen Lang as the Reverend Increase Mather, father of series regular Cotton (Seth Gabel).  Increase, a witch-hunter so fanatical that he didn’t much care […]

  THE STRAIN:  Sunday 10PM on FX – Potential DVR Alert Although capable of finer things (notably his Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth), the expert filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is one of those directors–you could call them Tarantinians–with a deep fondness for neo-schlock.  It’s resulted in projects like the Hellboy series, and also Pacific Rim, where del […]

  WELCOME TO SWEDEN:  Thursday 9PM on NBC – Potential DVR Alert WELCOME TO SWEDEN has one of the more unusual provenances of any show on a US broadcast network.  It was commissioned by Swedish television, where it aired last spring–and which explains its heavy use of subtitled Swedish dialogue.  Although it includes some familiar […]

  WORKING THE ENGELS:  Thursday 9:30PM on NBC – Change the Channel As summer sitcoms go, WORKING THE ENGELS makes Undateable look like the return of Seinfeld. It’s an inert pile of unfunny cliches, dysfunctional family division. The contrivance (calling it a “premise” would give it too much dignity) is that Papa Engel, a lawyer, […]

  THE BRIDGE:  Wednesday 10PM on FX THE BRIDGE was simultaneously one of the best and most frustrating series of last season.  Loaded with atmosphere, superbly acted by an expansive cast headed by Demian Bichir and Diane Kruger, and with plenty of fascinating quirks in its characters and dialogue, it was also a structural and […]

  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 […]

  FINDING CARTER:  Tuesday 10PM on MTV – Potential DVR Alert Most YA drama, in one way or another, is about the emotional dislocation of being a teen, and in recent years, the reigning trope has been to externalize the theme supernaturally:  the teen discovers that he/she is a vampire, an alien, a witch, a […]

  With a full season of experience and audience feedback under its belt, it’s not unusual for a TV series to improve in its second season.  What’s considerably less typical is for the reverse to happen.  Yet whether due to the addition of new showrunner Brad Kern (although series creators Sherri Cooper and Jennifer Levin […]