TYRANT:  Tuesday 10PM on FX Previously… on TYRANT:  Barry Al-Fayeed (Adam Rayner) is a contented Pasadena-area pediatrician–and he’s also Bassam, the younger son of the longtime ruler of a Middle Eastern military dictatorship, who fled that life 20 years ago.  He travels with his wife Molly (Jennifer Finnigan), son Sammy (Noah Silver) and daughter […]

  UNDER THE DOME:  Monday 10PM on CBS The broadcast networks don’t get much in the way of pleasant surprises these days, but last summer’s UNDER THE DOME was an exception.  CBS’s “event” adaptation of Stephen King’s massively long novel was intended as an ambitious entry in the quiet world of summer programming, and it […]

  In its 6th season, NURSE JACKIE went all the way back to square one.  There were cosmetic differences, of course–Jackie Peyton (Edie Falco) is now divorced, and increasingly alienated from her daughters Grace (Ruby Jerins) and Fiona (Mackenzie Aladjem).  But for the most part, the season was Jackie redux, as she cunningly (and sometimes […]

  THE LEFTOVERS:  Sunday 10PM on HBO – Potential DVR Alert Part of the HBO mystique–what helps keep it so not-TV-ish–is the caliber of shows it doesn’t put on the air.  An adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, directed by Noah Baumbach and with a cast headed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ewan McGregor?  Not good […]

  If nothing else, this first half of 2014 has been marked as The Year of Eva Green.  Green will probably never be a mainstream Hollywood star–there’s something too feral and broken about her for wide audiences to be comfortable in her presence–but in 300:  Rise Of An Empire and in Showtime’s PENNY DREADFUL, she’s […]

  CALIFORNICATION knew going in that this 7th season would be its last, and we’ve grown used to series in that position, from Breaking Bad to Friends to–God help us–Lost, making a special effort to provide a final run with extra impact, tying up loose ends and providing a summation of what the show has […]

  THE LAST SHIP:  Sunday 9PM on TNT Previously… on THE LAST SHIP:  It’s taken just a few months for a new pandemic to decimate the world’s population, and half a million people are still dying every day.  On board the USS Nathan James, which had been cut off from all communication in the Arctic […]

  RECKLESS:  Sunday 9PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… In the Charleston of CBS’s summer potboiler RECKLESS, it seems like just about everyone is sleeping with everyone else, or wants to.  That absurdly overheated quality is the most likable thing about what’s otherwise a fairly conventional legal procedural, which comes from a […]