BILLIONS:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime The second season of Showtime’s financial intrigue soap BILLIONS isn’t in a tremendous hurry to get started.  The story picks up a few weeks after the Season 1 finale, enough time for billionaire Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) to fix up the offices he’d ripped apart after US Attorney Chuck […]

ONE BIG HAPPY:  Tuesday 9:30PM on NBC Previously… on ONE BIG HAPPY:  Luke (Nick Zano) and lesbian best buddy Lizzy (Elisha Cuthbert) have followed through on their vow to try and have a baby together if neither is with anyone else by age 30.  But the timing is off:  Lizzy finds out she’s pregnant just […]

  JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH (Warners/HBO Max – February 12):  The title refers to the FBI informant Bill O’Neal (played here by LaKeith Stanfield) and the Illinois Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya).  Although Hampton was only 21 years old, he was so charismatic and successful–he had put together a local coalition that […]

  BLACK SAILS:  Saturday 9PM on Starz – Worth A Look The pirate action-adventure BLACK SAILS is Starz’s latest attempt to swing for the fences with ambitious original programming and finally be taken as seriously as its pay cable brethren HBO and Showtime.  This project seems intended to split the difference between Starz’s successful, but […]

  THE MICHAEL J. FOX SHOW:  Thursday 9:30PM on NBC Note:  NBC aired two episodes of THE MICHAEL J. FOX SHOW on its opening night, the pilot at 9PM followed by the first regular episode in the show’s usual 9:30PM timeslot.  Our thoughts on the pilot are here. Previously… on THE MICHAEL J. FOX SHOW:  […]

  Although frequently tortuous to watch, TOP OF THE LAKE wasn’t really Snob TV, where a Famous Filmmaker slums their way through a series.  It’s more that narrative has never been of particular interest to Jane Campion, even in her best films like The Piano or Holy Smoke, and giving her 6 hours to play […]

  The crises on HART OF DIXIE, perhaps the most amiable hour on network television, tend to be fairly low-intensity, and tonight’s midseason finale–a Hanukkah episode, of all things, not something you often see on a show where the main characters aren’t Jewish–was no exception.  The major dramatic development of the hour came when the […]

  GREY’S ANATOMY:  Thursday 9PM on ABC WHERE WE WERE:  In a plane crash.  After a difficult year in which many of our characters had to pass their medical boards and then choose/be chosen by a hospital for a permanent position–Karev (Justin Chambers) to Johns Hopkins, Cristina (Sandra Oh) to the Mayo Clinic–a group of […]