The fourth and final season of Cinemax’s BANSHEE felt more like an epilogue, or even a spin-off, than a climax.  It wasn’t the time jump between Seasons 3 and 4, or the shortened 8-episode order, or even the physical relocation from North Carolina to Pennsylvania (for tax credit reasons).  The focus, the center of […]

  VICE PRINCIPALS:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO – In the Queue Your feelings about HBO’s new VICE PRINCIPALS are likely to be determined by your instinctive reaction to the name Danny McBride.  For a decade now, since the indie movie The Foot-Fist Way, McBride and his writing/producing/directing partner Jody Hill have been turning out variations […]

  THE EXORCIST:  Friday 9PM on FOX – Potential DVR Alert Like Noah Hawley’s ongoing take on Fargo, the new FOX version of THE EXORCIST, created for television by Jeremy Slater (one of the unhappy group credited for the script of last year’s awful Fantastic Four reboot) wisely uses the underlying material as inspiration for […]

  RANSOM:  Saturday 8PM on CBS – Change the Channel There’s literally one thing worth knowing about CBS’s new RANSOM, and here it is:  it’s the first scripted broadcast network series in quite a while to be scheduled for initial airing on Saturday nights, as opposed to being dumped there after failing elsewhere on the […]

  FEUD:  BETTE AND JOAN:  Sunday 10PM on FX – Potential DVR Alert It’s a testament to Ryan Murphy’s clout that FEUD:  BETTE AND JOAN even exists.  8 hours set in the early 1960s about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, a pair of Oscar-winning stars in their 50s who were considered has-beens when they made […]

  MANHUNT: UNABOMBER:  Tuesday 10PM on Discovery – In the Queue Discovery’s 8-hour docudrama miniseries MANHUNT: UNABOMBER features its Ted Kaczynski (Paul Bettany) only in the final sequence of its opening 2 hours, a decision that gets the show off to an unfortunately pedestrian start.  As the title indicates, the focus isn’t on the charismatic […]

  BLINDSPOTTING (no distrib):  At Sundance, often one doesn’t seek perfection so much as promise, and there’s plenty of the latter in Blindspotting, written by its stars Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal.  They have a lot on their minds, from the gentrification of Oakland to police shootings of unarmed black men to the dynamics of […]

  STATION 19:  Thursday 9PM on ABC – In the Queue STATION 19 probably marks the end of an era at ABC:  unless a pilot developed under her watch is picked up, it will be the last new Shonda Rhimes series at the network, as she moves on to her huge new deal at Netflix.  […]