POWER:  Saturday 9PM on Starz After its long respite in the past with the likes of The White Queen, Da Vinci’s Demons, Dancing On the Edge and Magic City, Starz returns to the 21st Century with the new POWER, a drama so contemporary that it boasts (as he’s billed) Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson among […]

  THE NIGHT SHIFT:  Tuesday 10PM on NBC Previously… on THE NIGHT SHIFT:  On the 7PM-7AM shift at San Antonio Medical Center, Dr. TC Callahan (Eoin Macken) is the rebellious yet brilliant ex-Army medic who’s willing to break all the rules, damn it, because all he cares about are his patients.  His ex, Jordan Alexander […]

  MISTRESSES:  Monday 10PM on ABC Tonight’s season premiere of last summer’s guilty pleasure MISTRESSES referenced the old line about not fixing what ain’t broken, which was odd, because under showrunner/Executive Producer Rina Mimoun, the show seemed to be doing just that.  In the premiere, at least, written by Mimoun and directed by Ron Lagomarsino, […]

  While not as loudly buzzy as Girls, SILICON VALLEY has been far more popular, indeed HBO’s highest-performing new comedy in quite a while (the fact that it follows the massive Game of Thrones on the network’s line-up hasn’t hurt, of course). Unlike a lot of comedies, both network and cable, that need some time […]

  The farther it gets from the historical person named Leonardo Da Vinci, the better Starz’s DA VINCI’S DEMONS tends to be as a series.  In its 2d season, it went very far–all the way to South America, in a completely fictional Indiana Jones-ish quest for the mystical and all-powerful “Book of Leaves,” not to […]

  A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST:  Not Even For Free – They Don’t Include “Die Laughing” Seth MacFarlane, out from behind his high-concept animated and fantasy premises, has a surprisingly retro, even conservative sense of humor.  For all the many, many four-letter words in A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST, and […]

  CROSSBONES:  Friday 10PM on NBC – Potential DVR Alert Viewers of Starz’s Black Sails will find much that’s familiar in NBC’s summer pirate adventure CROSSBONES.  We’re back in the Caribbean, this time in the early 18th century, and there’s a powerful pirate king, a dangerous newcomer who saves his skin by memorizing a secret […]

  MALEFICENT:  Watch It At Home – Only Jolie Casts a Spell The conflicting agendas driving the new MALEFICENT don’t leave much room for the movie itself.  Like Wicked and Once Upon A Time, it’s a revisionist fairy tale, specifically one that casts a sympathetic, proto-feminist eye on an iconic evil sorceress.  But it’s also […]