GANG-RELATED:  Thursday 9PM on FOX Previously… on GANG-RELATED:  Ryan Lopez (Ramon Rodriguez) is an LAPD detective on the city’s inter-agency anti-gang task force, working for Sam Chapel (Terry O’Quinn) .  He’s also, secretly, a spy for the Acosta gang, having been raised by its leader Javier (Cliff Curtis) and his family after Ryan’s parents […]

  UNDATEABLE:  Thursday 9PM on NBC – Change the Channel UNDATEABLE, whose episodes NBC is burning off two at a time on summer Thursday nights, may not be quite bad enough to earn the obvious “unwatchable” or “unbearable” labels its title seems to demand–not at the tail end of a season in which NBC gave […]

  HALT AND CATCH FIRE:  Sunday 10PM on AMC – Potential DVR Alert HALT AND CATCH FIRE won’t remind you much of The Social Network.  (Or for that matter of Silicon Valley.)  Set in 1983 Texas and written by first-time series creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers (the series will be run by the […]

  THE NIGHT SHIFT:  Tuesday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel It’s as though NBC and series creators Jeff Judah and Gabe Sachs (they were among the showrunners of the 90210 reboot, and wrote the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie) deliberately set out to make the least distinctive series possible with THE NIGHT […]

  What is it with endings?  Why do they rattle the brains of even the greatest of television’s creative minds?  Half-endings, too, which is what tonight’s finish to the first half of MAD MEN‘s 7th and final season was, the remaining 7 hours to sit on an AMC shelf until a year from now.  (That […]

  THE NORMAL HEART:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert When Larry Kramer’s just-barely-semi-autobiographical THE NORMAL HEART was first written and performed in 1985, it was as “ripped from the headlines” as any episode of Law & Order, a furious, mournful expose about the AIDS crisis as it was happening just outside the theater […]

  Considering how defiantly unlike the rest of broadcast television HANNIBAL is, not to mention its love of metaphor, it made sense for the show’s Season 2 finale to air entirely on its own, separate from the last episodes of just about every other network series, and 2 days after the end of the regular […]

  BLENDED:  Not Even For Free – A Bad Sitcom Episode, 4 Times As Long On the Adam Sandler Movie Pain-o-Meter (patent pending), the new BLENDED ranks about midway between the not-so-bad Just Go With It and the soul-crushing horror of That’s My Dad and Jack & Jill.  It’s Sandler wearing his sentimental, romantic hat, […]