> ENLIGHTENED – Mondays 9:30PM on HBO – If Nothing Else Is On… As a writer, Mike White is drawn to stories of delusion.  Even though their tones (and commerciality) are widely divergent, his screenplays from Chuck & Buck to The School of Rock, The Good Girl to Nacho Libre share protagonists who are firmly […]

> WARNING:  If You Watch THE LEAGUE For Its Plot Revelations(?), Spoilers Below THE LEAGUE is no longer the best sitcom on TV that no one’s ever heard of.  The show has become consistently, increasingly popular, so much so that it’s no longer riding in the ratings on the coat-tails of its FX lead-in It’s […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots Not even the presence of Michael Chiklis and Elizabeth Perkins could make VINCE UNCENSORED endurable.   Deservedly consigned by CBS to its trash-bin, this isn’t one of those pilots you’ll be likely to hear about again.  The storyline of Vince Uncensored uses a contrivance to get to an […]

  It is, make no mistake, a wonderful thing that FOX (with the financial cooperation of studio Warner Bros) is bringing FRINGE, one of television’s most distinctive and imaginative shows, back for a 5th and final 13-episode season.  It also has to be said, though, that Season 4 wasn’t the show’s best.  (Note:  SPOILERS will […]

  PARTNERS: Monday 8:30PM on CBS – Worth A Look It’s impossible not to compare the new fall comedies PARTNERS on CBS and The New Normal on NBC.  Even though the CBS show is multi-camera and NBC’s is in single camera format, both are broad, sentimental comedies about what are essentially blended gay/straight families. New […]

  After two seasons on the air, WILFRED remains the most confounding show on television–which presumably is just as its makers want it.  The season finale, written by the developer of the US version of the series, David Zuckerman (from a story by Zuckerman and Scott Prendergast) and directed by house director Randall Einhorn, had […]

    FRIENDS WITH KIDS:  Worth A Ticket – Sitcom, In A Good Way   We live in a pop culture where the recent Emmy Award nominees are so clearly superior to the films up for this past year’s Oscar that it’s not even worth arguing about. (Mad Men vs The Artist?  Game of Thrones […]

  LEGION:  Wednesday 10PM on FX – DVR Alert The answer to what Noah Hawley could do for an encore after Fargo is:  continue to spectacularly overperform.  Fargo was and is a totally unexpected piece of great television, an adaptation that’s not an adaptation of one of the quirkiest masterworks in the American cinema canon, […]