JANE THE VIRGIN:  Monday 9PM on CW Previously… on JANE THE VIRGIN:  Jane (Gina Rodriguez) is what the title says she is, much to the relief of her grandmother Alba (Ivonne Coli), yet still pregnant, thanks to the mistake of a doctor who accidentally inseminated her.  This naturally complicates her relationship with fiance Michael […]

  CW is treating Season 4 of HART OF DIXIE as carelessly as its characters tend to treat each other.  The show’s return has been delayed until midseason, moved to the nether reaches of Friday nights, and its order cut to 10 episodes, all of which suggests that although no one is saying so for […]

As an actor, James Franco often delivers performances that are packed in quotation marks, as though he’s an actor playing the role of an actor playing his role.  In I AM MICHAEL, however, he does serious, substantive work as Michael Glatze, a real-life one-time gay activist who became not just a fundamentalist Christian pastor, but a […]

  ONE BIG HAPPY:  Tuesday 9:30PM on NBC – Change the Channel Have you heard the one about the guy who makes a pact with his lesbian best friend that if they’re not with anyone else when they turn 30, they’ll have a baby together?  Have you heard the one about the guy who meets […]

  The first season of BROADCHURCH was a phenomenon in the UK, one that prompted the ill-fated FOX US remake Gracepoint, and also, back in England, the somewhat controversial decision to renew the series beyond its seemingly self-contained initial season.  Against the odds, though, in Broadchurch Season 2, writer/creator Chris Chibnall wove a more inventively plotted, less monotonously paced […]

  STITCHERS:  Tuesday 9PM on ABCFamily Previously… on STITCHERS:  Graduate student and science whiz Kirsten (Emma Ishta) has “temporal dysplasia,” a (fictional) condition in which she doesn’t experience the passage of time.  Somehow this has given her a robotic personality, but for unexplained reasons it also makes her the perfect candidate for the government’s Stitchers […]

  DATES:  Thursday 9PM on CW – If Nothing Else Is On… CW is barely promoting its run of the 2013 British series DATES, which the network is using (presumably for a negligible fee) to fill a few hours of its summer schedule.  It’s an oddity, the kind of show you might expect to find […]

  From the viewpoint of its newly-concluded third season, the first 2 years of Starz’s BLACK SAILS feel like a very long and somewhat misguided prologue to where the series is now.  With Michael Bay as its leading Executive Producer, Black Sails was presented as a yarn of 18th century sea piracy, built around the […]