TOP OF THE LAKE:  Monday 10PM on Sundance Channel There’s a scene in the second hour of TOP OF THE LAKE, the miniseries co-written (with Gerard Lee) and co-directed (with Garth Davis) by Jane Campion, the filmmaker behind The Piano, Holy Smoke, An Angel At My Table, Bright Star and other idiosyncratic art films, […]

  BATES MOTEL:  Monday 10PM on A&E The idea of a pilot is to provide a template for the series that’s to come, but while the first hour of BATES MOTEL is accomplished and well-acted, it’s difficult to tell what kind of show it plans to be.  The premise is straightforward enough:  a prequel (although […]

  The second season of Lena Dunham’s GIRLS has been as polarizing as anything on TV since the conclusion of Lost; with its relatively low viewership, it’s sometimes felt as though literally every person who watches the show has been writing about it.  The season finale, written by Dunham with fellow Executive Producer Judd Apatow […]

  As a series, Cinemax’s BANSHEE has been notable for the sheer knock-down, drag-out-edness of its action scenes.  One episode started with a bungled robbery which led to a chase that must have lasted 10 minutes, and when hero ex-con turned fake-sheriff of Banshee, PA Lucas Hood (Antony Starr) faced down an MMA fighter who […]

  THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE:  Not Even For Free – While You’re Watching… Poof!  It’s Gone It would have been a neat trick if Steve Carell could have pulled off as clear a Will Ferrell role as the lead in THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE.  But Ferrell’s brand of flamboyant, childish, deluded yet vulnerable vaingloriousness just […]

  It took me just under 6 weeks to get through the 13 hours of HOUSE OF CARDS, the first original Netflix series.  That’s a little less than half the time a regular weekly run would have taken, although nowhere near the weekend binge-viewing that some were planning when all the episodes of Season 1 […]

  ARMY WIVES:  Sunday 9PM on Lifetime Lifetime’s venerable ARMY WIVES returned for its seventh season tonight, but really this will be the 2.0 version of the show.  Most of the original cast is gone this season or minimized to recurring (only Catherine Bell, of the original core group of spouses, is returning as a […]

  THE CLIENT LIST:  Sunday 10PM on Lifetime No one would include Lifetime’s THE CLIENT LIST on a short (or for that matter, lengthy) list of the highlights of our current remarkable era of cable television drama.  In almost every way, it’s a very standard, run-of-the-mill, unexceptional one-hour domestic piece, with a veteran network TV […]