RAISING HOPE:  Friday 9PM on FOX With series creator Greg Garcia spending his time these days (God help him) at his new The Millers, there’s been a change of regime at RAISING HOPE, which had its belated Season 4 debut tonight with back-to-back episodes.  The new showrunner is Mike Mariano, who’s been with the […]

  There were more cameo stars in the first 15 minutes of tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE than regular cast members, and since SNL has enough regulars for a small city, that’s saying something.  It all got Paul Rudd’s third stint as host off to an energized start, which the show predictably proceeded to dribble away […]

  DOWNTON ABBEY:  Sunday 9PM on PBS In its fourth season as the most successful regular series in PBS history, DOWNTON ABBEY operates as smoothly as a well-staffed ancestral estate.  Even though the larger subject of the series is the creeping spread of democracy into the centuries-old system of English aristocracy, which would eventually undermine […]

  A surprisingly commercial concoction by Sundance standards, Gillian Robespierre’s OBVIOUS CHILD doesn’t feel very much unlike the pilot for a cable dramedy.  That’s not meant as any kind of dire criticism; TV could use more smart, funny female voices like Robespierre’s and star Jenny Slate’s (Slate is already featured in a multitude of high-class TV shows, […]

  House of Cards Season 2 Eps 1-3 Review Here. Eps 4-7 Review Here. Eps 8-10 Review Here. It’s a paradox of the Netflix version of HOUSE OF CARDS that in many ways, its least interesting character is the one at its center.  Pick the wildlife metaphor of choice:  Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) is a […]

  Showtime’s EPISODES has improved markedly from its first season, which mostly invited viewers to join British television writers Sean and Beverly Lincoln (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) as they turned their noses up at the woeful idiocy of American TV comedy and its practitioners.  (It was a subject series creators David Crane and Jeffrey […]

  SILICON VALLEY:  Sunday 10PM on HBO Previously… on SILICON VALLEY:  Richard Hendrix (Thomas Middleditch) is a computer programmer with dreams of inventing the next big billion-dollar thing–and he may have actually done it, with an algorithm that allows for compression and duplication of video, music, etc without loss of quality.  Offered $10M for his […]

  After two full seasons, it’s become clear that Mindy Kaling’s THE MINDY PROJECT may never be a “well-made show.”  Characters pop in and out–it was recently announced that receptionist Betsy (Zoe Jarman) is the latest regular who won’t be back in the fall–or they change randomly–was it ever clear why Jeremy (Ed Weeks) needed […]