TYRANT:  Wednesday 10PM on FX FX’s TYRANT has never been as incisive or daring as it could have been, given its incendiary setting in a fictional Middle Eastern nation on the brink of revolution, but it’s a survivor, back on the air for its third season.  After an unengaging initial run, the series remade […]

  STAR:  Wednesday 9PM on FOX (returning January 4) – In the Queue The writer/producer/director Lee Daniels makes his home in wild melodrama, and he’s had success at two extremes:  with the almost hallucinatory grittiness of Precious, and the ultra-glitz of Empire.  His new FOX series STAR is an attempt to meld both, and not […]

  THE BLACKLIST: REDEMPTION:  Thursday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel THE BLACKLIST: REDEMPTION is for all those who longed to see what The Blacklist would look like without James Spader, a group that could probably fit into a medium-sized elevator.  Ordered by NBC when the network still thought The Blacklist was going to […]

  DESIGNATED SURVIVOR has been running through showrunners like breath mints (a fourth is scheduled to join the show for Season 2, and reportedly every script makes its way through star/executive producer Kiefer Sutherland as well), so it’s not much of a surprise that the tone and even the genre of the show has wobbled […]

  GAME OF THRONES:  Sunday 9PM on HBO With tonight’s Season 7 premiere, the endgame of HBO’s GAME OF THRONES has begun, kicking off the final 13 episodes (which will be divided 7/6 over 2 seasons).  It might be called the “Don’t Screw This Up” run, as series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, now […]

  ME, MYSELF & I:  Monday 9:30PM on CBS – In the Queue CBS’s ME, MYSELF & I is a gimmick sitcom, which CBS seems to regard as necessary for single camera comedies (see Life In Pieces, or don’t).  The high-concept here is more or less This Is Us with one-liners  As in the NBC […]

  LA TO VEGAS:  Tuesday 9PM on FOX – In the Queue Broadcast TV kicks off its new scripted series year with FOX’s well-paced LA TO VEGAS, a mostly retro workplace sitcom with a small twist:  Lon Zimmet’s series takes place almost entirely on the roundtrips of the titular run, operated by the Southwest-like Jackpot Airlines. The […]

  RISE:  Tuesday 9PM on NBC – In the Queue RISE creator Jason Katims practically demands that viewers compare his new series with his classic Friday Night Lights.  The song that accompanies the opening scene sounds like it came off the Lights soundtrack, director Mike Cahill (an indie filmmaker whose best-known works are Another Earth […]