DARK MATTER:  Friday 10PM on Syfy – Change the Channel You can easily imagine the first episode of Syfy’s new DARK MATTER as being the pitch that sold the series, and it also sounds like the start of a joke:  6 people and an android wake up on a spaceship…  (In fact, the show […]

  BIG LITTLE LIES was a bait and switch of the highest order.  The show was marketed as a murder mystery, and the fragmentary flashforwards early on confirmed the idea that this was where the story was headed.  But the killing itself didn’t actually occur until the last 15 minutes of the 7th and final […]

  Calling a season of AMERICAN HORROR STORY “grounded” is like calling a batch of moonshine smooth:  it’s still going to make your eyes water on the way down.  But creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk set CULT in something that resembled our real world, certainly as compared to ultra-baroque previous installments like Freak Show […]

  A recurring storyline in FX’s TRUST tracked the obsession of J. Paul Getty (Donald Sutherland) with the sumptuous Los Angeles museum that would bear his name, which was ultimately revealed to be a gigantic monument to its own pointlessness.  Series creator Simon Beaufoy couldn’t have intended that as a mirror to his own show, […]

  Although frequently tortuous to watch, TOP OF THE LAKE wasn’t really Snob TV, where a Famous Filmmaker slums their way through a series.  It’s more that narrative has never been of particular interest to Jane Campion, even in her best films like The Piano or Holy Smoke, and giving her 6 hours to play […]

  Frank Darabont has had a busy couple of weeks, although not necessarily in a good way.  He launched TNT’s MOB CITY, his first project since being thrown off AMC’s The Walking Dead after less than two seasons as creator/showrunner, to ratings that started out as disappointing and only got worse.  Then, earlier this week, […]

  BALLERS:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – Change the Channel BALLERS is alarmingly ramshackle by HBO standards.  Of course, it’s got enough A-list lineage to justify it getting on the air several times over, with genuine movie star Dwayne Johnson in the lead, and most of the Entourage production team attached, including Mark Wahlberg, this […]

  SIGNIFICANT MOTHER:  Monday 9:30PM on CW – Change the Channel CW doesn’t air scripted half-hours in its regular season line-up, and it’s been trying its hand with them over the summer when there’s little to lose.  No one is watching its Thursday British import Dates, but it’s a surprisingly nimble set of mostly two-actor, […]