PITCH:  Thursday 9PM on FOX – Potential DVR Alert Dan Fogelman is a busy man.  He’s not only the creator of This Is Us, which debuted strongly two nights ago, he’s also co-creator (with Rick Singer) of the buzzy PITCH.  And gues what, this pilot has a twist in its final moments too. The Pitch twist is the […]

  The fourth and final season of Ray McKinnon’s Sundance series RECTIFY, perhaps the most universally acclaimed television program of the post-Sopranos era, was its most conventional.  There were few surreal stretches of memory and fantasy, the plot for the most part moved forward straightforwardly, and there were even bits of humor along the way, […]

  SCANDAL is full of characters who take one step over the line of ethics and morality, sometimes for what they’ve convinced themselves are the best possible reasons, only to find themselves in a morass they can’t escape.  The same has come to be true of the series itself, which took its fatal step when […]

  INSECURE:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO Issa Rae’s INSECURE became progressively more assured during the course of its first season, and although it wasn’t more than a moderate success, its ratings trended upward through its run, until it was outrating its higher-profile lead-in, Sarah Jessica Parker’s Divorce.  HBO has rewarded it by scheduling Season 2 […]

  THE BRAVE:  Monday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel In the Age of Trump, and with younger audiences migrating to alternative delivery platforms, the broadcast networks are making a play–some might call it their last stand–for red-state viewers, who may not be premium customers as far as advertisers are concerned, but who show […]

  GROWN-ISH:  Wednesday 8PM on Freeform – In Progress ABC’s Black-ish has been a bright spot on the broadcast landscape, the rare network family sitcom to earn both wide audiences and critical praise for its combination of political sting and emotional warmth.  A spin-off created by Black-ish creator Kenya Barris (and Larry Wilmore, an original […]

  In its second season, Noah Hawley’s FX series LEGION largely became a delivery system for set-pieces.  Some of these sequences, to be sure, were dazzling:  Hawley has become a whiz with aspect ratios, split screens, stylized sets, skewed camera angles, eccentric music choices, and all manner of visual and aural devices–at one point, he […]

  BRITTANY RUNS A MARATHON (Amazon):  Paul Downs Colaizzo, previously a playwright, makes a remarkably assured film writing/directing debut with Brittany Runs a Marathon, which features a breakout star performance by Jillian Bell.  The story is based on Colaizzo’s own friend, and revolves around an overweight woman who decides to remake her life physically and […]