VEEP:  Sunday 10PM on HBO You wouldn’t expect Armando Iannucci’s VEEP to change much from season to season, and you’d largely be right.  Notwithstanding its four-letter words and bustling cinema verite screwball style, Veep is the most conventional of HBO’s comedies, a workplace sitcom about a group of mostly officious idiots that happens to […]

  THE FOSTERS:  Monday 9PM on ABCFamily Previously… on THE FOSTERS:  San Diego cop Stef (Teri Polo) and charter school assistant principal Lena (Sherri Saum) are a gay couple raising a blended family:  Stef’s biological son Brandon (David Foster), adopted twins Mariana (Cierra Ramirez) and Jesus (Jake T. Austin), and now foster children Callie (Maia […]

  ALMOST HUMAN:  Monday 8PM on FOX (after a Sunday Nov 17 preview) – Worth A Look The ALMOST HUMAN pilot has a whole lot of concept.  The show was created by J. H. Wyman, a senior writer/producer on Fringe (the pilot is directed by Brad Anderson, who also directed many Fringe episodes), and the […]

  Among the many, many places where cable has been eating the lunch of the broadcast networks is in the anarchic, shoestring-budgeted world of adult late-night comedy, much of it animated, where Adult Swim has been routinely beating the late-night talk shows in young demos with lunatics-running-the-asylum work like Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, […]

  BROADCHURCH:  Wednesday 10PM on BBCAmerica Previously… on BROADCHURCH:  In the small Dorset town of Broadchurch, the body of 11-year old Danny Latimer has been found on the beach, just as the local police force has, coincidentally, just hired brooding Detective Inspector Alec Hardy (David Tennant), fresh off a bad recent experience with another high-profile […]

  Steve McQueen (the filmmaker) doesn’t take it easy on audiences.  His first feature Hunger provided an excruciatingly detailed look at the fatal hunger strike of the Irish convict Bobby Sands, and he followed it with Shame, a cooly unsexy portrait of the ravages of sexual addiction.  His new film 12 YEARS A SLAVE is […]

  REVOLUTION:  Wednesday 8PM on NBC Can REVOLUTION save itself?  It had the splashiest start of any drama last season, leaping to a 4.1 rating on the back of The Voice.  (That’s even higher than this week’s launch of The Blacklist in the same slot.)  But from there it tumbled downward all season, losing more […]

  Lorne Michaels has never been happy when primetime overruns push the start time of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, and he must like it even less in the DVR era, when many people on the East Coast will miss the last 27 minutes of tonight’s episode forever.  But that’s the cost of airing college football on […]