THE PASSAGE:  Monday 9PM on FOX FOX’s THE PASSAGE does to Justin Cronin’s intricate, elaborate trilogy of postapocalyptic thrillers what Hollywood has traditionally done with literary fiction, flattening the books in the most conventional way possible.  This wasn’t the original plan, or even the second:  Ridley Scott’s production company acquired Cronin’s books with the […]

  Only in the world of RAY DONOVAN would a season’s (more or less) happy ending commence with the chainsaw dismemberment of corpses, but that’s Showtime’s twisted family saga.  The headline of Season 6 was the show’s relocation from Los Angeles to New York, which hardly seemed affect its DNA at all.  In fact, at […]

6:30 We’ve arrived at that strangest phenomenon of awards season, the night when we collectively grant the 88 nonentities of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (none of them filmmakers, many of them not even critics, and some of them of dubious principle) meaningful sway over the Academy Awards.  That will be even more true this […]

  COUNTERPART:  Sunday 9PM on Starz Starz’s COUNTERPART is both TV’s most cerebral thriller and its most cerebral sci-fi, a very serious story of espionage that happens to take place between two parallel versions of Earth where virtually every inhabitant has a physical (but not psychological) double, and the border between the two Earths is […]

  The first half of The Walking Dead‘s 9th season included so many major changes that its ratings continuing their general downward trend rather than collapsing entirely may count as a sort of moral victory, even though the numbers are now at series lows.  New showrunner Angela Kang had 8 episodes to cover a whole […]

  DIRTY JOHN:  Sunday 10PM on Bravo Bravo recently finished a 2-season run of Imposters, the story of a con artist who seduced victims into marriage, only to steal all their money.  Clearly the network knows what it likes, because in Imposters’ stead we have Dirty John, which tells a story remarkably close to that […]

  ESCAPE AT DANNEMORA:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime Although the star currency of producer/director Ben Stiller and leading players Benicio del Toro, Patricia Arquette and Paul Dano doubtless were responsible for the 7 hours of ESCAPE AT DANNEMORA being produced by Showtime, the limited series is far from a glossy big-name vehicle.  As an actor, […]

  Hardly anyone has been watching KIDDING, which makes Showtime’s decision to renew the show for a second season a sign of their commitment either to indie movie sensibility or to being in business with Jim Carrey.  In either case, the renewal gives the series a year to decide whether to work past its seemingly […]