THE BRIDGE:  Wednesday 10PM on FX – DVR Alert FX has assumed a leadership role in the development of serious, ambitious TV drama over the past decade (The Shield, Rescue Me, The Americans), and with its new series THE BRIDGE, it takes on its largest canvas to date.  The Bridge, which is based on […]

  After three seasons, THE KILLING is still hard to get a fix on.  Technically it’s a murder mystery, but efficiently and intelligently spinning out crime stories is what it’s least good at–its narrative is notoriously overextended, sloppily plotted and reliant on bad detective work and a seemingly infinite number of red herrings.  (Even though […]

POWER:  Saturday 9PM on Starz POWER, like Empire, revolves around an African-American drug dealer who seeks respectability in the music business., but who will still commit murder when necessary to protect his interests.  Although the shows are quite different in tone–Power is presented more as a crime drama than a family soap, with drugs in […]

  MR. ROBOT – Wednesday 10PM on USA Previously… on MR. ROBOT:  Elliot (Rami Malek) is a master hacker with an assortment of antisocial and other disturbing quirks, including paranoia, depression, and perhaps schizophrenia, who self-medicates (taking both morphine and a withdrawal drug) and barely manages a friendship with Angela (Portia Doubleday).  He works for […]

  DESIGNATED SURVIVOR:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC Previously… on DESIGNATED SURVIVOR:  When the US government gathers in a single location, one low-ranking official is kept apart in case of catastrophe.  Thus Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Tom Kirkman (Kiefer Sutherland) is the only member of the administration left alive when a bomb destroys the […]

  FX’s just-concluded third season of Noah Hawley’s FARGO was its most divisive, and the criticisms came from a number of directions.  One segment was simply done with Hawley’s theme-and variations approach to the Coen Brothers’ original film, in which each season tells a new story, but one that always features a disruptive representative of […]

  JOJO RABBIT (Fox Searchlight – October 4):  The discourse about Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit has quickly become a debate between those who think its Nazi-era black comedy is authentically daring, and those who feel its purported audacity is a pretense covering a merely middlebrow sensibility.  (Note:  every person in the history of language who […]

  It’s been 23 years since the pre-Christopher Nolan version of the Batman franchise launched into the boxoffice stratosphere, and a lot has changed in the movie landscape.  (1989 is so long ago that it was a topical gag in the movie to cast Gotham City’s Mayor with an actor who looked like New York’s […]