MURDER IN THE FIRST:  Monday 10PM on TNT Previously… on MURDER IN THE FIRST:  San Francisco homicide detectives Terry English (Taye Diggs) and Hildy Mulligan (Kathleen Robertson) are investigating two crimes connected to arrogant high-tech tycoon Erich Blunt (Tom Felton), the violent deaths of both his biological father and his former employee and lover.  […]

  COUNTERPART:  Sunday 9PM on Starz, starting 1/21/18 – In the Queue Tales of alternative earths are an increasingly popular form of fiction these days, possibly because our actual Earth is currently so difficult to handle.  Just as The Man In the High Castle runs the subgenre through tropes of old-time war movies, Starz’s new […]

  X-MEN:  DAYS OF FUTURE PAST:  Buy A Ticket – For Once, The Script Is As Mighty As the CG After the money-making meatball that was Godzilla, X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST serves welcome notice that a movie can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, be crammed with CG-generated spectacle, and still have room for an […]

  HBO’s RUN turned out to be a treatise on the limitations of the elevator pitch.  Everything about the show that could be described between the lobby of an office building and, say, its 20th floor (let’s assume the occupants were socially distanced) seemed irresistible.  The premise:  a pair of onetime lovers follow through on […]

  WEIRD LONERS:  Tuesday 9:30PM on FOX – If Nothing Else is On… WEIRD LONERS belongs to the sitcom subspecies of quirky singles comedy, which has given us New Girl (the pilot for Weird Loners was directed by Jake Kasdan, who’s also a New Girl director/producer) but also things like A To Z and Marry […]

  COVERT AFFAIRS:  Tuesday 10PM on USA   WHERE WE WERE:  At the CIA, where Annie Walker (Piper Perabo), the young, beautiful languages expert who supposedly works for the Smithsonian, is actually an agent.  (She met a guy on the beach while on vacation… it’s not worth getting into.)  Specifically, Annie works in the Domestic […]

  DRACULA:  Friday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… A century of vampire movies and TV shows has taught us that undead is by no means the same as lifeless, but NBC’s new excavation of DRACULA doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.  Produced on a lavish scale (at least in the […]

  QUEER (A24 – TBD):  Luca Guadagnino has unearthed glamour in the blood-soaked dance troupe/witches’ coven of Suspiria and the cannibal romance of Bones and All, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that his seedy 1950s Mexico City and South America of Queer glistens with swank.  Queer is based (by Justin Kuritzkes, who wrote Guadagnino’s Challengers) […]