30 ROCK:  Thursday 8PM on NBC WHERE WE WERE:  Jack (Alec Baldwin) was divorcing his now-freed North Korean prisoner wife Avery (Elizabeth Banks).  Jenna (Jane Krakowski) was engaged to her Jenna-impersonator boyfriend Paul L’Astname (Will Forte).  Liz (Tina Fey) was, somewhat surprisingly, still with boyfriend Criss (James Marsden), and even more surprisingly, former page […]

  THE CLOSER:  Monday 9PM on TNT   WHERE WE WERE:  The LAPD, where Atlanta emigre Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick), having triumphed over the initial prejudices of her all-male squad, has forged a well-earned reputation as the person a guilty suspect would least want to face in an interrogation room. WHERE WE […]

THE NIGHT SHIFT:  Monday 10PM on NBC THE NIGHT SHIFT was a workmanlike performer for NBC last summer, but its promotion to The Voice‘s lead-out on the network’s midseason schedule says more about the empty shelves at NBC than about the show itself, which remains a (very) sub-Grey’s Anatomy mix of surgery and romance. The […]

  The second season of Lena Dunham’s GIRLS has been as polarizing as anything on TV since the conclusion of Lost; with its relatively low viewership, it’s sometimes felt as though literally every person who watches the show has been writing about it.  The season finale, written by Dunham with fellow Executive Producer Judd Apatow […]

  FX’s FOSSE/VERDON was a triumph of narrowcasting, a showbiz hall of mirrors about a showbiz hall of mirrors.  That was never more so than in its final installment, where it met its meta-destiny by depicting Bob Fosse (Sam Rockwell) depicting a just-slightly fantasized version of his own life and death in All That Jazz.  […]

> Tonight’s Grammy Awards were inevitably somewhat haunted by the awful loss of Whitney Houston barely 24 hours earlier, a tragedy that seemed to have been going on for a decade yet was still shocking when it came to its fruition.  Nevertheless, the show found time to include innumerable music numbers, some of them saluting […]

  BILLIONS:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime The fourth season of a successful series can be an inflection point.  By the time Season 4 begins, the show’s makers know what works, but it’s still early enough that the talent isn’t beginning to itch for their next big things.  It’s easy enough to glide along the path […]

  It may not be fair, but it’s awfully hard not to compare the second seasons of KILLING EVE directly with HBO’s Barry, since both were comedies-with-drama/dramas-with-comedy about hired killers that aired on virtually the same Sunday nights.  Many of us watched the latest installments of each series in the span of the same few hours.  […]