BROADCHURCH – Wednesday 10PM on BBCAmerica One of the first things shown in the Season 3 premiere of BROADCHURCH is a looming close-up of a tear rolling down a crime victim’s face, so we know little has changed in that perpetually brooding Dorset town.  However, while Season 2 of Chris Chubnall’s series was a direct […]

  PREACHER:  Monday 9PM on AMC Think of PREACHER as American Gods without the aspirations to greatness.  Both shows detail the gory interactions between (more or less) ordinary humans and supernatural beings; both tackle religion as an integral part of their pulp action; both feature jet-black humor.  Under Bryan Fuller’s supervision, though, Gods is painterly […]

  VEEP keeps setting new challenges for itself, and surpassing them.  Last season, it underwent a change at the top when series creator Armando Iannucci decided to move on, and new showrunner David Mandel kept the trains running as hilariously as ever.  This year, it imploded its own paradigm, exploring what its political satire would […]

  POWER:  Sunday 9PM on Starz American Gods and Outlander may lean more to the Prestige end of Peak TV, but Starz’s only true original hit is the gangster soap POWER, which brought the network to new ratings heights when it moved to Sundays last season.  Tonight’s Season 4 premiere, written by series creator Courtney […]

  Season 4 of THE ORIGINALS had the chance to emerge from the shadow of its departing parent The Vampire Diaries–there was even a 5-year time jump to distance the two shows–but it didn’t really happen.  For most of its length, the season was a variation of the same pattern that Originals has followed since […]

  THE MIST:  Thursday 10PM on Spike – Change the Channel THE MIST is far from the most imaginative or robust of Stephen King’s works.  King has rarely been accused of too much concision, but he was only able to wring out enough material from this premise for a novella; the title conveys just about […]

  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 […]

  BETTER CALL SAUL reminds us that a gripping tale about well-drawn characters can hold audiences even if it’s not the story they thought they wanted to see.  Although it’s an off-shoot of Breaking Bad, Saul rarely has high-octane action sequences to compare with Bad‘s.  Much of the time, it exists entirely outside conventional genre, […]