GREAT NEWS:  Tuesday 9PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… NBC’s latest disposable sitcom GREAT NEWS hails from the House of Tina Fey, who serves as one of its Executive Producers.  Series creator Tracey Wigfield was a writer/producer on 30 Rock, and Great News, which is set behind-the-scenes at a local TV […]

  FARGO:  Wednesday 10PM on FX Noah Hawley’s two FX series provide different models of the ways a television series can be ambitious.  Legion is so broad in its stylistic universe as to seem virtually without borders; its episodes ranged in tone and structure to such an extent that they eventually encompassed animated and black-and-white […]

  FAMOUS IN LOVE:  Tuesday 9PM on Freeform (full season also available via online/VOD) – Change the Channel On the basis of its opening hour, Freeform’s new FAMOUS IN LOVE is pretty woeful stuff.  It’s the latest version of America’s contribution to the fairy tale template, the one that tells of the gleam and oh-so-naughty […]

  BETTER CALL SAUL moves with the assurance of a series that knows exactly where it’s going to end up–and so do we, since we’re aware that sad sack attorney Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) will ultimately wind up as slick Saul Goodman in the world of Breaking Bad (and then as a woeful Cinnabon manager […]

  Although Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin are still present to provide a continuing center of gravity, the HOMELAND that concluded its sixth season tonight is almost unrecognizable from the one that premiered in 2011.  That series was a dazzling mix of doomed romance and psychological spy thriller, about a bipolar CIA agent who couldn’t […]

  PRISON BREAK:  Tuesday 9PM on FOX – If Nothing Else Is On… Where was the clamor for a return of PRISON BREAK?  The show had pretty much run its course both critically and with viewers by the time it went off the air in 2009 after a 4-season run, and even at its peak […]

  THE WALKING DEAD is in danger of becoming TV’s version of The Phantom Menace: a gigantic hit that no one really likes.  The ratings, while still massive, were significantly down in Season 7, which premiered with the instantly-infamous episode that introduced villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who promptly clubbed two cast regulars to death […]

  BIG LITTLE LIES was a bait and switch of the highest order.  The show was marketed as a murder mystery, and the fragmentary flashforwards early on confirmed the idea that this was where the story was headed.  But the killing itself didn’t actually occur until the last 15 minutes of the 7th and final […]