> Worth A Ticket. Of all the “Friends” who kept America company in its collective living room for a decade, David Schwimmer has taken the most concerted step away from the work that made him famous.  While Courtney Cox, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc and Lisa Kudrow have mostly continued in TV comedy, and Jennifer Aniston’s […]

  ANGER MANAGEMENT:  Thursday 9:30PM on FX – Change the Channel The most interesting thing about ANGER MANAGEMENT–by far–is the deal that put it on the air.  When Charlie Sheen found himself at liberty, following his low-key and barely even noticed departure from 2 1/2 Men, he clearly wanted a shot at a payday that […]

  EXTANT:  Wednesday 9PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… CBS’s EXTANT has been at the center of a Hollywood tentpole-sized marketing campaign for months, so it’s a bit disappointing to find that the show itself is just a moderately compelling hodgepodge of sci-fi motifs, without even the ambitious scale of the network’s […]

  Although the ratings continued heading downward, there were heartening developments in the back half of THE WALKING DEAD‘s Season 9.  Under new showrunner Angela Kang, the show took some steps to jar itself loose from the rut it gotten itself into.  The departure of star Andrew Lincoln may have kick-started the need to explore […]

  Heroes probably still sets the bar for disastrous second seasons of initially enjoyable TV shows, but this year’s REVENGE came uncomfortably close.  ABC more or less acknowledged that fact when it (in a genteel, corporate way) fired series creator and showrunner till now Mike Kelley from the upcoming Season 3 (fellow Executive Producer Sunil […]

  It was an odd SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE all around tonight, starting with the fact that host Chris Hemworth was there to plug The Avengers:  The Age of Ultron, which won’t even open for 2 more months.  Hemsworth isn’t exactly known as a comic stylist, so although he had a few enjoyably goofy moments, the […]

  GREY’S ANATOMY:  Thursday 8PM on ABC The occasional misguided NY Times profile aside, it’s a good time to be Shonda Rhimes.  With an entire night of ABC’s primetime real estate put into her care, she’s achieved a level of renown and celebrity few TV writer/producers have had–not even her fellow 3-series moguls, Dick Wolf […]

  The original, Las Vegas-set CSI didn’t just spawn a mini-industry of its own spin-offs, but it can fairly lay claim to being one of the most influential shows of its generation, more or less inventing the subgenre of high-tech procedural that’s populated every network over the years since it began.  The series rose from […]