A return visit to SIRENS after having seen its initial episodes revealed that the series, produced and co-created (with Bob Fisher) for US television by Denis Leary, had become even more like Rescue Me without fires, now including that show’s Lenny Clarke and John Scurti recurring as the fathers of the two main characters.  […]

  THE BLACKLIST: REDEMPTION:  Thursday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel THE BLACKLIST: REDEMPTION is for all those who longed to see what The Blacklist would look like without James Spader, a group that could probably fit into a medium-sized elevator.  Ordered by NBC when the network still thought The Blacklist was going to […]

  Over the course of its season, NBC’s SHADES OF BLUE muddled its way from being a broadcast network-lite version of a gritty cable cop drama to a more conventional heist thriller.  It was flawed in both contexts, but more able to carry its weight as the latter. The series, created by Adi Hasak, was […]

  PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN (Annapurna – Oct. 13):  In the hothouse of a film festival, movies that are unrelated inevitably begin to collide with each other in the viewer’s mind.  So it’s difficult, in a festival that’s given us the extraordinary Disobedience, to give similar weight to Angela Robinson’s much frothier and thinner […]

> A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and production of episodes for the regular season:  a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover in the off-season) give plenty of notes, both helpful and otherwise, and […]

  THE NIGHT OF:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert “Noisy” is the byword of the television moment, and HBO makes noise as well as any programming service, whether its shows are laden with dragons, foul-mouthed politicians or coke-snorting record executives.  Every so often, though, the network demonstrates that it can also deliver unadorned […]

BURN NOTICE – Thursday 9PM on USA   WHERE WE WERE:  On the jailhouse steps.  Uber-evil Anson Fullerton (Jere Burns), the shrink who “burned” our hero Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) and destroyed his CIA career for years, had successfully framed Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar), the love of Michael’s life, for a bombing that killed innocent people.  […]

  WE ARE MEN:  Monday 8:30PM on CBS Previously… on WE ARE MEN:  Carter (Chris Smith), whose recent engagement stopped short of the altar, has joined a colony of men without women at a San Fernando Valley apartment complex.  Frank (Tony Shalhoub), Stuart (Jerry O’Connell) and Gil (Kal Penn) are all in various stages of […]