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 […]

  BIG LITTLE LIES:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert We no longer blink when movie stars sign on for TV work, and this week’s arrivals are Oscar winners Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, not to mention Shailene Woodley, whose 7-hour HBO project BIG LITTLE LIES is so star-heavy that Adam Scott, Alexander Skarsgard […]

  THE GOOD FIGHT:  Episodes Release Each Sunday On CBS All Access – Binge-Worthy If THE GOOD FIGHT were actually a CBS drama, the spin-off of The Good Wife would instantly become the network’s best show–and one of the most promising anywhere on broadcast TV.  But while a slightly edited version of the opening episode […]

  BILLIONS:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime The second season of Showtime’s financial intrigue soap BILLIONS isn’t in a tremendous hurry to get started.  The story picks up a few weeks after the Season 1 finale, enough time for billionaire Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) to fix up the offices he’d ripped apart after US Attorney Chuck […]

  DOUBT:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… As highly prized as the talents of Shonda Rhimes are, it takes the continuing line of her failed imitators to remind us just how difficult it is to duplicate her touch.  Conviction and Notorious are two tries that went splat earlier this season, […]

  Viewed in its 10-hour entirety, THE YOUNG POPE encompassed much of the good and bad of Auteur TV.  HBO, by all appearances, wrote a (very large) check to the arthouse filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino as creator, director and co-writer of the series, and then left him alone to make his art.  He emerged with a […]

  GIRLS:  Sunday 10PM on HBO As HBO’s GIRLS begins its 6th and final season, it somehow feels older than it actually is.  That’s the way it is with television now:  the revolutionary can become the familiar in a blink.  It had already felt, with the arrival of half-hours like Atlanta, Better Things and Insecure, […]

  LEGION:  Wednesday 10PM on FX – DVR Alert The answer to what Noah Hawley could do for an encore after Fargo is:  continue to spectacularly overperform.  Fargo was and is a totally unexpected piece of great television, an adaptation that’s not an adaptation of one of the quirkiest masterworks in the American cinema canon, […]