THE AFFAIR:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime THE AFFAIR was one of last year’s most confounding shows.  It was at once carefully observed and gimmicky, precise and willfully vague, compulsively watchable and annoying. The problem wasn’t so much the show’s format of telling its overlapping events repeatedly, from the often conflicting perspectives of adulterous Noah […]

  Noah Hawley handily retained his status as the Third Coen Brother with a second masterful season of FARGO.  This go-round may have been even more ambitious than the first:  not only did Hawley once again capture the spirit of the original film, but this time he added 1979-era period detail and an allegory of […]

  Every year at about this time, Marvel faces a contradiction.  Even as it has a giant movie dominating multiplexes worldwide (this year, of course, it’s Captain America: Civil War, which is approaching the $1 billion mark), its TV business struggles.  Over the past few weeks, network cousin ABC has canceled hiatus series Agent Carter, […]

  The second season of Starz’s OUTLANDER was often disconcerting for a viewer unfamiliar with Diana Gabaldon’s bestselling novels.  That may be one reason why the series, embraced by Starz (along with the hit Power) as one of its signature properties, and gifted with a 2-season renewal order, didn’t fare particularly well in the ratings […]

  PITCH:  Thursday 9PM on FOX – Potential DVR Alert Dan Fogelman is a busy man.  He’s not only the creator of This Is Us, which debuted strongly two nights ago, he’s also co-creator (with Rick Singer) of the buzzy PITCH.  And gues what, this pilot has a twist in its final moments too. The Pitch twist is the […]

  The fourth and final season of Ray McKinnon’s Sundance series RECTIFY, perhaps the most universally acclaimed television program of the post-Sopranos era, was its most conventional.  There were few surreal stretches of memory and fantasy, the plot for the most part moved forward straightforwardly, and there were even bits of humor along the way, […]

  SCANDAL is full of characters who take one step over the line of ethics and morality, sometimes for what they’ve convinced themselves are the best possible reasons, only to find themselves in a morass they can’t escape.  The same has come to be true of the series itself, which took its fatal step when […]

  INSECURE:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO Issa Rae’s INSECURE became progressively more assured during the course of its first season, and although it wasn’t more than a moderate success, its ratings trended upward through its run, until it was outrating its higher-profile lead-in, Sarah Jessica Parker’s Divorce.  HBO has rewarded it by scheduling Season 2 […]