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 […]

  THE EXPANSE:  Tuesday 10PM on Syfy – If Nothing Else Is On… The one thing we can tell conclusively about Syfy’s new series THE EXPANSE from its first hour is that it’s in no hurry.  The hour, which aired as a special preview on Monday night before the series moves to its regular Tuesday […]

  Nobody saw Season 2 of YOU’RE THE WORST coming.  Season 1 of Stephen Falk’s series had been high-risk enough, a rom-com that spat on the genre’s conventions while also quietly incorporating them, centered on a couple notable for their narcissism, self-destructiveness and general sense of delusion.  Falk, and his stars Aya Cash and Chris […]

  In an era when even network sitcoms often try to Say Something Meaningful, let’s take a moment to appreciate THE LEAGUE, which devoted 7 prosperous seasons to ingeniously and hilariously being nothing but rude.  Jeff Schaffer and Jackie Marcus Schaffer’s series gathered together a half-dozen expert comic minds (Mark Duplass, Katie Aselton, Nick Kroll, […]

  SCREAM QUEENS was 13 consecutive hours of shrill campiness, and it was only fans of shrill camp who turned out for it–and they were far lower in number than FOX and the Ryan Murphy brain-trust had hoped.  As the MTV reboot of Scream had previously demonstrated, slasher movies don’t lend themselves to being extended […]

  TELENOVELA:  Monday 8:30PM on NBC starting January 4 – If Nothing Else Is On… Simply put, TELENOVELA is what Jane the Virgin would be if Jane’s vain, airheaded but good-hearted actor father Rogelio were the main character–actually, if every character were more or less Rogelio.  The show, which NBC previewed tonight to give it […]

  At what point does unconventional storytelling become perversity for its own sake, a collection of curlicued narratives that operate like the showrunner version of The Emperor’s New Clothes?  It’s a question that came up often in connection with Damon Lindelof’s Lost, especially toward the end of its ultimately frustrating run, and even though THE […]

  THE WIZ LIVE was the smoothest, best-cast and best-sung yet of NBC’s annual Broadway musical pageants, although it had its own issues.  The network, and producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan, made a demographic choice in picking The Wiz as their latest production.  Although a Broadway hit, The Wiz isn’t generally considered part of […]