HELIX:  Friday 10PM on Syfy – If Nothing Else Is On… Just about every network, cable and broadcast, is in the science-fiction business these days in one way or another, and weirdly enough the only one that seems to have been left behind is Syfy, which has been waiting a long time for its […]

  The writing team of David Wain and Michael Showalter (Wain directs) certainly knew that THEY CAME TOGETHER would be far from the first parody of romantic comedy movies to come along.  Date Movie opened back in 2008, Friends With Benefits, although it had other fish to fry, featured a dead-on film-within-the-film satire that starred […]

  HANNIBAL:  Friday 10PM on NBC With the exception of Twin Peaks, HANNIBAL may well be the strangest drama ever to air on a broadcast network.  Created for television by Bryan Fuller as a prequel in the Thomas Harris canon to Red Dragon, it mixes mannered, hushed, often extended dialogue sequences with loving, lingering scenes of […]

  It was a somewhat underpopulated 8th and final season for PSYCH.  Maggie Lawson, the show’s female lead Juliet O’Hara, was off shooting Back In the Game most of the time, and Kirsten Nelson’s Chief Vick of the Santa Barbara Police had been relieved of her duties at the end of Season 7, so both […]

  SALEM:  Sunday 10PM on WGN America – If Nothing Else Is On… There’s more than vanity to the desire of just about every cable network to have at least one original scripted series (although that’s part of it).  There’s also a clear dollar and cents value to original scripted programming, which pays off in […]

  THE BLACKLIST was a hit before it was much of a show, and it’s still decidedly uneven.  That was underscored again by tonight’s season finale, which killed off–well, apparently; you never know with this series–at least one regular and grievously injured more, but put very few cards on a table that could have used […]

  CROSSBONES:  Friday 10PM on NBC – Potential DVR Alert Viewers of Starz’s Black Sails will find much that’s familiar in NBC’s summer pirate adventure CROSSBONES.  We’re back in the Caribbean, this time in the early 18th century, and there’s a powerful pirate king, a dangerous newcomer who saves his skin by memorizing a secret […]

  THE LAST SHIP:  Sunday 9PM on TNT – If Nothing Else Is On… Post-apocalypses are a dime a dozen on television these days, so a new one had better be something special.  The one in TNT’s new THE LAST SHIP arrives by way of a generic new plague that isn’t as scary or original as it needs […]