THE FOLLOWING:  Monday 9PM on FOX (starting Jan 27) The blood-drenched, increasingly grandiose literary pretensions of THE FOLLOWING grew tiresome by the end of last season’s run.  It seemed like very good news that in the season finale, Edgar Allen Poe scholar, brutal serial killer and unaccountably irresistible cult leader Joe Carroll (James Purefoy) […]

  MAD MEN:  Sunday 10PM on AMC The final season of MAD MEN was conceived by Matthew Weiner to run, as the previous seasons had, across 14 consecutive weeks, and it was AMC’s decision (for scheduling and budgetary reasons) to break the season in half and run it over 2 years.  Nevertheless, whether by chance […]

  GIRLS:  Sunday 9PM on HBO Watching the Season 4 premiere of GIRLS on the same night as this year’s Golden Globes was a reminder of how quickly things move in today’s pop culture from being state-of-the-art, cutting-edge phenomena to… if not yesterday’s news, certainly farther back from the Twitterverse heat than tonight’s winners Transparent […]

  COLONY:  Thursday 10PM on USA (pilot available via on-demand and streaming) – If Nothing Else Is On… USA’s new COLONY falls into the category of alien-invasion science fiction, but its pilot has more in common with World War II films like The Last Metro or the recent alt-history chronicle The Man In the High […]

  THE LAST MAN ON EARTH:  Sunday 9:30PM on FOX – Potential DVR Alert THE LAST MAN ON EARTH is both excitingly original and disappointingly cliched, an odd mix that leaves its future prospects somewhat unsettled.  However it ends up, though, FOX and its creator/star Will Forte deserve credit for embarking on a show that’s […]

  THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC The back half of THE WALKING DEAD‘s fourth season began by bringing the series back to square one:  isolated figures wandering without a clear goal through an anonymous landscape riddled with zombies. The episode, entitled “After,” picked up immediately after last fall’s finale, and established quickly that […]

  THE MESSENGERS:  Friday 9PM on CW – Change the Channel CW wasn’t in any rush to get THE MESSENGERS on its air, holding it until the last month of the broadcast season, and then putting the show in the lowest-visibility slot on its schedule, the Friday 9PM hour.  The series, created by Eoghan O’Donnell […]

  DICE:  Sunday 9:30PM on Showtime – Change the Channel The journey of Andrew Dice Clay from an explosively successful poster child (and, many would say, cynical exploiter) of comedy political incorrectness to a long sentence in the showbiz wilderness and then a new career as an increasingly respected character actor, with solid recent performances […]