AGENT CARTER:  Tuesday 9PM on ABC Under showrunners Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas, the second season of ABC/Marvel’s retro comic book adventure AGENT CARTER, at least in the early going, makes a less strenuous effort to fit into the larger Marvel universe, and the result is more streamlined and smoother than Season 1. The […]

  ONE BIG HAPPY:  Tuesday 9:30PM on NBC – Change the Channel Have you heard the one about the guy who makes a pact with his lesbian best friend that if they’re not with anyone else when they turn 30, they’ll have a baby together?  Have you heard the one about the guy who meets […]

  JUSTIFIED:  Tuesday 10PM on FX Final seasons, as we all know, can be tricky, but JUSTIFIED seems to be in strong shape as it enters its last lap.   Justified lost a bit of its mojo last year, the victim of some inadequate villains and scattered plotting (the whole Mexican druglord subplot seemed to come […]

  LEGENDS OF TOMORROW:  Thursday 8PM on CW – In the Queue Even with a half-season and the resources of two other series to prepare the way, LEGENDS OF TOMORROW finally arrived on CW heavy with exposition.  It was such a premise pilot, in fact, that the show’s ability to stand on its own feet […]

  With the addition of Rockne S. O’Bannon to the REVOLUTION writing/producing team as co-showrunner, alongside series creator Eric Kripke, the first half (actually 9/22nds) of its second season has been more tightly focused and dramatically effective than the mess of its first year.  There were considerably less of Season 1’s annoying mannerisms:  endless trudging […]

  UNDATEABLE:  Tuesday 9PM on NBC NBC made its position on the current state of broadcast network comedy fairly clear when it essentially chose UNDATEABLE over The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt this midseason.  Both shows were ordered and had produced their episodes, but the network shuffled the Tina Fey-produced Kimmy to Netflix (which appears to have […]

  STITCHERS:  Tuesday 10PM on Freeform STITCHERS gave itself an IZombie joke tonight (the two shows have somewhat notoriously similar premises, both concerning young women who can temporarily enter the memories of the recently dead to solve their murders), and that gag was about as imaginative as things got.  Stitchers is by far the more […]

  BACKSTROM:  Thursday 9PM on FOX – Change the Channel BACKSTROM is literally FOX’s try at being CBS:  the project, based on a series of Swedish mystery novels, was originally developed for the silver-haired network and a pilot was ordered, but CBS ultimately passed.  FOX’s in-house studio was the show’s production company, and its creator is […]