Tonight’s series finale of SUBURGATORY provided as clear a picture as any of how much the series had lost its way in the course of its three season run.  Originally, Emily Kapnek’s show had a very clear voice and point of view:  Tessa Altman (played wonderfully by Jane Levy) had been moved against her […]

  LAST RESORT: Thursday 8PM on ABC – Potential DVR Alert The strangest new show on any network this season may be LAST RESORT, created and written by the man behind The Shield, Shawn Ryan, with Karl Gajdusek. The problem with trying to evaluate LAST RESORT based on its fairly riveting pilot is that the […]

  DON’T TRUST THE B– IN APT 23:  Tuesday 9:30PM on ABC WHERE WE WERE:  New York City, where naive midwestern arrival June shares an apartment with street-smart, manipulative Chloe (Krysten Ritter).  Their neighbor, and Chloe’s best friend, is James Van Der Beek, playing the same kind of version of himself that Matt LeBlanc does […]

  When people say that an original film or television series has the feel of a novel, it’s usually meant as a high compliment.  (The Wire is probably the definitive example of this in television.)  But Sundance Channel’s first scripted series RECTIFY was a reminder that not all novels, however earnest and well-meant, are worth […]

  It would have been nice if Reese Witherspoon had shown triumphant comic chops on tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, in the face of her terrible new movie comedy Hot Pursuit, but although she was a poised and enthusiastic host, it was just another uneven SNL. Witherspoon was mostly an observer for the funniest bit of […]

  HALT AND CATCH FIRE:  Sunday 10PM on AMC The first season of HALT AND CATCH FIRE realized late in the game that it had been telling the wrong story about the wrong characters, and tonight’s Season 2 premiere was burdened to an extent by the aftereffects of that fact.  The original protagonists were the […]

  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 […]

> Michael Scott is really gone.  Technically, that’s been true since a few episodes before the end of THE OFFICE‘s last season, but with tonight’s season premiere, Office 2.0, the most well-publicized reboot of the new season, began to tell us what it’s going to be.   Which is, for now at least, a somewhat jarring […]