THE NIGHT OF:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert “Noisy” is the byword of the television moment, and HBO makes noise as well as any programming service, whether its shows are laden with dragons, foul-mouthed politicians or coke-snorting record executives.  Every so often, though, the network demonstrates that it can also deliver unadorned […]

  WESTWORLD:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – Potential DVR Alert HBO’s mega-series WESTWORLD began its run enigmatically and laden with multiple layers of meta-narrative, so much so that it’s not entirely clear from the 70-minute premiere where it intends to take us. The premise is clear enough, preserved by series creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa […]

  Viewed in its 10-hour entirety, THE YOUNG POPE encompassed much of the good and bad of Auteur TV.  HBO, by all appearances, wrote a (very large) check to the arthouse filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino as creator, director and co-writer of the series, and then left him alone to make his art.  He emerged with a […]

  Even after a full season of RIVERDALE, it’s not entirely clear what the show is trying to accomplish.  The high-concept premise is clear enough:  take the fresh-faced characters from the Archie comics world, and set them loose in a dark, sexualized YA soap.  But beyond that, series creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (who’s also been involved […]

  SNOWFALL:  Wednesday 10PM on FX – In the Queue It used to make sense to judge a new TV series based on its pilot, because the pilot was a template of all the episodes that would follow.  In the serialized, bingeable TV era, though, an opening hour is often just an introduction to the […]

  AP BIO:  Thursday 9:30PM on NBC (regular run starts March 1) – Change the Channel Most of the braintrust behind NBC’s new sitcom AP BIO hails from Saturday Night Live, starting with series creator Mike O’Brien and including Executive Producers Lorne Michaels, Seth Meyers and Michael Shoemaker, so it’s not hard to see why the pilot […]

  It was clear from the pilot of NBC’s GOOD GIRLS that the series had a trio of strong assets and some major challenges.  The strengths were its three stars, Christina Hendricks, Retta and Mae Whitman, each of them thoroughly capable of anchoring a show on her own, and together an Avengers-like powerhouse of warmth, […]

  WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS:  Wednesday 10PM on FX The deadpan vampire mockumentary cult hit WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS is the latest piece of IP to find eternal–or at least extended–life on the small screen.  In some ways, it seems like that was where it belonged all along, since the format […]