After 6 seasons, PARKS & RECREATION is still the most reliably lovable show on network television–maybe on all of TV.  No other series wears its heart on its sleeve as genuinely as Parks, and no ensemble provides more joyful fun than its cast.  The Season 6 finale, written by Co-Executive Producer Alan Yang and […]

RAY DONOVAN:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime Showtime has been having an awful summer, marked by the abject failure of I’m Dying Up Here and Twin Peaks, an 18-hour stunt that is filling the tiniest of niches.  (The soon-to-return Episodes and Dice have never been blockbusters either.)  For deliverance, the network is turning to its own Monarch of Moroseness, the […]

  Throughout its third season, reactions to GIRLS seemed to depend to a large extent on the particular vision of the series that viewers had.  Season 3 of Lena Dunham’s show was notably less conceptual and experimental than Season 2 had been, with its standalone episodes, abrupt shifts in tone and focus, sexual frankness unusual […]

  HOUDINI & DOYLE:  Monday 9PM on FOX – Change the Channel Paranormal procedurals have been fertile ground for FOX since at least The X-Files, recently with Lucifer and Sleepy Hollow (and the rebooted X-Files).  The network’s early-arrival summer series HOUDINI & DOYLE, though, is a plodding, uninspired miss in the subgenre. As the rules […]

  THE BRIDGE:  Wednesday 10PM on FX THE BRIDGE was simultaneously one of the best and most frustrating series of last season.  Loaded with atmosphere, superbly acted by an expansive cast headed by Demian Bichir and Diane Kruger, and with plenty of fascinating quirks in its characters and dialogue, it was also a structural and […]

  In its third season, HOUSE OF LIES tried to have more substance than it did in previous years, and part of the time it worked.  The end of Season 2 had scattered the cast, with Marty Kaan (Don Cheadle) forming his own consulting shop, while the members of his “pod,” Jeannie (Kristen Bell), Clyde […]

> FX’s Elmore Leonard-inspired crime drama JUSTIFIED really hit its stride in its second season last year, and now it’s back, trying to build on that very solid success. WHERE WE LEFT OFF:  The redoubtable Mags Bennett (Emmy-winner Margo Martindale) has gone to her grave, and so has her corrupt sheriff son.  (Her other son, […]

  HBO’s RUN turned out to be a treatise on the limitations of the elevator pitch.  Everything about the show that could be described between the lobby of an office building and, say, its 20th floor (let’s assume the occupants were socially distanced) seemed irresistible.  The premise:  a pair of onetime lovers follow through on […]