The first season of CW’s musical-comedy CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND was by far the most daring and distinctive show on broadcast television, but a nagging question remained:  what could it do for an encore?  It wasn’t clear how long the story could follow Rebecca Bunch (series co-creator Rachel Bloom) in her stalking of one-time summer camp […]

  VEEP keeps setting new challenges for itself, and surpassing them.  Last season, it underwent a change at the top when series creator Armando Iannucci decided to move on, and new showrunner David Mandel kept the trains running as hilariously as ever.  This year, it imploded its own paradigm, exploring what its political satire would […]

  ME, MYSELF & I:  Monday 9:30PM on CBS – In the Queue CBS’s ME, MYSELF & I is a gimmick sitcom, which CBS seems to regard as necessary for single camera comedies (see Life In Pieces, or don’t).  The high-concept here is more or less This Is Us with one-liners  As in the NBC […]

  LA TO VEGAS:  Tuesday 9PM on FOX – In the Queue Broadcast TV kicks off its new scripted series year with FOX’s well-paced LA TO VEGAS, a mostly retro workplace sitcom with a small twist:  Lon Zimmet’s series takes place almost entirely on the roundtrips of the titular run, operated by the Southwest-like Jackpot Airlines. The […]

  THE PURGE:  Tuesday 10PM on USA THE PURGE movie franchise has made a fortune by working both sides of the ideological street.  On the one hand, it professes to condemn the near-future dystopia it depicts, in which an authoritarian government flushes the pipes of America by allowing 12 hours of nearly unrestricted violence without […]

  Although its production studio MRC is seeking a stay of execution from another network or streaming service, it currently appears as though Starz’s Season 2 finale of COUNTERPART will be the last we see of the show, which is both a shame and less than a shock.  In an era where much of TV […]

  ON BECOMING A GOD IN CENTRAL FLORIDA:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime There’s an overlap between two of cable’s more high-profile new shows, which also happen to air against each other in the linear world.  Both HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones and Showtime’s ON BECOMING A GOD IN CENTRAL FLORIDA are dark comedies about pernicious American […]

  The most paranormal thing about FRINGE, in the end, was that it actually survived 5 seasons on the air, as very possibly the lowest-rated series to be regularly renewed in the history of network television.  (Made possible by budget restrictions and Warner Bros Television’s willingness to accept sharply lowered license fees because of the […]