HALT AND CATCH FIRE:  Sunday 10PM on AMC – Potential DVR Alert HALT AND CATCH FIRE won’t remind you much of The Social Network.  (Or for that matter of Silicon Valley.)  Set in 1983 Texas and written by first-time series creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers (the series will be run by the […]

  THE NIGHT SHIFT:  Tuesday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel It’s as though NBC and series creators Jeff Judah and Gabe Sachs (they were among the showrunners of the 90210 reboot, and wrote the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie) deliberately set out to make the least distinctive series possible with THE NIGHT […]

  What is it with endings?  Why do they rattle the brains of even the greatest of television’s creative minds?  Half-endings, too, which is what tonight’s finish to the first half of MAD MEN‘s 7th and final season was, the remaining 7 hours to sit on an AMC shelf until a year from now.  (That […]

  THE NORMAL HEART:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert When Larry Kramer’s just-barely-semi-autobiographical THE NORMAL HEART was first written and performed in 1985, it was as “ripped from the headlines” as any episode of Law & Order, a furious, mournful expose about the AIDS crisis as it was happening just outside the theater […]

  Considering how defiantly unlike the rest of broadcast television HANNIBAL is, not to mention its love of metaphor, it made sense for the show’s Season 2 finale to air entirely on its own, separate from the last episodes of just about every other network series, and 2 days after the end of the regular […]

  GANG-RELATED:  Thursday 9PM on FOX – Change the Channel I think my favorite cliche in the pilot for FOX’s burn-off drama GANG-RELATED–out of, believe me, plenty of choices–comes at the end of an argument between a fiery Assistant District Attorney (Shantal VanSanten) and the head of the show’s inter-agency Gang Task Force (Terry O’Quinn).  […]

  In its second season, THE AMERICANS continued to be a expertly crafted saga of betrayals, both political and personal.  Tonight’s chilling season finale, written by series creator Joe Weisberg and his co-showrunner Joel Fields, and directed by Daniel Sackheim, brought all its themes together brilliantly, and set the stage for what should be an […]

  MOTIVE:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC Welcome to summer network TV. The broadcast networks talk a good game about the new 12-months-a-year world of television–and to its credit, CBS has been relatively ambitious with Under the Dome and this summer’s Extant, a sci-fi thriller starring Halle Berry–but for the most part, once May sweeps end, […]