THE VIKINGS:  Sunday 10PM on History Channel Previously… on VIKINGS:  Back around the 8th Century AD, Ragnar Lothbrok (Travis Fimmel) is the one Viking visionary enough to believe that there are lands to the west even more ripe for conquest (like, for example, England) than those in the east, and he embraces the revolutionary […]

  GO ON is a genuine bubble show–not just in its ratings (which are strong when it has The Voice as a lead-in and barely acceptable when it doesn’t), but in its quality.  The series wobbles from episode to episode and even between storylines in a single episode, sometimes smart and charming and equally often […]

  The all-knowing Machine at the heart of PERSON OF INTEREST turned positively chatty in last night’s Season 2 finale, providing real-time advice and assistance via phone and text services to just about anyone who asked it nicely.  (If you didn’t care for numbers, it would help you out via musical tones.)   The Machine, […]

  We’re gradually discovering that Steven Soderbergh’s definition of “retirement” from filmmaking is a fairly narrow one.  It was recently announced that he plans to direct a new series for Cinemax, and he has another cable/online series in development.  It appears that the one thing he won’t be doing for the foreseeable future is directing […]

  SAVE ME had a late start, but it managed to be the worst network show to premiere during the 2012-13 season.  Unspeakably self-righteous, smug and narcissistic–and also not remotely funny–it was a series about religion that could have been underwritten by atheists.  While the idea of having The Big C creator Darlene Hunt run […]

  CAMP:  Wednesday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… If drive-in theaters hadn’t been superseded by multiplexes, NBC’s new CAMP would be the TV equivalent of a drive-in movie, a throwback to B-movie 80’s comedies like Meatballs, Summer School and One Crazy Summer.  (It would prefer to be a throwback to better […]

  BREAKING BAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC This is actually the back half of Breaking Bad‘s last season (AMC separated the 16 episodes into two parts for scheduling and budgetary reasons–namely, that actors, writers and other Guild members are entitled to automatic bumps in pay if and when a “new season” begins).  That may help […]

  ROOKIE BLUE did a solid job of wrapping up its fourth season and setting up cliffhangers for Season 5 (already ordered) with last night’s episode.  Although the Grey’s Anatomy-with-guns police soap has never had the level of success as its medical forebear, it’s been a steady summer performer for ABC, and this season successfully saw it […]