JUSTIFIED:  Tuesday 10PM on FX JUSTIFIED is pure dark pleasure to watch.  Other cable series are more thematically or structurally ambitious (which is why Justified is unfairly ignored at awards time), but Graham Yost’s series, taking its cue from the late Elmore Leonard’s original prose, is utterly assured in its command not just of plotting […]

  THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC The back half of THE WALKING DEAD‘s fourth season began by bringing the series back to square one:  isolated figures wandering without a clear goal through an anonymous landscape riddled with zombies. The episode, entitled “After,” picked up immediately after last fall’s finale, and established quickly that […]

  VERONICA MARS:  Watch It At Home – Still a TV Show, For Better and Worse It was probably impossible for the movie of VERONICA MARS to live up to the story of how it came to be made.  That’s an epic, decade-long saga, which began when the TV series, critically praised but never a […]

  MAD MEN:  Sunday 10PM on AMC Fresh episodes of MAD MEN will likely still be airing more than a year from now, so all the obituaries for the series that have been appearing lately run the risk of sounding like “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead” when they’re repeated in 2015.  The only reason […]

  After two full seasons, it’s become clear that Mindy Kaling’s THE MINDY PROJECT may never be a “well-made show.”  Characters pop in and out–it was recently announced that receptionist Betsy (Zoe Jarman) is the latest regular who won’t be back in the fall–or they change randomly–was it ever clear why Jeremy (Ed Weeks) needed […]

  THE LAST SHIP:  Sunday 9PM on TNT – If Nothing Else Is On… Post-apocalypses are a dime a dozen on television these days, so a new one had better be something special.  The one in TNT’s new THE LAST SHIP arrives by way of a generic new plague that isn’t as scary or original as it needs […]

  SEED:  Monday 9:30PM on CW – If Nothing Else Is On… Remember last year’s Vince Vaughn (purported) comedy Delivery Man?  CW’s summer sitcom SEED isn’t a rip-off of the movie, exactly, since it premiered in Canada before the Vaughn movie opened (although whether it’s a rip-off of Starbuck, the 2011 Canadian movie that preceded […]

  THE BLACKLIST:  Monday 10PM on NBC THE BLACKLIST was a game-changing smash for NBC last season, in combination with The Voice solidifying the network’s hold on Mondays to such an extent that the night, along with Sunday Night Football, made up for all its shortcomings the rest of the week.  The show was a […]