FAMILY TOOLS –  Wednesday 8:30PM on ABC – Change the Channel   J.K. Simmons is one of our national character actor treasures, but he tests the bounds of our willingness to follow him anywhere with FAMILY TOOLS, which is getting a last-minute run starting tonight. Tools is sitcom with a capital “sit.”  The rollicking […]

  DALLAS:  Monday 9PM on TNT As TNT pushes its action-oriented “Boom” branding campaign (successfully with The Last Ship, not so much with Murder In the First nor apparently the new Legends), DALLAS seems more and more like a remnant not just of an earlier era of television, but of its own network’s past.  The […]

  The return of Tracy Morgan to SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE after his long convalescence from a devastating auto accident was an event, and the show treated it as such, with guest appearances from Morgan’s 30 Rock co-stars Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Jane Krakowski and Jack McBreyer, not to mention Larry David as Bernie Sanders in […]

  Over the course of its season, NBC’s SHADES OF BLUE muddled its way from being a broadcast network-lite version of a gritty cable cop drama to a more conventional heist thriller.  It was flawed in both contexts, but more able to carry its weight as the latter. The series, created by Adi Hasak, was […]

  SINGLE PARENTS:  Wednesday 9:30PM on ABC ABC’s post-Modern Family Wednesday sitcom SINGLE PARENTS was created by Elizabeth Meriwether and JJ Philbin, respectively the creator and a senior writer/producer of New Girl (the pilot is credited to Philbin from a story by both of them), and it’s an attempt to extend that show’s brand of […]

  For the most part, the cast, writers and even the crew of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE seemed to have taken off for their holiday break a week early, leaving the worst episode of the season (so far) behind.  The only saving graces:  New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and, of all things, the second consecutive funny […]

  ELEMENTARY:  Thursday 10PM on CBS For those of us mildly obsessed with BBC’s superlative Sherlock, it may have been unwise for CBS’s ELEMENTARY (which all concerned agree is not, legally, a knock-off) to bring its updated Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, in its Season 2 premiere, to London.  Kept on their separate continents, Jonny […]

and MR. ROBINSON:  Wednesday 9PM on NBC – Change the Channel NBC has been making a specialty of what might be called “stealth comedy.”  The network throws a short order of sitcom episodes on the air two at a time, apparently in an effort to be rid of the shows as quickly as possible.  The […]