SUITS:  Thursday 9PM on USA SUITS has returned from its lengthy fall/winter hiatus for the short 6-episode back “half” of its third season, and for a series usually in love with byzantine complications, reversals and twists, it was an unusually straightforward episode. The hour, written by Story Editor Erica Lipez and directed by Cherie […]

  GAME OF THRONES:  Sunday 9PM on HBO GAME OF THRONES is such an assured, expert piece of work that it’s easy to forget how many rules of conventional TV storytelling it routinely violates.  It’s not just the teeming mass of central characters–so many that tonight’s Season 4 premiere wasn’t even able to visit all […]

  PENNY DREADFUL:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime starting May 11 – Potential DVR Alert Showtime’s PENNY DREADFUL is an elegant addition to TV’s horror canon.  It’s been created and its initial 8-hour season has been entirely written by John Logan, whose A-list scripts include Gladiator, The Aviator, Sweeney Todd, Rango and Skyfall, and its pilot […]

  Like a middle schooler suddenly realizing that final exams are around the corner, the mostly tired 9th season of BONES went into overdrive tonight to deliver a super-dramatic season finale. The season had inherited a bummer of a cliffhanger from Season 8:  Booth (David Boreanaz) was blackmailed by petulant recurring serial killer Pelant (Christopher […]

  THE FOSTERS:  Monday 9PM on ABCFamily THE FOSTERS ended its first season on a near tidal wave of melodrama, and along the way it lost a great deal of the modest charm and believable emotions that had made it work in the first place.  Although tonight’s Season 2 premiere picked up on those storylines, […]

  RUSH:  Thursday 9PM on USA – Change the Channel USA Network is aiming for “edgy” with its new Thursday line-up, and so the pilot for RUSH begins with its antihero Will Rush (Tom Ellis) doing coke.  The twist?  When his lady friend goes into cardiac arrest, Will reveals himself as a brilliant physician who […]

  The season finale (if it’s lucky) of TNT’s mediocre MURDER IN THE FIRST was rather sad, pallid proof that the powerhouse writer/producer Steven Bochco has been outstripped by the genre he helped invent, the serialized adult crime drama.  Murder In the First tried, sometimes painfully, to be newfangled, throwing in the latest in basic […]

  THE MINDY PROJECT:  Tuesday 9:30PM on FOX After an uneven season and a half that seemed to slide from one genre and tone to the next on a nearly weekly basis (it’s a rom-com!  it’s a workplace comedy!), leaving supporting cast members in its wake, THE MINDY PROJECT took a huge leap forward with […]