VEEP:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO VEEP, television’s most scintillatingly vicious comedy, returned with a relatively mild Season 3 premiere by its standards.  Largely that was because the script, written by Supervising Producers Sean Grey and Will Smith (from a story also by series creator Armando Iannucci) and directed by Chris Addison, kept Vice President […]

  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 […]

  SILICON VALLEY:  Sunday 10PM on HBO – DVR Alert There’s no algorithm (yet) to predict compatibility between TV series, so we don’t know yet how SILICON VALLEY will fare in the ratings, or for that matter how its quality will hold up over time, but based on its pilot, it seems to be as […]

  It made plenty of strategic sense for Showtime to reclassify SHAMELESS in its 4th season as a Comedy for Emmy Award purposes, since television is now swamped with contending dramas, but if the plan works, the result will be pretty ironic, since this was the season where the actions of the mostly happy-go-lucky Gallagher […]

  TURN:  Sunday 9PM on AMC – If Nothing Else is On… Unlike just about any other armed conflict in history, and for reasons that have never really been pinned down, the American Revolutionary War has rarely been a fertile source of drama either in the movies or on television.  Mel Gibson’s The Patriot was […]

  SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE went musical in a big way for its host, Anna Kendrick, and that mostly wasn’t a bad thing.  Kendrick is a genuine musical-comedy performer, with not just the novelty hit “Cups” from Pitch Perfect to her credit but a lead in the upcoming film of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods on […]

  Hail and farewell to RAISING HOPE, that gently surreal bundle of quirky comedy that may have been too downscale to ever quite hit the pop culture jackpot.  The writing was discernible on the wall when series creator Greg Garcia left before the start of Season 4 to create The Millers and then FOX switched […]

  UNFORGETTABLE:  Friday 8PM on CBS UNFORGETTABLE, the CBS procedural whose title practically begs to be a punchline, is back.  Although “back” isn’t exactly the word:  Unforgettable was famously canceled after its initial 2011-12 season, and then uncanceled to serve as filler for CBS with a 13-episode order.  7 of those episodes aired last summer, […]