THE YOUNG POPE:  Sunday/Monday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert The cinema-tization of television continues with HBO’s THE YOUNG POPE.  It’s been created and directed by the filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, who made 2013’s Best Foreign Film Oscar winner The Great Beauty and followed it with the gorgeous but not quite coherent Truth.  Sorrentino is […]

  DO NO HARM:  Thursday 10PM on NBC A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the production of episodes for the regular season: a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover) give plenty of notes, […]

  THE KNICK:  Friday 10PM on Cinemax Previously… on THE KNICK:  New York’s Knickerbocker Hospital circa 1900 is a highly respectable institution, funded by wealthy benefactors and with a conscientious staff, but to modern eyes, it’s little more than a sewer, with “state of the art” operating procedures that seem savage and conditions that are […]

> THE FIRM:  Thursdays 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel THE FIRM isn’t NBC’s #1 priority for midseason–that would clearly be Smash.  (In other news, there’s no truth to the rumor that NBC has decided to change its corporate name to “Smash–The Monday After the Super Bowl”.)  But The Firm is the inheritor of […]

    The sparse network summer season for scripted series kicked off tonight with ROOKIE BLUE, beginning that extreme rarity, a 3d season, where few original network dramas in summer even get to a Season 2. WHERE WE WERE:  Our heroine, 2d year Toronto police officer Andy McNally (Missy Peregrym), after a season and a […]

  “I understand why you’re confused,” said the figure who wasn’t Elliot Alderson’s therapist Krista (Gloria Reuben) to the figure who wasn’t Elliot (Rami Malek) toward the end of the finale of Sam Esmail’s series MR ROBOT.  And, well, yeah. This year, we’ve had reason to be reminded how tough endings are to achieve in […]

    LAST MAN STANDING was a terrible show when the season began, and it hasn’t gotten any better.  The series was anticipated to be a blockbuster hit, and ABC gave it the unusual task for a new series of opening up a night, since it marked the return of Tim Allen to series television, […]

> Thursday night brought a mother lode of returning serialized dramas to broadcast TV, with both ABC and CW returning to duty.  Let’s start by looking at ABC’s 10PM PRIVATE PRACTICE, airing a fresh episode for the first time since a 2-hour special on November 17. WHERE WE LEFT OFF:  As usual, there was all […]