The only thing more boring than a typical Oscars is one without surprises, and the closest thing to a major upset this year turned out to be Disney’s loss in the Best Animated Short category.  (The studio almost instantly rebounded with the much more important Animated Feature prize for Frozen.)  All the conventional wisdom […]

  SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE was pushed off the air for a solid month by the Winter Olympics, and then by 15 more minutes in the east tonight by an NHL game in primetime–not the kind of thing that pleases Generalissimo Lorne Michaels.  After all that, the show wasn’t remotely worth the wait. The Big Bang […]

  HANNIBAL:  Friday 10PM on NBC With the exception of Twin Peaks, HANNIBAL may well be the strangest drama ever to air on a broadcast network.  Created for television by Bryan Fuller as a prequel in the Thomas Harris canon to Red Dragon, it mixes mannered, hushed, often extended dialogue sequences with loving, lingering scenes of […]

  VIKINGS:  Thursday 10PM on History The season 2 premiere of VIKINGS neatly demonstrated the series’ knack for straddling brawny historical action and engrossing historical soap.  Written by series creator Michael Hirst and directed by Ciaran Donnelly, it separated into two halves, both dealing with the consequences of events from last season’s finale. The first […]

  THE AMERICANS:  Wednesday 10PM on FX THE AMERICANS thrives on complications–moral, political, ethical and sexual–and it starts Season 2 with a nifty one.  In the Reagan era, when the show is set, the fundamentalist Afghan mujahideen that deep-cover KGB agent Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) betrays and kills were mortal enemies of the Soviets backed […]

  THE RED ROAD:  Thursday 9PM on Sundance Channel – If Nothing Else Is On… “Ponderousness” is odd branding for a cable network with fledgling original programming to embrace, but after Top of the Lake, Rectify, The Returned and the new THE RED ROAD, it’s pretty clear that Sundance Channel is very comfortable with its […]

  MIXOLOGY:  Wednesday 9:30PM on ABC – Worth A Look MIXOLOGY is the most ambitious of ABC’s new comedies, although “ambitious” in this case means resembling one of those omnibus rom-com movies that simultaneously tell half a dozen stories, all turning out to be tangentially related to each other.  At its best, that subgenre is […]

  MIND GAMES:  Tuesday 10PM on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On… The creator of ABC’s midseason MIND GAMES, Kyle Killen, was the man behind Lone Star and Awake (as well as the movie The Beaver), so he doesn’t lack in fertile imagination.  What he hasn’t had, however, is any commercial success whatsoever, and […]