JA’MIE: PRIVATE SCHOOL GIRL:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO – Change the Channel JA’MIE: PRIVATE SCHOOL GIRL belongs to that particular British Empire school of comedy in which the central joke is that a female character is played, very obviously, by a man in drag–not that the character is a man pretending to be a […]

  There was one last super-powerful conspiracy for NIKITA (Maggie Q) to bring down in tonight’s series finale, and a climactic showdown with arch-villainess Amanda (Melinda Clarke) to survive, as CW’s low-rated yet hard-to-kill action series finally came to an end after a truncated 4th mini-season. The final episode (fittingly entitled “Canceled”), written by Executive […]

  SLEEPY HOLLOW has grown into one of the (few) pleasant surprises of the fall network season, a keenly judged mix of supernatural folderol, increasingly well-drawn characters and light time-travel comedy.  Enough of a hit to already have been renewed for next season, the show’s first fall term culminated in a barnburner of a season […]

  MIXOLOGY:  Wednesday 9:30PM on ABC Previously… on MIXOLOGY:  On one night, in one bar, ten people variously search for romance or its temporary facsimile through the course of the season’s run.  We were briefly introduced to most of them last week, but the pilot concentrated on Tom (Blake Lee), a likably dweeby guy who’d […]

  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 […]

  The second season of BATES MOTEL has been two largely separate series, and one of them is well worth watching.  That’s the one about teenaged Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore), the sensitive and high-strung taxidermy enthusiast who is in the process of becoming a serial killer of women, and his relationship with his intemperate, unstable, […]

  Season 4 of HBO’s epic GAME OF THRONES had the good fortune to cover the back half of George R. R. Martin’s third novel in the series, “A Storm of Swords,” which is perhaps the most thrill-packed few hundred pages in the entire saga.  That made for a 10-hour ride with few chances for […]

  WORKING THE ENGELS:  Thursday 9:30PM on NBC – Change the Channel As summer sitcoms go, WORKING THE ENGELS makes Undateable look like the return of Seinfeld. It’s an inert pile of unfunny cliches, dysfunctional family division. The contrivance (calling it a “premise” would give it too much dignity) is that Papa Engel, a lawyer, […]