See also:  THE SKED NETFLIX REVIEW:  “Arrested Development” (Episodes 1-3)                  THE SKED NETFLIX REVIEW:  “Arrested Development” (Episodes 4-7) Rounding into the second half of Netflix’s ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT Season 4, the storyline is starting to become as twisty as a John Le Carre espionage thriller–a quiz, at this point, about just who wants and […]

  In its second season, Stephen Bochco and Eric Lodal’s MURDER IN THE FIRST altered its format, only to find new ways to fail.  Season 1 had told a single convoluted story, a murder mystery loaded with so many red herrings and reversals that by the time it ended, it was impossible to care who […]

  GIRLS:  Sunday 10PM on HBO GIRLS is coming off a notably rocky second season, one in which Lena Dunham seemed to take up and abandon narrative structures and tones with the same disregard for consequence that her characters often have with each other.  There were free-standing episodes stuck in the middle of serialized stories, […]

  While not as loudly buzzy as Girls, SILICON VALLEY has been far more popular, indeed HBO’s highest-performing new comedy in quite a while (the fact that it follows the massive Game of Thrones on the network’s line-up hasn’t hurt, of course). Unlike a lot of comedies, both network and cable, that need some time […]

  The second season of FX’s THE BRIDGE faced quite a few challenges, some of them traceable to Season 1, and others self-created.  The original version of The Bridge was closely tied to the Swedish/Danish series on which it had been based.  It featured an extremely gimmicky serial killer plot that clashed violently with the […]

  PERSON OF INTEREST:  Thursday 9PM on CBS WHERE WE WERE:  Watching Harold Finch (Michael Emerson), the secretive billionaire creator of the super-surveillance system that keeps tabs on all potential criminals and victims in the country, being kidnapped by the woman calling herself Caroline Turing (Amy Acker), who manipulated Finch’s system to make it appear […]

  NEW GIRL:  Tuesday 9PM on FOX WHERE WE WERE:  In an apartment with four very strange inhabitants:  Jess (Zooey Deschanel) of the title, who does have her magic pixie dream girl moments but enough issues and grit of her own to make her more than a male fantasy; Winston (Lamorne Morris), a former (European) […]

  Viewed in its 10-hour entirety, THE YOUNG POPE encompassed much of the good and bad of Auteur TV.  HBO, by all appearances, wrote a (very large) check to the arthouse filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino as creator, director and co-writer of the series, and then left him alone to make his art.  He emerged with a […]