> It’s not all that unusual for a situation comedy to change directions in the midst of its initial season and emerge a different, and better, show:  The Office and Parks & Recreation both took that journey (the US Office was trying too hard at first to ape the Ricky Gervais original, and Parks was […]

  NOS4A2:  Sunday 10PM on AMC It wouldn’t matter so much that the scares per hour rate of AMC’s new horror series NOS4A2 is so low, if the material in its place were more compelling.  The series is AMC’s latest attempt to find something compatible with its Walking Dead franchise, and it has promising auspices, […]

  HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER is an edifice built on two foundations:  the acting of Viola Davis as the show’s brilliant and complex criminal attorney Annalise Keating, and the ability of series creator Peter Nowalk and his writing/producing staff to come up with compelling non-stop plot twists.  In Season 2, Davis as usual […]

  Do Westworld‘s creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have free will?  This third season of HBO’s was supposed to be fundamentally different from the first two, and certainly things changed in some key ways.  The action was set almost entirely in the “real world” and not the titular park, there were important new characters […]

  After an entire season, it’s still not clear just what AMC’s PREACHER intends to be, but it’s been a dazzling ride all the same, sort of a Quentin Tarantino version of a Coen Brothers version of a Luis Bunuel version of the apocalypse.  Every episode has had at least one remarkable set-piece sequence, and […]

  Despite an abundance of first-rate acting, RAY DONOVAN may have been the biggest disappointment of the summer.  Ann Biderman’s dark family drama didn’t succeed at any of the things it seemed to be trying to do, and never lived up to the promise of its pilot. The show’s major failure was in the relationship […]

  MAJOR CRIMES:  Monday 9PM on TNT MAJOR CRIMES isn’t the kind of series to go for “game-changing” alterations, so the back half (actually 8 episodes) of its second season, which resumed tonight after a break since August, is only incrementally different from what aired last summer.  The show is a straightforward procedural for the […]

  BLOOD & TREASURE:  Tuesday 10PM on CBS Summer has come to network TV, which means 4 months with tons of unscripted offerings and the occasional downscale scripted series.  The latter is typified by CBS’s BLOOD & TREASURE, which had a 2-hour premiere after the NCIS season finale in an (unsuccessful) attempt to goose the ratings. Most of […]