BLACK-ISH:  Wednesday 9:30PM on ABC Previously… on BLACK-ISH:  Dre Anderson is a successful ad agency executive who lives well with his lovely anesthesiologist wife Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross), teen children Junior (Marcus Scribner) and Zoey (Yara Shahidi), younger twins Jack (Miles Brown) and Diane (Marsai Martin), and moderately cantankerous Pops (Laurence Fishburne).  Dre’s one […]

  The material didn’t always keep up with the cast, but tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE was one of the more enjoyable recent episodes.  Host Jim Carrey obviously knows his way around uninhibited sketch comedy, and the advantage to his not being anywhere near the center of the comic zeitgeist lately was that his mannerisms aren’t […]

  It remains a pop culture puzzle that Marvel can have such uninterrupted, unprecedented success as a producer of blockbuster movies, yet still not have cracked the code of TV, while DC, which is hurrying (perhaps too fast) to play catch-up on the big screen, is routinely turning out hit series for the small one.  (Well, […]

  YOUNGER:  Tuesday 10PM on TV Land Although it’s a half-hour rather than an hour, TV Land’s new YOUNGER feels somewhat similar to VH1’s recent Hindsight.  Both are series versions of high concepts that might have been feature films starring, say, Sandra Bullock, a decade or so ago, and both revolve around women on the cusp […]

  History will record that on the same night the curtain rang down for Mad Men, THE ROYALS also concluded its season.  As utterly different as the two shows are, The Royals is one of the many cable scripted series that probably wouldn’t exist if Mad Men hadn’t proven how valuable a single drama can […]

  THE BRINK:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO – If Nothing Else Is On… THE BRINK will make you appreciate the precision and verbal dexterity of Veep.  Actually, although it’s an HBO political satire, The Brink gets most of its inspiration from an earlier classic of the form, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.  Much as in that […]

  LIFE IN PIECES:  Monday 8:30PM on CBS – Change the Channel Two seasons ago, CBS gave us The Millers, which against all odds managed to take the talents of Will Arnett, Beau Bridges, Margo Martindale, J.B. Smoove and Jayma Mays (and that’s not even counting guest stars) and emerge with a show that was […]

  THE KNICK:  Friday 10PM on Cinemax Even at a time of unprecedented quality on television, when the complaint is that there’s just too much good content to watch, Cinemax’s THE KNICK was something special last season.  It served as a reminder that in the right hands, a story that sounds initially unpromising–the saga of […]