UNSOLVED: THE MURDERS OF TUPAC & THE NOTORIOUS B.I.G. – Tuesday 10PM on USA – Potential DVR Alert The progeny of The People vs. OJ Simpson continue to arrive.  This season we’ve had the (so far) enormously disappointing American Crime Story follow-up The Assassination of Gianni Versace, as well as Dick Wolf’s even worse […]

> Disclaimer:  Network pilots now in circulation are not necessarily in the form that will air in the Fall.  Pilots are often reedited and rescored, and in some cases even recast or reshot.  So these critiques shouldn’t be taken as full TV pilot reviews, but rather as a guide to the general style and content […]

  THE BOONDOCKS:  Monday 10:30PM on Adult Swim Aaron McGruder’s name is barely to be found in the credits for Season 4 of Adult Swim’s animated THE BOONDOCKS, absent as both a producer and writer (he retains a credit for his contribution to the show’s theme song), and since he was, unusually, not only the […]

  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 […]

  SALVATION:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS CBS’s summer series SALVATION presents a potential end of the world so pedestrian that viewers might fall asleep while awaiting the apocalypse.  It’s a disappointment, because at their best (BrainDead, the first season of Under the Dome), CBS’s forays into the sci-fi potboiler genre can be entertainingly over the […]

  VEEP keeps setting new challenges for itself, and surpassing them.  Last season, it underwent a change at the top when series creator Armando Iannucci decided to move on, and new showrunner David Mandel kept the trains running as hilariously as ever.  This year, it imploded its own paradigm, exploring what its political satire would […]

  Even with the nonstop double (sometimes barely single) entendres, 2 BROKE GIRLS is as basic and old-fashioned as a sitcom can be–it’s sort of a starter kit for CBS comedy.  Take 2 mismatched diner co-workers/roommates/business partners (Kat Dennings as streetsmart Max and Beth Behrs as once-wealthy Caroline), mix with a wacky boss and fellow […]

  Think of MR. SELFRIDGE as the methadone to Downton Abbey‘s pure heroin.  It’s not remotely the real thing, but it serves to feed the craving through these many months until Downton returns in January 2014.  Although both are period pieces set in early 20th-century England, Downton has a distinctly, irresistibly modern pace and urgency, […]