THE WHITE QUEEN – Saturday 9PM on Starz – Worth A Look Starz’s THE WHITE QUEEN is, apart from a bit of nudity (this is pay cable, after all), a rather old-fashioned historical bodice-ripper.  The bodice in question belongs to England’s Queen Elizabeth (Rebecca Ferguson), wife of Edward IV (Max Irons) circa 1464, 9 […]

  Magic was one ingredient that MAGIC CITY lacked, and so despite its not-insubstantial virtues, tonight’s Season 2 finale also marked its finish as a series.  The low-rated show was a passion project of its creator Mitch Glazer, built around his own childhood memories about mostly Jewish gangsters in the lavish Miami Beach hotels of […]

  BROADCHURCH:  Wednesday 10PM on BBCAmerica – Potential DVR Alert BROADCHURCH suffers a bit, through no fault of its own, from murder fatigue.  Since The Killing, we’ve seen quite a few of these extended mysteries, tracing a single crime (usually against a child or other innocent) throughout a season, from The Bridge to Top of […]

  THE FOSTERS had a very busy first season (or half-season, depending on whether you count ABCFamily’s practice of ordering 10 summer episodes and then 10 more for winter as one season or two). There was, to begin with, the basic situation of the Foster family itself, with two lesbian parents, Lena (Sherri Saum) and Stef […]

  FALLING SKIES told a somewhat different story this season under showrunner Remi Aubuchon than it had in its first two years, and the changes worked fairly well for the most part.  Tom Mason (Noah Wyle) and his plucky band of rebels against the evil alien Espheni, instead of roaming the east coast, were based […]

  After three seasons, THE KILLING is still hard to get a fix on.  Technically it’s a murder mystery, but efficiently and intelligently spinning out crime stories is what it’s least good at–its narrative is notoriously overextended, sloppily plotted and reliant on bad detective work and a seemingly infinite number of red herrings.  (Even though […]

  UNFORGETTABLE:  Sunday 9PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… You may already have forgotten UNFORGETTABLE.  It debuted in fall 2011 as one of CBS’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of procedurals, its particular gimmick being that heroine Detective Carrie Wells (Poppy Montgomery) has hyperthymesia, the ability to recall with absolute precision almost everything she’s […]

  Among the many, many places where cable has been eating the lunch of the broadcast networks is in the anarchic, shoestring-budgeted world of adult late-night comedy, much of it animated, where Adult Swim has been routinely beating the late-night talk shows in young demos with lunatics-running-the-asylum work like Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, […]