THE AFFAIR:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime The second season of THE AFFAIR took some risks, and they largely paid off.  (Dramatically, if not in the ratings.)  The series widened its universe beyond the viewpoints of illicit lovers Noah Solloway (Dominic West) and Allison Lockhart (Ruth Wilson) to include their respective exes Helen (Maura Tierney) […]

  THE BLACKLIST: REDEMPTION:  Thursday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel THE BLACKLIST: REDEMPTION is for all those who longed to see what The Blacklist would look like without James Spader, a group that could probably fit into a medium-sized elevator.  Ordered by NBC when the network still thought The Blacklist was going to […]

  DESIGNATED SURVIVOR has been running through showrunners like breath mints (a fourth is scheduled to join the show for Season 2, and reportedly every script makes its way through star/executive producer Kiefer Sutherland as well), so it’s not much of a surprise that the tone and even the genre of the show has wobbled […]

  GAME OF THRONES:  Sunday 9PM on HBO With tonight’s Season 7 premiere, the endgame of HBO’s GAME OF THRONES has begun, kicking off the final 13 episodes (which will be divided 7/6 over 2 seasons).  It might be called the “Don’t Screw This Up” run, as series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, now […]

Game WISDOM OF THE CROWD:  Sunday 8PM on CBS – Change the Channel CBS’s WISDOM OF THE CROWD is for the people who thought the problem with FOX’s canceled APB was that it didn’t star Jeremy Piven.  Once again we have a high-tech billionaire who decides to privatize crimefighting after someone close to him is […]

  LIVING BIBLICALLY:  Monday 9:30PM on CBS – Change the Channel LIVING BIBLICALLY is a CBS sitcom for the Age of Trump, and like so many artifacts of this age, it may well thrill its target audience while causing others to shudder. Although inspired by a nonfiction book, Living Biblically is fully as hacky as […]

  Unwise bargains were a staple of ONCE UPON A TIME from the very beginning, so it was sadly appropriate that series creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz entered into one themselves in order to convince ABC to order a 7th season for the show.  In return, the network demanded a slashed license fee, which […]

  KILLING EVE:  Sunday 8PM on AMC/BBCAmerica AMC very much wants KILLING EVE to be its next big thing.  The critical and awards-season darling spent its first season on the network’s subsidiary BBCAmerica service, but while the marketing for Season 2 still refers to it as “BBCAmerica’s”, all episodes are being simulcast on the parent […]