THE VIKINGS:  Sunday 10PM on History Channel In its pilot, at least, THE VIKINGS, which marks History Channel’s first step into the world of continuing scripted drama after its massive success last year with the Hatfields and McCoys miniseries, is so rudimentary a piece of historical fiction that it might as well have been […]

  RED WIDOW spent its season about two inches away from being a really enjoyable dark farce.  All the ingredients were there:  plotting that had a vague, circular logic but was basically nonsensical, and a cast of moronic characters so wrapped up in their own ignorance, selfishness and blind aggression that they constantly bumped into […]

  NASHVILLE is a superior network series, loaded with talent and powerful moments, but it can also drive you up a wall, beset as it is with sometimes infuriating shortcomings.  The same was true for tonight’s season finale, written and directed by series creator Callie Khouri. Some of the show’s problems are glaringly obvious.  Its […]

  MAJOR CRIMES:  Monday 9PM on TNT MAJOR CRIMES, TNT’s spin-off of The Closer, will always have a weakness at its center, caused by the odd decision to build the show around the character of Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell), the not very likable or interesting LAPD detective who’d originally been introduced as an officious internal […]

  THE BRIDGE:  Wednesday 10PM on FX Previously… on THE BRIDGE:  In the exact center of the bridge connecting El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico, a killer has placed two half-bodies of murdered women, carefully joined together.  One is an anti-immigrant conservative American judge; the other is a teenage Mexican prostitute.  The crimes require a […]

  Read All Our Fall Pilot Reports here and Midseason Pilot Reports here. CRISIS:  Sunday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else is On… Funny story.  Remember how last fall, there was a serialized thriller about a high-stakes political kidnapping in Washington whose victims included teens called Hostages that flopped badly?  NBC would prefer that […]

  THE NEIGHBORS:  Friday 8:30PM on ABC THE NEIGHBORS was last season’s reminder that a pilot isn’t the final word on a series.  In fact, neither are the first several episodes.  It took a while for Dan Fogelman’s show to demonstrate that it was more than its inane premise and slapstick gags about aliens living […]

  It’s relatively unusual for a movie star to host SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE without having something to plug, but this week Bruce Willis took the lead for his first turn since the days of the original Die Hard in 1989.  Willis rarely gets the credit he deserves for the range of his roles (the Die […]