> A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and production of episodes for the regular season:  a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover in the off-season) give plenty of notes, both helpful and otherwise, and […]

  The remarkable thing is that GLEE was ever a giant mainstream hit in the first place.  When the books are closed on Kevin Reilly’s reign at FOX, great credit will be due to him for daring to go all in on such a strange, lovable, inconsistent mutant of a show, simultaneously a serious, sentimental […]

  MASTERS OF SEX:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime Previously… on MASTERS OF SEX:  In 1956, brilliant but arrogant and socially awkward fertility expert William Masters (Michael Sheen) prepares to start his trailblazing research into the physicality of human sexuality.  His own personal life is hardly beyond reproach–he’s allowed his wife Libby (Caitlin Fitzgerald) to believe […]

  ELEMENTARY:  Thursday 10PM on CBS For those of us mildly obsessed with BBC’s superlative Sherlock, it may have been unwise for CBS’s ELEMENTARY (which all concerned agree is not, legally, a knock-off) to bring its updated Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, in its Season 2 premiere, to London.  Kept on their separate continents, Jonny […]

  The breakout comedy star of 2015 is also an award-winning sketch comic and writer, so SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE could hardly do better than to have Amy Schumer as host for the 2d episode of the season.  For the most part, the show seemed to step up its game–even Weekend Update showed signs of a […]

  WILFRED:  Thursday 10PM on FX Thursday’s back-to-back double-episode Season 3 premiere of WILFRED provided a good picture of a show with, fittingly, a somewhat split personality, at times an existential, cosmic joke about the search for meaning in life and the nature of identity, and then again a rude comedy about a man’s friendship […]

  Starz cut its losses quickly on FLESH AND BONE, which had been ordered as the first season of a continuing series, but was declared to be a finite miniseries before it had even started airing.  That late shift made tonight’s finale even more awkward and unsatisfying than it might have been, but Moira Walley-Beckett’s […]

  THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC Based on everything we know about THE WALKING DEAD, it seemed a safe assumption after the Season 4 finale that we’d be spending a large chunk of Season 5 trapped with our heroes at Terminus, the supposed sanctuary they’d spent most of the season seeking that turned […]