SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE usually benefits from having a host with the confident comic talent that Melissa McCarthy brings to the table, but even with a 3-week hiatus in its pocket, the writing staff came up with little that was up to her level.  The result was a very long 90 minutes. Almost everything that […]

  ORPHAN BLACK:  Saturday 9PM on BBCAmerica The second hour of BBCAmerica’s ORPHAN BLACK continued to keep up the pace while gradually revealing its secrets.  The very hardworking Tatiana Maslany this time got to add German and soccer mom accents to her repertoire, as the base character of Sarah met yet more of her lookalikes, […]

  HANNIBAL:  Thursday 10PM on NBC – Potential DVR Alert Bryan Fuller has a very unusual sensibility, especially for network TV.  He’s attracted both to gruesome crime stories and elaborate visual tableaux, as he showed in his Wonderfalls and particularly Pushing Daisies, with its mix of candy-coated production design and bizarre murder mysteries–it was like […]

  ROGUE:  Wednesday 9PM on Audience Network (DirecTV only) – Change the Channel Remember when the phrase “cable drama” only implied a cheaper, racier version of a network cop show?  Subscribers to DirecTV can relive those years with ROGUE, its newest original programming and a series that gives Red Widow a run for its money […]

    HOW TO LIVE WITH YOUR PARENTS (FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE):  Wednesday 9:30PM on ABC –  Change the Channel There isn’t much to be said for the exhaustively titled midseason comedy HOW TO LIVE WITH YOUR PARENTS (FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE), but within the subgenre of sitcoms about adults living […]

  Season 4 of  JUSTIFIED may or may not have been its best so far–Margo Martindale’s Mags Bennett still towers over Season 2–but it was unquestionably the most thrillingly novelistic, true to the show’s original source in the writing of Elmore Leonard.  The series, created and run by Graham Yost (who’s also been supervising The Americans […]

  Over the course of the season, THE NEW NORMAL toned down its most disastrous miscalculation, which can be summarized in two words:  Ellen Barkin.  Not Barkin the very fine actress, of course, but the character she was called upon to play, Jane Forrest, the conservative Republican midwesterner grandmother who had raised Goldie Clemmons (Georgia […]

  GAME OF THRONES:  Sunday 9PM on HBO That ineffable “It” that HBO referred to in the classic “It’s Not TV.  It’s HBO” ad campaign is now remarkably widespread, from FX to AMC, from Showtime to Netflix.  HBO for its part has had plenty of failures over the 14 years since The Sopranos established it […]