Odd and inconsistent may have been the watchwords for tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE with host Lena Dunham, but even intermittent inspiration was a big improvement after last week’s grimly unfunny outing with Jim Parsons. Dunham has one of the most distinctive voices in current TV comedy, and her SNL gig worked best when it […]

  RAY DONOVAN:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime – Potential DVR Alert Ray Donovan (Liev Schreiber) is a fixer with plenty to fix.  Professionally, he’s sort of a lower-rent LA version of Scandal‘s Olivia Pope, employed by Hollywood agent Lee Drexler (Peter Jacobson) to do whatever’s necessary to clean up after Tinseltown’s celebrities and studio execs.  […]

  DARK MATTER:  Friday 10PM on Syfy – Change the Channel You can easily imagine the first episode of Syfy’s new DARK MATTER as being the pitch that sold the series, and it also sounds like the start of a joke:  6 people and an android wake up on a spaceship…  (In fact, the show […]

  The second season of NBC’s GRIMM was considerably more satisfying than its first, although it did show the strain of trying to establish a series mythology.  The season’s final episode (really, last week’s hour and this one formed a cohesive 2-hour finale), written by series co-creators David Greenwalt and Jim Kouf, and directed by […]

  THE AMERICANS:  Wednesday 10PM on FX THE AMERICANS thrives on complications–moral, political, ethical and sexual–and it starts Season 2 with a nifty one.  In the Reagan era, when the show is set, the fundamentalist Afghan mujahideen that deep-cover KGB agent Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) betrays and kills were mortal enemies of the Soviets backed […]

  STAR-CROSSED:  Monday 8PM on CW – Change the Channel If aliens are in high school, we must be on CW.  The network’s midseason entry STAR-CROSSED plays as a clip reel of CW’s greatest hits, from the supernatural teen romance of The Vampire Diaries to the forbidden love of Beauty and the Beast to the […]

  It was perfectly appropriate to dread the news that an athlete was hosting SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE–the show’s history abounds with deadly sports hosts like Michael Phelps and Tom Brady.  And in case that wasn’t enough pressure for tonight’s host Eli Manning, one of the rare exceptions to the rule was his own brother Peyton, […]

  SCANDAL:  Thursday 10PM on ABC Sex is both currency and kryptonite on SCANDAL, a tool and a compulsion.  Shonda Rhimes’s series is coming off a genuinely phenomenal second season, one which saw its ratings rise by an incredible 50% between its season premiere and the finale, in which Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) was outed […]