SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE didn’t exactly hide its fears about Adam Levine’s comic chops as host when the show loaded up his opening monologue not only with the inevitable The Voice parody, but with guest “mentors” Andy Samberg, Cameron Diaz and Jerry Seinfeld.  (Samberg and Seinfeld got off a couple of funny lines, while Diaz’s There’s […]

  THE FOLLOWING:  Monday 9PM on FOX – DVR Alert We’ve been here before, perhaps most memorably in Red Dragon aka Manhunter:  the burned-out, injured, brilliantly intuitive FBI agent, called back to the field to go after his nemesis, a savage but erudite serial killer.  But even Thomas Harris didn’t invent that archetype, and Kevin […]

  SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE had a generally dispiriting start to the second half of its season, with an episode proving once again that just giving the writers some time off in no way guarantees that they’ll come back with better material.  The show used host Jennifer Lawrence in almost every sketch, and she did her […]

  BANSHEE:  Friday 10PM on Cinemax Previously… on BANSHEE:  Through a series of coincidences not worth recounting, an ex-con (Antony Starr) has taken on the identity of Lucas Hood, who was killed on his way to becoming the new sheriff of Banshee, Pennsylvania, a small town rich in Pennsylvania Dutch culture and crime.  It also […]

  LEGIT:  Thursday 10:30PM on FX Not everyone can be Louis C.K.  That’s the lesson of LEGIT, FX’s latest excursion to its comedy sweet spot of the low-budget, stand-up grunge aesthetic that’s given us It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, The League and Wilfred as well as Louie.  This time, though, the reigning sensibility–in the pilot, […]

  The most paranormal thing about FRINGE, in the end, was that it actually survived 5 seasons on the air, as very possibly the lowest-rated series to be regularly renewed in the history of network television.  (Made possible by budget restrictions and Warner Bros Television’s willingness to accept sharply lowered license fees because of the […]

  SUITS:  Thursday 10PM on USA Last season, SUITS took a leap up in class, becoming not just the smartest and most sophisticated show on USA–which, let’s face it, isn’t the highest bar in the business–but making itself worthy of comparison with some of the best shows on anyone’s air, including legal genre colleague The […]

  Not even HAVEN‘s worst enemy would have wished on the series its season finale experience of the past few weeks.  More serialized than ever before, the season was approaching its ending with a second-to-last episode that featured deadly violence in a school (although directed at older graduates attending a reunion, not at children)–in the […]