LIFE SENTENCE:  Wednesday 9PM on CW – Change the Channel Last season, CW aired No Tomorrow, a madcap romp about a couple who lived every day as though it might be their last, because a deadly meteor was supposedly on its way to destroy the Earth.  The series flopped, but now the network has […]

  ATLANTA:  Wednesday 10PM on FX Season 1 of Donald Glover’s FX series ATLANTA was, among other things, a show that went in so many directions after its premiere that judging it from its opening half-hour proved to be foolhardy.  The same may very well be true for Season 2, so we’ll deal briefly with […]

  UNSOLVED: THE MURDERS OF TUPAC & THE NOTORIOUS B.I.G. – Tuesday 10PM on USA – Potential DVR Alert The progeny of The People vs. OJ Simpson continue to arrive.  This season we’ve had the (so far) enormously disappointing American Crime Story follow-up The Assassination of Gianni Versace, as well as Dick Wolf’s even worse […]

  GOOD GIRLS:  Monday 10PM on NBC – Potential DVR Alert GOOD GIRLS is one of the more promising pilots of the broadcast season–even if it’s itching not to be a broadcast series.  Jenna Bans’ script is a #MeToo slant on Breaking Bad and Fun With Dick and Jane, and as that list may suggest, […]

  LIVING BIBLICALLY:  Monday 9:30PM on CBS – Change the Channel LIVING BIBLICALLY is a CBS sitcom for the Age of Trump, and like so many artifacts of this age, it may well thrill its target audience while causing others to shudder. Although inspired by a nonfiction book, Living Biblically is fully as hacky as […]

  Something nagged at the first two seasons of CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND, and it’s right there in the title.  Rebecca Bunch (series co-creator Rachel Bloom) was lovable and hilarious, but she was also, well, unhinged.  Bloom and co-creator Aline Brosh McKenna largely played Rebecca’s manipulations and stalking, and the damage she did to other people’s lives […]

  HOMELAND:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime The endgame has begun for Showtime’s HOMELAND–the reported plan is for next year’s Season 8 to be the last, although the network hasn’t confirmed that–and we’re past the point where it makes sense to bewail the fact that the series has never again equaled the heights of its first […]

  HERE AND NOW:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – In the Queue HERE AND NOW is sort of the Alan Ball/HBO version of The Fosters, which means that its characters are a generation older, it has a lot of sex, a lot of talk, and a lot of angst, and there’s a mystical “mystery” element. […]