EXTANT:  Wednesday 9PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… CBS’s EXTANT has been at the center of a Hollywood tentpole-sized marketing campaign for months, so it’s a bit disappointing to find that the show itself is just a moderately compelling hodgepodge of sci-fi motifs, without even the ambitious scale of the network’s […]

  DOMINION has performed well enough in the ratings that there’s a fair chance of it being renewed (especially since it’s evidently produced on the cheap).  This is fairly remarkable, since even by the currently debased standards of Syfy, the post-apocalyptic Biblical sci-fi fantasy is notably awful (it makes its lead-in, the merely not-bad Defiance, […]

  In its second season, Syfy’s DEFIANCE continued to be erratic, although sometimes in a more satisfying way than in Season 1.  Under the helm of series co-creator and new showrunner Kevin Murphy (replacing fellow co-creator Michael Taylor), Defiance was less bound by its initial efforts to be a neo-western–set in a post-apocalyptic St. Louis […]

  MULANEY:  Sunday 9:30PM on FOX – Change the Channel MULANEY arrives with a fair amount of goodwill.  It’s a multicamera sitcom modeled after Seinfeld, and produced by Lorne Michaels.  Its creator/star, John Mulaney, is one of the relatively few SNL writers to have achieved some measure of fame for himself, mostly thanks to his […]

  ELEMENTARY:  Thursday 10PM on CBS Nothing makes ELEMENTARY look better than the arrival of ABC’s Forever, an even more ersatz updated Sherlock Holmesisn procedural that features a fantastically knowledgeable British detective partnered with a more practical American (and adds a supernatural element, as Forever‘s hero is immortal).  Forever is simplistically sentimental and overly ingratiating, […]

  GIRLS:  Sunday 9PM on HBO Watching the Season 4 premiere of GIRLS on the same night as this year’s Golden Globes was a reminder of how quickly things move in today’s pop culture from being state-of-the-art, cutting-edge phenomena to… if not yesterday’s news, certainly farther back from the Twitterverse heat than tonight’s winners Transparent […]

  BATTLE CREEK:  Sunday 10PM on CBS – Change the Channel While not the worst show of the season, BATTLE CREEK may well be the most disappointing.  The light procedural combines the talents of two of TV’s premier writer/showrunners, Breaking Bad‘s Vince Gilligan and House‘s David Shore, with a cast that includes Josh Duhamel, Dean […]

  In its 5th season, SHAMELESS recognized that some of its younger Gallaghers were now old enough to be corrupted, which resulted in strong storylines for Carl (Ethan Cutkosky), whose drug dealing ended up putting him (and his half-nephew, if that’s a thing) in juvie, and especially Debbie (Emma Kenney), who discovered love and sex […]