POWER:  Saturday 9PM on Starz POWER, like Empire, revolves around an African-American drug dealer who seeks respectability in the music business., but who will still commit murder when necessary to protect his interests.  Although the shows are quite different in tone–Power is presented more as a crime drama than a family soap, with drugs in […]

  MR. ROBOT – Wednesday 10PM on USA Previously… on MR. ROBOT:  Elliot (Rami Malek) is a master hacker with an assortment of antisocial and other disturbing quirks, including paranoia, depression, and perhaps schizophrenia, who self-medicates (taking both morphine and a withdrawal drug) and barely manages a friendship with Angela (Portia Doubleday).  He works for […]

  CHARMED:  Sunday 9PM on CW CW’s reboot of CHARMED wants to be a lighthearted supernatural romp, but it also seeks to push as many topical buttons as it possibly can.  So while the basic story of a trio of young women witches provides a built-in tale of female empowerment, the new pilot also comes […]

  No season of Showtime’s HOMELAND ever came close to touching the wild highs of its first, an amazing concoction that managed to combine the tension of a great thriller with constant twists, impossible romance and psychological complexity.  The seven seasons that followed were varyingly up and down, the latter often marked by the apparent […]

  THE SLAP:  Thursday 8PM on NBC – Potential DVR Alert THE SLAP is strikingly different from everything else on broadcast television–it’s unusual even by cable standards, with an indie film, non-genre mindset that brings little to mind beyond Showtime’s The Affair and HBO’s Togetherness (and even The Affair has its flash-forward murder plot to help […]

  TYRANT went all the way back to the source for its main plotline this season, giving Bassam Al-Fayeed (Adam Rayner) a saga so Moses-like that he might as well have witnessed a burning bush along the way.  Bassam was sentenced to death for treason by his brother Jamal (Ashraf Barhom), ruler of a Middle […]

  AGENTS OF SHIELD – Friday 9PM on ABC It’s hard to believe that only 5 seasons ago, when ABC’s AGENTS OF SHIELD arrived on the air, the idea of a superhero TV series still seemed somewhat new and cool.  At that point, it was joined only by Arrow, in the era before CW was […]

  THE LOUDEST VOICE:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime The rise of Fox News through its dark visionary Roger Ailes, and the resulting effect on media, politics and the world at large, is one of the most important sociopolitical stories of this era, but on the basis of its opening hour, Showtime’s 7-hour limited series THE […]