ROGUE:  Wednesday 9PM on Audience Network (DirecTV only) A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the production of episodes for the regular season: a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover) give plenty of […]

  Like its central hero, Dr. Lee Rosen (David Strathairn), ALPHAS spent most of its Season 2 finale staggering about in a daze, apparently bleeding to death.  And–SPOILER ALERT— also like Rosen, as well as everyone else who had the misfortune to be in Grand Central Station at the close of the episode aside from […]

> The sex jokes may have diminished over at Whitney, but they’re in full force on ARE YOU THERE, CHELSEA?.  In the first few minutes of tonight’s season finale, Chelsea (Laura Prepon) told her friends about a trip to Atlantic City:  “I got penetrated by a guy who made salt-water taffy.”  This was followed by […]

  The historical significance of HOUSE OF CARDS in the evolution of television is by now well-established.  It’s the first original production created specifically for Netflix, and the company made its first bet a huge one:  26 one-hour episodes, 2 full seasons worth, ordered without even a pilot (at a reported cost of $100M), and […]

  MAGIC CITY:  Friday 9PM on Starz You’d have thought, after the low-rated, little-buzzed first season of MAGIC CITY, that both Starz and series creator Mitch Glazer would have recognized the series needed to return with some extra oomph for Season 2.  But it wasn’t to be found in tonight’s season premiere, and the result […]

  In its 6th season, THE GOOD WIFE continued to delightfully flout every depressing lesson the rest of network television tells us.  Under the remarkable stewardship of Robert and Michelle King, the series turns out seasons that are distinctive, moving, sharply funny, phenomenally intelligent and have an eye for the bigger moral and political picture, […]

  Do Westworld‘s creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have free will?  This third season of HBO’s was supposed to be fundamentally different from the first two, and certainly things changed in some key ways.  The action was set almost entirely in the “real world” and not the titular park, there were important new characters […]

  THE VIKINGS:  Sunday 10PM on History Channel Previously… on VIKINGS:  Back around the 8th Century AD, Ragnar Lothbrok (Travis Fimmel) is the one Viking visionary enough to believe that there are lands to the west even more ripe for conquest (like, for example, England) than those in the east, and he embraces the revolutionary […]