FULL FRONTAL WITH SAMANTHA BEE:  Monday 10:30PM on TBS – Potential DVR Alert It is written, apparently, that all alumni of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show who aren’t starring in movies or sitcoms must have their own comedy news series, and tonight it was the turn of Samantha Bee.  TBS’s marketing of the series […]

  BEYOND:  Monday 9PM on Freeform (Preview Tonight at 9PM), also available on VOD/streaming – Change the Channel Add BEYOND to the growing pile of genre shows that have failed at Freeform since Pretty Little Liars became the network’s signature series, joining Guilty, Twisted and Dead of Summer.  (Shadowhunters returns on Monday but with new […]

  INSTINCT:  Sunday 8PM on CBS – Change the Channel It’s a coincidence that the movie Love, Simon and CBS’s series INSTINCT premiered over the same weekend, but both are facets of a newish stage in LGBTQ pop culture:  the ordinary genre story that happens to have a gay lead.  In the case of Love, […]

> A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and 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 in the off-season) give plenty of notes, both helpful and otherwise, and […]

  In a way, COVERT AFFAIRS typifies the uncertain place where USA Network finds itself these days.  The series began in 2010 as one of USA’s mostly light-hearted “blue-sky” procedurals.  It centered around young, naive language expert Annie Walker (Piper Perabo), who was literally seduced into joining the CIA on a beach vacation, and who […]

  Starz cut its losses quickly on FLESH AND BONE, which had been ordered as the first season of a continuing series, but was declared to be a finite miniseries before it had even started airing.  That late shift made tonight’s finale even more awkward and unsatisfying than it might have been, but Moira Walley-Beckett’s […]

  The curtain rang down on the 4th season of WHITE COLLAR tonight, an unusually labored one.  The show still has a fair amount of style and charm, but it’s starting to feel as shackled as Neal Caffrey’s ankle bracelet (and harder to slip out of). Partly the series is a victim of its own […]

  Previously… on SAVE ME:  Beth Harper (Anne Heche), didn’t die when, after the latest of many drunken nights, she choked on a hero sandwich.  She was, in fact, saved by God Him/Herself, and is now a prophet of the Lord’s message, albeit on a small scale.  She knows local facts, like who her teenage […]