LEGENDS:  Wednesday 9PM on TNT – If Nothing Else Is On… After serving as a home for middle-aged procedurals for years, TNT has done well with its recent run of more macho adventures like The Last Ship and Falling Skies.  Its latest entry in that genre is the spy thriller LEGENDS, based on a […]

  GREAT NEWS:  Tuesday 9PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… NBC’s latest disposable sitcom GREAT NEWS hails from the House of Tina Fey, who serves as one of its Executive Producers.  Series creator Tracey Wigfield was a writer/producer on 30 Rock, and Great News, which is set behind-the-scenes at a local TV […]

  When SUBURGATORY went on the air last season, it had a clear vision:  as the title suggests, it was a light but acerbic satire about the perils of living a few too many miles from New York City, reflected through the gaze of Tessa (Jane Levy), a bright high-schooler who’d been brought from Manhattan […]

  FX’s FOSSE/VERDON was a triumph of narrowcasting, a showbiz hall of mirrors about a showbiz hall of mirrors.  That was never more so than in its final installment, where it met its meta-destiny by depicting Bob Fosse (Sam Rockwell) depicting a just-slightly fantasized version of his own life and death in All That Jazz.  […]

  Although Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin are still present to provide a continuing center of gravity, the HOMELAND that concluded its sixth season tonight is almost unrecognizable from the one that premiered in 2011.  That series was a dazzling mix of doomed romance and psychological spy thriller, about a bipolar CIA agent who couldn’t […]

  CRISIS:  Sunday 10PM on NBC Previously… on CRISIS:  On its way to a field trip in New York, a class of students from a Washington DC private school are kidnapped by a large and well-organized group of captors, and in the course of the crime, first-day Secret Service agent Marcus Finley (Lance Gross) is […]

  Although Starz was a co-financier of THE WHITE QUEEN, the show was produced by the BBC predominantly for a British audience, so it helped to have a working (or at least a Wikipedia) knowledge of 15th-century English history to get the most out of it.  For example, it would have been difficult to appreciate […]

  SMILF:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime – In the Queue SMILF is TV’s latest auteur dramedy, a semiautobiographical work from star/writer/producer/director Frankie Shaw.  (She was Elliot’s ill-fated neighbor on Mr. Robot.)  As the title suggests, the show is the story of young single mom Bridgette (Shaw), who has a friendly relationship with her son’s dad Rafi […]