FX’s THE STRAIN is doing something that The Walking Dead and its cohorts in the undead genre won’t:  telling a (more or less) coherent story from beginning to end, and exiting when it’s over.  During this third season, it was announced that next year, despite ratings that are still more than acceptable (if far […]

  Cinemax’s QUARRY felt like a pulpier version of Rectify, and it came by that lineage naturally:  although based on a series of crime novels by Max Allan Collins, and with all 8 episodes often stunningly directed by Banshee‘s Greg Yaitanes, the series was created and run by Graham Cordy and Michael D. Fuller, who […]

  PURE GENIUS:  Thursday 10PM on CBS – Change the Channel One of the oddities of CBS’s medical drama PURE GENIUS is that its setting–a wildly overfunded institute that boasts the ultimate in cutting edge technology, regularly offers miracles to its patients, and is backed by an arrogant billionaire mastermind–would ordinarily be revealed as the […]

  THE GREAT INDOORS:  Thursday 8:30PM on CBS – Change the Channel Fall TV has a mystery even greater than exactly what’s going on at Westworld:  Joel McHale’s presence in the cardboard CBS sitcom THE GREAT INDOORS.  It’s one thing when multi-camera veterans from the 1990s like Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and Kevin James come […]

  RECTIFY:  Wednesday 10PM on Sundance Ray McKinnon’s Sundance drama RECTIFY is the prestige television series for those who consider themselves just a little bit too good, even these days, for TV.  With its glacial pace, arid narrative, film festival trappings and copious religious touchstones, it announces its own self-importance to the world at large.  […]

  MAN WITH A PLAN:  Monday 8:30PM on CBS – Change the Channel As the traditions of television splinter around them, the broadcast networks have fled en masse to TV comfort food this fall–but for CBS, that’s no more than the status quo.  Aside from its Robert & Michelle King shows, the network hasn’t moved […]

  THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC The Season 7 premiere of THE WALKING DEAD didn’t have a lot of goals.  The series managed somehow, in this age of spoiler culture and social media, to keep the off-camera victim of its Season 6 finale murder a mystery–no easy feat–and it had to pay off […]

  FALLING WATER:  Thurs 10PM on USA – If Nothing Else Is On… The pilot for USA’s FALLING WATER is flashy, but it doesn’t have much on its mind.  The project has had an extended period of development:  it was originally created by Henry Bromell, whose credits included I’ll Fly Away, Homicide and Homeland, and when Bromell died in 2013, […]