Well, the studio audience seemed to be having a great time at SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE tonight.  There were more squeals than laughs to be had, what with Justin Bieber in the house as both host and musical guest.  The show was very careful never to force Bieber out of his comfort zone, and while […]

  The biters and the Governor took their toll on the humans who remained in Season 3 of THE WALKING DEAD, but the show’s potentially most damaging casualty may have been at AMC’s own hand, when it decided to get rid of showrunner Glen Mazzara, for reasons neither side has disclosed or–remarkably–even leaked.  His season […]

  It helps, when watching CW’s BEAUTY & THE BEAST, not to think too much about “Beauty and the Beast”.  Not the 1987 TV show, and certainly not the movies and other adaptations of the story.  Jay Ryan’s Vincent Keller just isn’t much of a Beast–he’s not even much of an Incredible Hulk, and he’s […]

  GRIMM:  Friday 9PM on NBC Although it’s technically in the action genre, action hasn’t turned out to be what GRIMM does best, which made tonight’s rat-a-tat Season 3 premiere feel somewhat off-brand.  Over its two years on the air, the series has transitioned nicely from a demon-of-the-week supernatural procedural with a fairly wooden lead, […]

  In recent years, Cameron Crowe has had trouble keeping his scripts coherent even when they only have to last 2 hours.  It probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise that giving him 10 hours to play with was asking for trouble, and much of his Showtime series ROADIES has been unfocused and self-indulgent, a […]

  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 […]

  DESIGNATED SURVIVOR:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC ABC’s DESIGNATED SURVIVOR had what the trades like to call a “troubled” off-season.  Remarkably for a show that’s just aired its twenty-third episode, it’s on its fourth showrunner, with Keith Eisner as its newest version of the drummer from This Is Spinal Tap.  Today, the story broke that […]

  There was a trainwreck quality to the final season of Showtime’s THE AFFAIR, although it managed to gather itself with some grace for tonight’s series finale, which ended with a remarkably happy conclusion for a show that was mostly built on shifting perspectives of interpersonal misery. The Affair probably shouldn’t have returned for a […]