SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE had one of the quietest off-seasons in its recent history, with the addition of featured player Jon Rudnitsky as its only major change, so for better and worse, tonight’s Season 41 premiere felt as though it could easily have aired last season. There were a few indications that time has passed.  […]

  HUMANS:  Sunday 9PM on AMC – If Nothing Else Is On… The sentient robot story gets another workout in HUMANS, AMC’s first import series.  It’s set in a barely futuristic England where “synths” have taken over an increasing number of menial and routine jobs.  They’re housekeepers, nannies, companions to the elderly–and prostitutes–and they’ve been […]

  Only in the world of RAY DONOVAN would a season’s (more or less) happy ending commence with the chainsaw dismemberment of corpses, but that’s Showtime’s twisted family saga.  The headline of Season 6 was the show’s relocation from Los Angeles to New York, which hardly seemed affect its DNA at all.  In fact, at […]

  DOUBT:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… As highly prized as the talents of Shonda Rhimes are, it takes the continuing line of her failed imitators to remind us just how difficult it is to duplicate her touch.  Conviction and Notorious are two tries that went splat earlier this season, […]

  BLACK BOX:  Thursday 10PM on ABC Previously… on BLACK BOX:  Dr. Catherine Black (Kelly Reilly) is a brilliant neurologist who happens also to be hiding her bipolar condition from almost everyone in her life, even though her propensity to stop taking her meds can make her symptoms dangerously obvious.  These include a hypersexuality that […]

  24: LEGACY:  Monday 8PM on FOX – In the Queue It’s difficult to watch the “new” 24: LEGACY simply as a TV show.  By the time the original series went off the air in 2010, it was already more trope than drama, its many gimmicks (the “real-time” format, split screens, on-screen countdown clock, etc) […]

>The FOX pilot LOCKE & KEY is a very effective hour of creepiness, but it’s not that hard to understand why the network didn’t put the project on its schedule.  The show screams “cult hit” at best, and the pilot feels more like a shortened feature film than the viable prototype for a continuing weekly […]

  TURN:  Sunday 9PM on AMC – If Nothing Else is On… Unlike just about any other armed conflict in history, and for reasons that have never really been pinned down, the American Revolutionary War has rarely been a fertile source of drama either in the movies or on television.  Mel Gibson’s The Patriot was […]