> GIRLS – Sundays 10:30PM on HBO – Potential DVR Alert The lion’s share of attention paid to HBO goes to its splashy, big-budget, big-name projects like Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, Luck and True Blood.  But at the same time, the network has consistently produced smaller, idiosyncratic shows that are more akin to independent […]

  GETTING ON:  Sunday 10PM on HBO Previously on… GETTING ON:  At a geriatric extended care ward in a Los Angeles hospital, Nurses Dawn (Alex Borstein) and Didi (Niecy Nash) attempt to cope with bureaucracy, their newly-transferred (read: demoted) physician in charge Dr. Jenna James (Laurie Metcalf), and the sheer weight of bureaucracy as they […]

  Despite all the blood-drinkers, vengeful ghosts and homicidal maniacs on hand, the most frightening aspect of AMERICAN HORROR STORY: HOTEL may have been the sight of Lady Gaga picking up a Golden Globe for her blank imitation of a performance as the hotel’s Catherine-Deneuve-in-The Hunger-like mannequin murderess.  (Gaga, it turns out, is sadly Madonna-like […]

  The second season of FX’s THE BRIDGE faced quite a few challenges, some of them traceable to Season 1, and others self-created.  The original version of The Bridge was closely tied to the Swedish/Danish series on which it had been based.  It featured an extremely gimmicky serial killer plot that clashed violently with the […]

  BATES MOTEL:  Monday 9PM on A&E BATES MOTEL has lit up its Vacancy sign for a second season, and it’s retained its particular blend of soap, black comedy and horror thriller.  The strength of Bates is that even if we didn’t recognize its protagonist’s name, and know what lies in his Hitchcockian future, the […]

  It was a somewhat underpopulated 8th and final season for PSYCH.  Maggie Lawson, the show’s female lead Juliet O’Hara, was off shooting Back In the Game most of the time, and Kirsten Nelson’s Chief Vick of the Santa Barbara Police had been relieved of her duties at the end of Season 7, so both […]

  The most tantalizing question of the Summer 2018 TV season is whether Jesse Armstrong, the creator of HBO’s slow-boil triumph SUCCESSION, knew what he was doing all along, or if the first 3-4 episodes were as uncertain as they seemed at the time.  In that beginning phase, Succession felt like Billions for The Gang […]

  THE PURGE:  Tuesday 10PM on USA THE PURGE movie franchise has made a fortune by working both sides of the ideological street.  On the one hand, it professes to condemn the near-future dystopia it depicts, in which an authoritarian government flushes the pipes of America by allowing 12 hours of nearly unrestricted violence without […]