AMERICAN HORROR STORY:  CULT – Tuesday 10PM on FX We find ourselves in boom times for killer clowns.  They’re the main vehicles for terror in the new installment of FX’s Ryan Murphy anthology AMERICAN HORROR STORY, dubbed CULT (including a cameo from Freak Show‘s Twisty), and one of the granddaddies of the genre, Stephen King’s […]

  THE AMERICANS:  Wednesday 10PM on FX THE AMERICANS is coming off its first disappointing season, and the hope among fans was that it was attributable to the show receiving a final 2-season order, and showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields spending the first of those seasons indulging in such a long runway to the […]

  COUNTERPART:  Sunday 9PM on Starz Starz’s COUNTERPART is both TV’s most cerebral thriller and its most cerebral sci-fi, a very serious story of espionage that happens to take place between two parallel versions of Earth where virtually every inhabitant has a physical (but not psychological) double, and the border between the two Earths is […]

  GRAND HOTEL:  Monday 10PM on ABC ABC’s cardboard summer soap GRAND HOTEL is set at a resort hotel in Miami that isn’t as much fun as the one in Jane the Virgin.  This one has a standard-issue set of crises:  the hotel is bankrupt, its owner Santiago Mendoza (Demian Bichir) in debt to shady […]

  WANDAVISION:  Episodes 1 & 2 available now on Disney+, remaining episodes drop 12:01AM each Friday   WANDAVISION mixes the old and the new in ways both self-conscious and not.  COVID delays on other projects led to it becoming the first genuine piece of MCU content created for the small screen.  (Earlier series like Agents […]

    This year, the original Las Vegas-set CSI, about to begin its 12th season on the air, faced not one but two crossroads.  A couple of years earlier, the show’s original star William L. Petersen had decided a decade was enough, and decided not to renew his contract.  Conventional wisdom has it that an […]

  Although both fairy-tale inspired dramas that were introduced to network TV last fall have been renewed for 2d seasons, there’s no comparison in quality between Once Upon A Time and GRIMM.  Once has created a captivating, complex narrative of parallel universes and the loves and hates that reach across them, while Grimm is far […]

> Disclaimer:  Network pilots now in circulation are not necessarily in the form that will air in the Fall.  Pilots are often reedited and rescored, and in some cases even recast or reshot.  So these critiques shouldn’t be taken as full reviews, but rather as a guide to the general style and content of the […]