SUPERSTORE:  Monday 8PM (starting January 4) on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… If a weak form of The Office‘s DNA seems to flow through NBC’s new sitcom SUPERSTORE, which previewed tonight before beginning its regular run on January 4, it’s not a coincidence:  the series was created by Justin Spitzer, a writer/producer […]

  PERSON OF INTEREST was CBS’s most ambitious and elegantly constructed procedural, and its ratings in other circumstances would have been decent enough to keep it on the air beyond a 4 1/2-season run.  But the TV business changed around it, and marginal ratings can no longer sustain expensive series that don’t permit their networks […]

  The fourth and final season of Ray McKinnon’s Sundance series RECTIFY, perhaps the most universally acclaimed television program of the post-Sopranos era, was its most conventional.  There were few surreal stretches of memory and fantasy, the plot for the most part moved forward straightforwardly, and there were even bits of humor along the way, […]

  Vampires may live forever, but TV shows don’t, and tonight the coffin closed on THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, the pre-superhero champion of the then-fledgling CW network when it debuted 8 years ago.  In truth, the close of business was a season or two past due:  not only were the ratings way down from their peak, […]

  MR. MERCEDES:  Wednesday 8PM on Audience Network (DirecTV) – DVR Alert It’s been quite a week for the splintering of television.  FX announced that it, like AMC, would launch a pay version of its service, allowing viewers on certain platforms to watch its shows without commercials for a monthly fee.  Then Disney dropped a […]

  VALOR:  Monday 9PM on CW – Change the Channel VALOR is the CW version of a military drama, which makes it markedly different from NBC’s The Brave and CBS’s SEAL Team.  For one thing, it’s significantly lacking in production values, even in its pilot, which would typically have a higher budget than regular series […]

  FOR THE PEOPLE:  Tuesday 10PM on ABC – In the Queue Things may change when Shonda Rhimes moves to Netflix, but in her ABC incarnation, her name on a project creates a certain set of expectations, which the new FOR THE PEOPLE mostly satisfies.  The pilot for the series, created by former Scandal writer/producer […]

  CAMPING:  Sunday 10PM on HBO Although HBO’s new comedy CAMPING is set in the great outdoors, it has the dynamics of a filmed play.  The concept is simple:  throw a number of mismatched characters together in a confined area, and watch them rub each other the wrong way.  In this case, the occasion is […]