SUCCESSION:  Sunday 9PM on HBO Sometimes HBO’s loyalty to its series creators results in the last season of Game of Thrones, but it can also lead to the first season of SUCCESSION (and, to be fair, the earlier seasons of Thrones), where vision and skill patiently nurtured result in the very best TV has […]

  AGENTS OF SHIELD has been given one more final season after the sixth that concluded tonight, and that will bring to an end an extended footnote to Marvel’s cultural domination of our moment.  Agents was the project most caught up in the territorial strife between Marvel Television and the increasingly all-powerful Marvel Cinematic Universe, […]

  It’s odd for a successful TV series to be asked to justify its continued existence, but that’s where HBO’s BIG LITTLE LIES found itself after the network looked at the Season 1 ratings (not just high but steadily rising, which is almost unheard-of these days), and expanded the show from its original one-time-only limited […]

  THE LOUDEST VOICE:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime The rise of Fox News through its dark visionary Roger Ailes, and the resulting effect on media, politics and the world at large, is one of the most important sociopolitical stories of this era, but on the basis of its opening hour, Showtime’s 7-hour limited series THE […]

  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 […]

  EUPHORIA:  Sunday 10PM on HBO HBO’s new teen transgression drama EUPHORIA is produced by the indie studio A24, and for those who frequent what’s left of the American indie landscape, most notably the films that come out of Sundance, Euphoria is less revolutionary than it presents itself as being.  The drugs- and porn-saturated world […]

  CITY ON A HILL – Sunday 9PM on Showtime Showtime’s new CITY ON A HILL wears so many influences on its sleeve that there’s hardly any garment to be seen.  The show hails from Executive Producers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and it’s sort of a subtweet of Affleck’s The Town, with a plot […]

  BIG LITTLE LIES:  Sunday 9PM on HBO There are two notable additions to the second season of HBO’s BIG LITTLE LIES–one of whom has understandably been talked about much more than the other–as well as a subtraction.  The celebrated newcomer, of course, is Meryl Streep as Mary Louise, mother of the deceased Perry (Alexander […]