Over the course of the season, THE NEW NORMAL toned down its most disastrous miscalculation, which can be summarized in two words:  Ellen Barkin.  Not Barkin the very fine actress, of course, but the character she was called upon to play, Jane Forrest, the conservative Republican midwesterner grandmother who had raised Goldie Clemmons (Georgia […]

  BACK IN THE GAME:  Wednesday 8:30PM on ABC Previously… on BACK IN THE GAME:  Newly divorced Terry Gannon, Jr (Maggie Lawson), with her son Danny (Griffin Gluck), has little choice but to move back home with her father Terry Sr, better known as “The Cannon” (James Caan).  The Cannon was a baseball player and […]

> Possibly because the Golden Globes take place in much less proximity to the Emmys than they do to the Oscars, and thus aren’t the crucial part of network gamesplaying that they are for the movie studios, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s TV awards have always tended to be more adventurous and genuine than the […]

Although IN PLAIN SIGHT was never one of USA’s breakout hits or signature shows like Monk or Burn Notice, it gave the network 5 sturdy seasons, holding down slots on 3 different nights in the course of its run, and tonight it made a dignified exit from the network. The final episode, written by series […]

  TYRANT went all the way back to the source for its main plotline this season, giving Bassam Al-Fayeed (Adam Rayner) a saga so Moses-like that he might as well have witnessed a burning bush along the way.  Bassam was sentenced to death for treason by his brother Jamal (Ashraf Barhom), ruler of a Middle […]

  AMERICAN CRIME:  Thursday 10PM on ABC – Potential DVR Alert Recently, the broadcast networks have started kicking the tires of what we think of as “cable” oriented programming, by which we mean serialized, darker, more emotionally ambiguous and less genre-bound stories that require serious attention from viewers.  This kind of programming is against broadcast TV’s […]

  SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE usually benefits from having a host with the confident comic talent that Melissa McCarthy brings to the table, but even with a 3-week hiatus in its pocket, the writing staff came up with little that was up to her level.  The result was a very long 90 minutes. Almost everything that […]

  If there was a way to turn its premise into a TV series worth watching, TOUCH didn’t find it.  The show tried very different approaches in its two seasons, but FOX’s cancellation notice this week closed the door on any further tries. In its first season, Touch was built around the feel-good idea that […]