THE VIKINGS:  Sunday 10PM on History Channel Previously… on VIKINGS:  Back around the 8th Century AD, Ragnar Lothbrok (Travis Fimmel) is the one Viking visionary enough to believe that there are lands to the west even more ripe for conquest (like, for example, England) than those in the east, and he embraces the revolutionary […]

  Despite the declining fortunes of network TV, it was a good season for newly-launched dramas, with big hits emerging for FOX in Empire, ABC in How to Get Away With Murder, and CW in THE FLASH.  The latter isn’t just one of its network’s highest-rated shows ever, but remarkably has outrated series in its […]

  DECEPTION:  Sunday 10PM on ABC – In the Queue For its newest trick, the House of Greg Berlanti presents a crime procedural so insubstantial it seems to disappear before your very eyes.  DECEPTION, created by Chris Fedak (co-creator of NBC’s vintage Chuck) mixes together tropes like a summer camp magic show:  the smug amateur […]

  WATCHMEN:  Sunday 9PM on HBO The Damon Lindelof/HBO WATCHMEN provides a new wrinkle to the world of IP exploitation.  It’s not an adaptation of the classic Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel (a la Zack Snyder’s all-too-reverent 2009 film) or even a reboot, but a newly conceived work that’s more like a spin-off or a […]

  GRANDFATHERED:  Tuesday 8PM on FOX – If Nothing Else is On… GRANDFATHERED wins the fall’s Exactly What You Think It Is prize, awarded annually to the show that has absolutely no interest in surprising its audience or even momentarily giving it pause.  (The award is a statuette in the form of a viewer half-asleep […]

  Throughout its third season, reactions to GIRLS seemed to depend to a large extent on the particular vision of the series that viewers had.  Season 3 of Lena Dunham’s show was notably less conceptual and experimental than Season 2 had been, with its standalone episodes, abrupt shifts in tone and focus, sexual frankness unusual […]

  In its first season, Marc Maron’s self-created series MARON was more of an uneven experiment than a cohesive series.  Maron tried on several different formats in the course of its 10 episodes on IFC–mordant day in the life, surreal Louie-ish flights of fancy, naturalistic multiepisode story arc–and while some tries were better than others, […]

  Read All Our Fall Pilot Reports here. SLEEPY HOLLOW:  Monday 9PM on FOX – If Nothing Else Is On… For what’s supposed to be an original series, SLEEPY HOLLOW feels awfully familiar.  Part of it, of course, is that writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are doing a spin on the Washington Irving classic […]