FEAR THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC – In the Queue The opening episode of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD was audacious as only a sure thing can be.  The new series is, of course, a spin-off of the fantastically successful The Walking Dead–even if it lost two-thirds of its parent show’s ratings, it […]

  How on earth is NBC going to bring back AQUARIUS next season?  In the history of broadcast television, it may well be the lowest-rated series ever renewed by a major network, with viewership so abysmal that the show couldn’t sustain a normal summer run and had to be pushed to the netherworld of Saturdays.  […]

  BLUNT TALK:  Saturday 9PM on Starz – If Nothing Else Is On… For Jonathan Ames, the creator of Starz’s new comedy BLUNT TALK, the sweet spot is the intersection of addled (male) self-delusion and yearning.  His HBO series Bored To Death never found much of an audience, but it was rewarding for those who […]

  KILLJOYS is, along with Dark Matter, one of the ultra-cheap scripted pieces that Syfy runs on Friday nights.  (Defiance, which airs with them, is a somewhat more ambitious enterprise.)  The grubby aesthetics of the two Canadian imports are so similar that it’s no surprise there’s been talk about a crossover between their universes–assuming both are […]

  THE ASTRONAUT WIVES CLUB never achieved much in the way of lift-off, and although ABC knew it was coming–there was a reason it was pushed to a summer run as the lead-in to Mistresses–the show’s flat quality must have initially taken the network by surprise.  On paper, the show seemed like it was exactly […]

  HUMANS packed more punch than its compendium of post-Blade Runner tropes initially suggested, but those strengths weren’t altogether reflected in tonight’s season finale.  At its best, Humans told the story of two troubled families, one human and one a group of illicitly sentient “synths,” and followed the members of each, through the course of […]

  In its second season, Courtney Kemp Agboh’s POWER solidified its position as Starz’s biggest original hit, and it was a considerably better drama, too.  Partly that was because of Season 1’s weird structure, which played as 8 hours of prologue because the show’s two protagonists, drug trafficker Jamie “Ghost” St. Patrick (Omari Hardwick) and […]

  You have to feel a little sorry for COMPLICATIONS, introduced by USA Network during the same summer that the network unveiled Mr. Robot, a game-changer that may be the most exciting new show of the year on any network.  Complications, by comparison, felt like the last act of a dying old programming regime–specifically, the […]