Woody Harrelson brought a boatload of Hunger Games co-stars with him (their movie opens Thursday night) as he returned to host SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE for the first time in more than 20 years.  That included Katniss Everdeen herself, who contributed a Jennifer-Lawrence-being-Jennifer-Lawrence moment of so totally muffing a cue carded joke that it threw […]

  THE SLAP:  Thursday 8PM on NBC – Potential DVR Alert THE SLAP is strikingly different from everything else on broadcast television–it’s unusual even by cable standards, with an indie film, non-genre mindset that brings little to mind beyond Showtime’s The Affair and HBO’s Togetherness (and even The Affair has its flash-forward murder plot to help […]

  A MILLION LITTLE THINGS:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC ABC’s A MILLION LITTLE THINGS is about as ambitious as broadcast TV intends to get this season, which in this case means This Is Us by way of The Big Chill.  As in the latter, the show revolves around a group of old friends, Eddie (David […]

  1600 PENN:  Thursday 9:30PM on NBC A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the production of episodes for the regular season: a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover) give plenty of notes, helpful […]

  THE NIGHT OF:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert “Noisy” is the byword of the television moment, and HBO makes noise as well as any programming service, whether its shows are laden with dragons, foul-mouthed politicians or coke-snorting record executives.  Every so often, though, the network demonstrates that it can also deliver unadorned […]

  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 […]

  To be sure, NBC’s THE GOOD PLACE hasn’t had much competition in the category of Most Imaginative Broadcast Sitcom this season.  (Really, there’s just The Last Man On Earth, which has been having a monotonous and somewhat off-putting Season 2.)  Still, while the half-hour form (you can’t really call many of the shows “comedies” […]

  The material didn’t always keep up with the cast, but tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE was one of the more enjoyable recent episodes.  Host Jim Carrey obviously knows his way around uninhibited sketch comedy, and the advantage to his not being anywhere near the center of the comic zeitgeist lately was that his mannerisms aren’t […]