THE ROYALS:  Sunday 10PM on E! – Change the Channel This week’s cable network eager to expand its portfolio to the world of scripted programming is E!.  Just as Bravo attempted to appeal to its Real Housewives audience with The Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce, E! is courting its celebrity gossip crowd with THE ROYALS, […]

  CROSSBONES, despite some hoopla when it was first announced, turned out to be a series hardly anyone wanted to watch.  Adjusting for the fact that Starz is only in 1/3 of US households, even that network’s Black Sails was ahead in the year’s piratical sweepstakes, despite Crossbones airing on NBC and featuring the series […]

VEEP has no particular interest in going anyplace, so its season finale tonight was more or less the same as any other episode.  This has made for a fun, but somewhat repetitive, ride over the show’s initial 8-episode season.  Every week Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) fails to accomplish anything at all, usually drilling […]

  The Season 2 finale of TNT’s MAJOR CRIMES, intended to pay off the show’s one serialized storyline, about Rusty (Graham Patrick Martin), the teen ward of series protagonist LAPD Captain Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell) and witness to a murder committed by imprisoned serial killer and attorney Philip Stroh (who was originally introduced back in […]

  Showtime’s EPISODES has improved markedly from its first season, which mostly invited viewers to join British television writers Sean and Beverly Lincoln (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) as they turned their noses up at the woeful idiocy of American TV comedy and its practitioners.  (It was a subject series creators David Crane and Jeffrey […]

  PENNY DREADFUL:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime Previously… on PENNY DREADFUL:  In 1890s London, a mysterious set of figures exist in a world where literature’s classic horror characters are as real as Jack the Ripper and the Industrial Revolution.  Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), a famous African explorer, is searching for his daughter Mina, who […]

  Among the many, many places where cable has been eating the lunch of the broadcast networks is in the anarchic, shoestring-budgeted world of adult late-night comedy, much of it animated, where Adult Swim has been routinely beating the late-night talk shows in young demos with lunatics-running-the-asylum work like Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, […]

> COMMUNITY returns to the NBC schedule at 8PM on Thursday, March 15. WHERE WE WERE:  Greendale Community College, of course!  Where the school mascot is a Human Being and the Dean (Jim Rash) is to be seen in outfits intended for any and all genders and species, a place of air conditioning repair secret-police […]