The fourth and final season of Cinemax’s BANSHEE felt more like an epilogue, or even a spin-off, than a climax.  It wasn’t the time jump between Seasons 3 and 4, or the shortened 8-episode order, or even the physical relocation from North Carolina to Pennsylvania (for tax credit reasons).  The focus, the center of […]

  TV’s summer of 2016 was notable for a splendidly entertaining and emotionally satisfying 1980s-themed horror thriller.  Unfortunately for Freeform and DEAD OF SUMMER, it was Netflix’s Stranger Things.  Dead, which ended a low-rated season tonight, did have its moments, though, especially in its grand guignol final episodes. The general pattern of the series was […]

  ON BECOMING A GOD IN CENTRAL FLORIDA:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime There’s an overlap between two of cable’s more high-profile new shows, which also happen to air against each other in the linear world.  Both HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones and Showtime’s ON BECOMING A GOD IN CENTRAL FLORIDA are dark comedies about pernicious American […]

  Is the dullness of HBO’s LOOKING a breakthrough or a flaw?  That’s the question that’s been following the series since its premiere two months ago, and it’s been argued both ways. From the start, Looking has been presented as a show about gay men that would break the mold, different from forebears like Will […]

  An odd thing happened to NASHVILLE in its 5th season, as it shifted networks to CMT and showrunners to Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick.  When series creator Callie Khouri and original showrunner Dee Johnson were in charge, Nashville had revolved around three women:  country music superstar Rayna Jaymes (Connie Britton), glitzy troublemaker Juliette Barnes […]

  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 […]

  AGENTS OF SHIELD – Friday 9PM on ABC It’s hard to believe that only 5 seasons ago, when ABC’s AGENTS OF SHIELD arrived on the air, the idea of a superhero TV series still seemed somewhat new and cool.  At that point, it was joined only by Arrow, in the era before CW was […]

  TATAU:  Saturday 10PM on BBCAmerica BBCAmerica only has two showcase slots to launch new series, those being the hours after Dr. Who and Orphan Black, so with plenty of time to prepare for the return of the latter, it’s difficult to understand how the network ended up handing the space over to TATAU, a […]