THE ROOKIE:  Tuesday 10PM on ABC THE ROOKIE is mostly a standard-issue police procedural, not surprisingly most reminiscent of ABC’s long-running summer series Rookie Blue, but with one big difference:  it’s unmistakably a star vehicle for Nathan Fillion.  He’s one of those actors who seems to have spent his entire adult life starring in […]

  House of Cards Season 2 Eps 1-3 Review Here. Eps 4-7 Review Here. At the three-quarters mark, this season of HOUSE OF CARDS has a somewhat different feel, not just from the English original but from the initial Netflix season.  While the series may never give Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) an antagonist who can […]

> A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and 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 in the off-season) give plenty of notes, both helpful and otherwise, and […]

  After three seasons on the air, it seems fair to say that–paraphrasing Star Wars—Homeland isn’t the show we were looking for.  That doesn’t make it a bad series, or an unentertaining one.  But it’s not the successor to Mad Men and Breaking Bad in the pantheon of truly great television dramas that it at […]

  LUCKY 7:  Tuesday 10PM on ABC Previously… on LUCKY 7:  In a Queens, NY auto shop, (almost) all the employees have just hit a $45M lottery jackpot.  However, that hasn’t made their problems go away.  Brothers Matt (Matt Long) and Nicky (Stephen Louis Grush), both in need of money before their win was announced […]

  I’m not sure when THE NEIGHBORS started winning me over.  I dismissed the pilot as an overbroad, gimmicky, mostly witless rehash of 3d Rock From the Sun, but as quickly as an October episode where Zabvronian alien Jackie Joyner-Kersee (Toks Olagundoye), who usually speaks with a British accent that would put her in good […]

  THE WHITE QUEEN:  Saturday 9PM on Starz Previously… on THE WHITE QUEEN:  Lady Elizabeth Woodville (Rebecca Ferguson) was a widow with two children who captured the lust, and then the heart, of England’s King Edward IV (Max Irons) in 1465.  This was during the War of the Roses, a battle of British nobility for […]

  Not to be cynical, but no show on TV could have an easier time coming up with a season-ending cliffhanger than CHASING LIFE, a YA soap whose heroine is battling leukemia.  For most of the back half of the series’ first season, April’s (Italia Ricci) cancer had been in remission, which left the show […]