THE EXORCIST:  Friday 9PM on FOX – Potential DVR Alert Like Noah Hawley’s ongoing take on Fargo, the new FOX version of THE EXORCIST, created for television by Jeremy Slater (one of the unhappy group credited for the script of last year’s awful Fantastic Four reboot) wisely uses the underlying material as inspiration for […]

  There was a time when BONES was a breath of fresh TV air.  When it arrived in 2005, the networks were deep into Peak Grim Procedural mode, as shows like CSI, Criminal Minds and NCIS thrived and spawned seemingly endless spin-offs.  Bones pumped some changes into the format, adding rom-com, screwball comedy, warmth and […]

  ORPHAN BLACK:  Saturday 10PM on BBCAmerica A somewhat meta line of dialogue about “consolidation” is a sign that ORPHAN BLACK has commenced its final (and 5th) season.  Series creators Graeme Manson and John Fawcett (Manson is credited as writer of the season premiere, Fawcett as director) have started to move their pieces toward the […]

  The seventh season of HBO’s blockbuster GAME OF THRONES, its most watched and in some ways most confounding, was shaped by two outside factors, and possibly a third.  Series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, having outrun the completed portion of George R. R. Martin’s series of novels, were in total control of the […]

  THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC Last year’s season premiere of THE WALKING DEAD was the show’s most polarizing hour, introducing long-awaited Big Bad Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and lingering on his brutal murders of two series regulars.  That seemed to hit a saturation point for some viewers, and although Dead is still […]

  STATION 19:  Thursday 9PM on ABC – In the Queue STATION 19 probably marks the end of an era at ABC:  unless a pilot developed under her watch is picked up, it will be the last new Shonda Rhimes series at the network, as she moves on to her huge new deal at Netflix.  […]

  Showtime’s BILLIONS has cultivated one of the most recognizable signatures on television, from its rudely epigrammatic dialogue, to its love/hate relationship with its ruthless, narcissistic characters, to its very narrative devices.  Tonight’s Season 4 finale, written by series co-creators David Levien and Brian Koppelman and directed by experienced Billions hand Colin Bucksey, was precisely […]

  THE WALKING DEAD: WORLD BEYOND – Sunday 10PM on AMC Even as AMC announced the upcoming termination of the WALKING DEAD mothership after one more super-sized season, the network went all-in on the franchise, unveiling multiple new spin-offs.  The latest piece of the show’s expanded universe is THE WALKING DEAD: WORLD BEYOND, which is […]