COMMUNITY:  Episodes 1 & 2 now streaming at Yahoo Screen The first two episodes of COMMUNITY‘s Season 6 are less meta than you’d expect.  Make no mistake, they’re plenty meta, with montages about montages, and much discussion of whether Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown, now on The Odd Couple) has been “spun off” from Greendale […]

  THE STRAIN:  Sunday 10PM on FX Despite its contemporary NY setting, there’s an old-world charm to the horrors of THE STRAIN, with its silver bullets and sword-canes.  They come courtesy of series godfather and co-creator Guillermo del Toro, who loves this stuff (his own upcoming movie Crimson Peak appears to be a compendium of […]

  In an era when even network sitcoms often try to Say Something Meaningful, let’s take a moment to appreciate THE LEAGUE, which devoted 7 prosperous seasons to ingeniously and hilariously being nothing but rude.  Jeff Schaffer and Jackie Marcus Schaffer’s series gathered together a half-dozen expert comic minds (Mark Duplass, Katie Aselton, Nick Kroll, […]

  TOGETHERNESS:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO HBO pairs Jay and Mark Duplass’s TOGETHERNESS with Girls on Sunday nights, and in a way they make sense as companion pieces, since Togetherness concerns a screwed-up foursome at a later stage of their lives than Lena Dunham’s characters.  Togetherness, though, views its people with a more mature and […]

  Despite the fact that the producers didn’t know if the Season 4 finale of NASHVILLE would be the end of the series when it was written (and lead studio Lionsgate, in fact, is still trying to sell the show to another network or platform, proposing a Season 5 writers room that would be run […]

  PREACHER:  Monday 9PM on AMC Think of PREACHER as American Gods without the aspirations to greatness.  Both shows detail the gory interactions between (more or less) ordinary humans and supernatural beings; both tackle religion as an integral part of their pulp action; both feature jet-black humor.  Under Bryan Fuller’s supervision, though, Gods is painterly […]

  THE BRAVE:  Monday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel In the Age of Trump, and with younger audiences migrating to alternative delivery platforms, the broadcast networks are making a play–some might call it their last stand–for red-state viewers, who may not be premium customers as far as advertisers are concerned, but who show […]

  GROWN-ISH:  Wednesday 8PM on Freeform – In Progress ABC’s Black-ish has been a bright spot on the broadcast landscape, the rare network family sitcom to earn both wide audiences and critical praise for its combination of political sting and emotional warmth.  A spin-off created by Black-ish creator Kenya Barris (and Larry Wilmore, an original […]