GRACELAND:  Wednesday 10PM on USA GRACELAND is USA’s attempt to meld its jokey procedural sensibility (and that of series creator Jeff Eastin, who previously created White Collar for the network) to the kind of hipper, darker crime dramas that distinguish other cable networks.  The title refers to a seized drug dealer’s beachside house in […]

  THE LEFTOVERS:  Sunday 10PM on HBO Previously… on THE LEFTOVERS:  3 years ago, 2% of the world’s population simultaneously and spontaneously vanished, in what may have been the Rapture (albeit a Rapture that took Gary Busey and the cast of Perfect Strangers along with the Pope).  The troubles of those who remain are encapsulated […]

  MANHATTAN:  Sunday 10PM on WGN America Previously… on MANHATTAN:  Starting in 1943, the New Mexico desert housed a mysterious, ultra-secret military and scientific operation code-named The Manhattan Project, its mission to create the first atomic bomb (or as they called it, the “gadget”).  There were two opposing designs for the gadget.  The better-funded and […]

  THE MCCARTHYS:  Thursday 9:30PM on CBS  – Change the Channel! PLAYERS:  Series creator Brian Gallivan, and because up till now he’s been a junior-level TV writer (on Happy Endings and Are You There, Chelsea?), showrunner Mike Sikowitz, a much more seasoned sitcom vet whose recent credits include Rules of Engagement and Welcome To the […]

  The second season of FX’s THE BRIDGE faced quite a few challenges, some of them traceable to Season 1, and others self-created.  The original version of The Bridge was closely tied to the Swedish/Danish series on which it had been based.  It featured an extremely gimmicky serial killer plot that clashed violently with the […]

  BOARDWALK EMPIRE was, from its start, HBO at its best and most frustrating.  The show was sumptuously produced, on a scale that no other small-screen purveyor of content could match, famously including the recreation of a chunk of the 1920’s-era Atlantic City boardwalk.  Its ambitious were enormous, ranging eventually through four decades and at […]

  DOWNTON ABBEY – Sunday 9PM on PBS When it started airing 5 years ago, DOWNTON ABBEY was an artifact of nostalgia for a vanished era of British society, one Americans for all our proud egalitarianism have always eaten with a spoon.  Now it feels just as much like a time capsule into a different […]

  The final hour of PARKS & RECREATION was more conceptual than one might have expected, in a way that made it feel more like an epilogue than a conclusion.  Written by series co-creator/showrunner Michael Schur and star/producer Amy Poehler, and directed by Schur, it was an omnibus of flash-forwards, advancing the action as much […]