THE OFFICE:  Thursday 9PM on NBC WHERE WE WERE:  Wondering how much longer THE OFFICE could last, as we wearily bid a not-so-fond farewell to Robert California (James Spader) and came to terms with the fact that Nellie Bertram (Catherine Tate) wasn’t going anywhere.  She seemed to be locked in a battle for supremacy […]

  STAR:  Wednesday 9PM on FOX (returning January 4) – In the Queue The writer/producer/director Lee Daniels makes his home in wild melodrama, and he’s had success at two extremes:  with the almost hallucinatory grittiness of Precious, and the ultra-glitz of Empire.  His new FOX series STAR is an attempt to meld both, and not […]

  New showrunner Brad Kern (working with series creators Sherri Cooper and Jennifer Levin) has made plenty of changes to BEAUTY & THE BEAST, but mostly they haven’t been improvements.  The gothic romanticism of Season 1 (and every other rendition of the tale) has been largely gone, replaced by a colder action-movie aesthetic.  Season 2 […]

  SUITS didn’t have a winter season this year so much as it had the stub of its fall season, just 6 episodes that seemed to be what was left over from the real season after an overlong holiday break.  That scheduling glitch may have contributed to the general feeling of letdown that accompanied the […]

  Think of MR. SELFRIDGE as the methadone to Downton Abbey‘s pure heroin.  It’s not remotely the real thing, but it serves to feed the craving through these many months until Downton returns in January 2014.  Although both are period pieces set in early 20th-century England, Downton has a distinctly, irresistibly modern pace and urgency, […]

> PARENTHOOD is sort of the Bizarro version of a broadcast network drama:  it shines when addressing the kind of tiny moments of human interaction that just about every other show on TV can’t be bothered to notice, but it sometimes falters when attempting the Big Event Episode that’s bread and butter for most series. […]

  If the first season of THE FOLLOWING stands for anything, it’s that the significant difference between the best cable dramas and the vast majority of their network counterparts hasn’t been about the ability to depict extreme violence.  The Following was as relentlessly violent as anything this side of The Walking Dead (and much more […]

  DIETLAND:  Monday 9PM on AMC AMC’s DIETLAND is a big swing, but it seems to be trying to hit to all parts of the field at once.  The series, created by Marti Noxon (from a novel by Sarai Walker), and with its first 2 episodes directed by Noxon as well, begins with a relatable, […]