VICE PRINCIPALS:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO – In the Queue Your feelings about HBO’s new VICE PRINCIPALS are likely to be determined by your instinctive reaction to the name Danny McBride.  For a decade now, since the indie movie The Foot-Fist Way, McBride and his writing/producing/directing partner Jody Hill have been turning out variations […]

  FREQUENCY:  Wednesday 9PM on CW – Potential DVR Alert We still have ABC’s Time After Time and FOX’s half-hour Making History to come, but of the time-travel sagas we’ve seen so far, CW’s FREQUENCY accomplishes more with far fewer resources than NBC’s lavish Timeless.  While it’s not entirely clear how Jeremy Carver, a longtime […]

  BETTER CALL SAUL moves with the assurance of a series that knows exactly where it’s going to end up–and so do we, since we’re aware that sad sack attorney Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) will ultimately wind up as slick Saul Goodman in the world of Breaking Bad (and then as a woeful Cinnabon manager […]

  THE MIST:  Thursday 10PM on Spike – Change the Channel THE MIST is far from the most imaginative or robust of Stephen King’s works.  King has rarely been accused of too much concision, but he was only able to wring out enough material from this premise for a novella; the title conveys just about […]

  GOTHAM:  Thursday 8PM on FOX Coming off its most satisfying season to date, the first where it seemed to have some control over its sprawl, GOTHAM has been given a new timeslot on Thursdays for its 4th season, and the subtitle “A Dark Knight.”  It is indeed creeping ever closer to the territory of […]

  COUNTERPART:  Sunday 9PM on Starz, starting 1/21/18 – In the Queue Tales of alternative earths are an increasingly popular form of fiction these days, possibly because our actual Earth is currently so difficult to handle.  Just as The Man In the High Castle runs the subgenre through tropes of old-time war movies, Starz’s new […]

  ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO – Tuesday 9PM on CW CW has gone back to its WB/UPN roots for ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO, a reboot and update of the Roswell series that debuted on the first of those networks in 1999, then moved to the other.  Once again, it’s a story of romance between an Earth woman […]

  AGENTS OF SHIELD has been given one more final season after the sixth that concluded tonight, and that will bring to an end an extended footnote to Marvel’s cultural domination of our moment.  Agents was the project most caught up in the territorial strife between Marvel Television and the increasingly all-powerful Marvel Cinematic Universe, […]