BLACK-ISH:  Wednesday 9:30PM on ABC Previously… on BLACK-ISH:  Dre Anderson is a successful ad agency executive who lives well with his lovely anesthesiologist wife Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross), teen children Junior (Marcus Scribner) and Zoey (Yara Shahidi), younger twins Jack (Miles Brown) and Diane (Marsai Martin), and moderately cantankerous Pops (Laurence Fishburne).  Dre’s one […]

  THE MICHAEL J. FOX SHOW:  Thursday 9:30PM on NBC Note:  NBC aired two episodes of THE MICHAEL J. FOX SHOW on its opening night, the pilot at 9PM followed by the first regular episode in the show’s usual 9:30PM timeslot.  Our thoughts on the pilot are here. Previously… on THE MICHAEL J. FOX SHOW:  […]

  DIVORCE:  Sunday 10PM on HBO – In the Queue In its opening half-hour, HBO’s DIVORCE doesn’t show much interest in the “-medy” part of “dramedy.”  The series creator is Sharon Horgan, who with Rob Delaney is also the co-creator and co-star of Amazon’s wonderful Catastrophe.  Part of what makes that show so extraordinary is […]

  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 […]

  Last week’s episode of NBC’s THIS IS US notched an impressive achievement:  in Live + 7 ratings, it moved past Empire to become the highest rated drama on broadcast TV.  Admittedly, L7 ratings aren’t the most meaningful metric for advertiser purposes, and being the highest rated broadcast drama isn’t the gala event it would […]

  Luckily for ELEMENTARY, appearances by the BBC’s celebrated Sherlock are so sporadic and brief (this season’s 3 episodes were the first in 2 years), that the two series only infrequently need to be judged against one another.  Those comparisons aren’t to Elementary‘s advantage in terms of conceptual brilliance and sheer inspiration, but then Elementary […]

  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, […]

  TREME:  Sunday 9PM on HBO You don’t need big ratings to be considered a success on HBO (just ask Lena Dunham), but generating buzz is essential.  That’s something TREME never did, despite a small hard core of enthusiastic fans that can sometimes drive that kind of attention.  Perhaps it was the downbeat setting of […]