FEAR THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC – In the Queue The opening episode of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD was audacious as only a sure thing can be.  The new series is, of course, a spin-off of the fantastically successful The Walking Dead–even if it lost two-thirds of its parent show’s ratings, it […]

MISTRESSES:  Monday 10PM on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On… These days, primetime soap operas usually try to be something else as well:  comedies (Desperate Housewives), musicals (Glee), thrillers (Revenge), medical dramas (Grey’s Anatomy) or legal (The Good Wife) or military (Army Wives), etc.  But MISTRESSES is an unapologetically flat-out soap, its title as […]

  THIS IS US:  Tuesday 10PM on NBC (moves to 9PM on 10/11) – If Nothing Else Is On NBC’s THIS IS US was created by Dan Fogelman, and the pilot was directed by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, the same team that wrote and directed the 2011 feature Crazy, Stupid, Love.  That movie, you […]

  THE COOL KIDS:  Friday 8:30PM on FOX One takeaway from FOX’s terrible new sitcom THE COOL KIDS is that Martin Mull is in a particularly ruinous rut.  Four years ago, he co-starred in FOX’s awful Dads, a quickly canceled clunker about naughty oldsters.  Now here he is back again in Cool Kids, which moves […]

  THE JIM GAFFIGAN SHOW:  Wednesday 10PM on TV Land – If Nothing Else Is On… Doofus dads are a staple of TV sitcoms, and THE JIM GAFFIGAN SHOW is an affable addition to the canon.  Gaffigan has made a modest industry out of recounting his life as a stand-up comic squeezed with his wife […]

  APB:  Monday 9PM on FOX – Change the Channel FOX’s APB is a zeitgeist show in the worst possible way.  No doubt when it was pitched and even produced, its central notion that inner-city crime could be cured only by an arrogant white billionaire was meant to invoke Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne, but […]

  CITY ON A HILL – Sunday 9PM on Showtime Showtime’s new CITY ON A HILL wears so many influences on its sleeve that there’s hardly any garment to be seen.  The show hails from Executive Producers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and it’s sort of a subtweet of Affleck’s The Town, with a plot […]

  DECEPTION:  Sunday 10PM on ABC – In the Queue For its newest trick, the House of Greg Berlanti presents a crime procedural so insubstantial it seems to disappear before your very eyes.  DECEPTION, created by Chris Fedak (co-creator of NBC’s vintage Chuck) mixes together tropes like a summer camp magic show:  the smug amateur […]