BLACK-ISH:  Wednesday 9:30PM on ABC – Worth A Look   PLAYERS:  Star and Executive Producer Anthony Anderson, and recurring guest star/EP Laurence Fishburne.  (And Executive Producer Larry Wilmore, although he’s leaving the show to take over the Stephen Colbert slot on Comedy Central.)  Series creator Kenya Barris.  Pilot director James Griffiths.  A supporting cast headed […]

  TABOO:  Tuesday 10PM on FX – Potential DVR Alert It may be that Tom Hardy will join Clive Owen and Michael Fassbinder among British leading men who never quite became the global superstars they seemed meant to be.  With Owen and Fassbinder, there’s a certainly coldness to them that makes them perfectly cast in […]

  VICTORIA:  Sunday 9PM on PBS – In the Queue Female British monarchs are certainly having a television moment, with Elizabeth I a regular character on CW’s soon-to-return Reign, her current namesake at the center of Netflix’s The Crown, and now the PBS/ITV VICTORIA.  The newest arrival is far classier than CW’s YA soap, but […]

  PERCEPTION:  Monday 10PM on TNT – Change the Channel   A man stands on a chair in the middle of a police station, earphones fastened to his head, and frantically conducts the symphony he’s listening to.  Yes, we’re in Eccentric Genius Detective Territory, Psychiatric Disturbance Subdivision, aka Monk-Land.  The new series PERCEPTION is essentially […]

> FALLING SKIES – Sundays 10PM on TNT – If Nothing Else Is On… Or:  how is FALLING SKIES not Terra Nova?  I’ve raved about FOX’s Fall dinosaur spectacle, and here’s another Steven Spielberg special-effects extravaganza, centered around a family trying to hold onto its identity and its life in a hair-raising environment–so what’s the […]

  TRUST:  Sunday 10PM on FX – DVR Alert TRUST is distinguished initially by what it isn’t.  Despite its placement on FX and the fact that it’s a saga of real-life celebrity crime and scandal, it’s not a Ryan Murphy production.  And although it tells the story of the 1973 kidnapping of J. Paul Getty […]

  THE GRINDER:  Tuesday 8:30PM on FOX – If Nothing Else Is On… THE GRINDER has something no other network sitcom this fall can claim:  an original, promising premise.  (It’s the execution that needs some work.)  Jared Paul and Andrew Mogel’s comedy gives us Dean Sanderson, Jr (Rob Lowe), longtime star of the primetime courtroom series […]

  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 […]