THE LOUDEST VOICE:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime The rise of Fox News through its dark visionary Roger Ailes, and the resulting effect on media, politics and the world at large, is one of the most important sociopolitical stories of this era, but on the basis of its opening hour, Showtime’s 7-hour limited series THE […]

  THE EXPANSE:  Tuesday 10PM on Syfy – If Nothing Else Is On… The one thing we can tell conclusively about Syfy’s new series THE EXPANSE from its first hour is that it’s in no hurry.  The hour, which aired as a special preview on Monday night before the series moves to its regular Tuesday […]

  ON BECOMING A GOD IN CENTRAL FLORIDA:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime There’s an overlap between two of cable’s more high-profile new shows, which also happen to air against each other in the linear world.  Both HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones and Showtime’s ON BECOMING A GOD IN CENTRAL FLORIDA are dark comedies about pernicious American […]

  SWEETBITTER:  Sunday 8PM on Starz – In the Quene Starz’s SWEETBITTER is, with Vida, part of the network’s unusual run of back-to-back half-hour dramas, each of them with a short 6-episode order.  Both shows make use of indie tropes, with Vida on the “gritty estranged family that has to co-exist” end of the Sundance […]

  BURDEN OF TRUTH:  Wednesday 8PM on CW This summer’s crop of original broadcast dramas (Reverie, Take Two, The Outpost) has been notably bad, and in that context, CW’s new Canadian import, the straightforward legal drama BURDEN OF TRUTH, comes as something of a relief. The set-up is a much tamer version of the one […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots IDENTITY is so clearly a Jerry-Bruckheimer-for-CBS procedural that it comes as a shock to realize that it was neither produced by Bruckheimer nor developed for CBS.  In fact, Mark Gordon’s company produced the show for ABC Studios and the ABC network, which must have remembered at some point […]

  POWER:  Saturday 9PM on Starz After its long respite in the past with the likes of The White Queen, Da Vinci’s Demons, Dancing On the Edge and Magic City, Starz returns to the 21st Century with the new POWER, a drama so contemporary that it boasts (as he’s billed) Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson among […]

  BALLERS:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – Change the Channel BALLERS is alarmingly ramshackle by HBO standards.  Of course, it’s got enough A-list lineage to justify it getting on the air several times over, with genuine movie star Dwayne Johnson in the lead, and most of the Entourage production team attached, including Mark Wahlberg, this […]