FAMILY TOOLS –  Wednesday 8:30PM on ABC – Change the Channel   J.K. Simmons is one of our national character actor treasures, but he tests the bounds of our willingness to follow him anywhere with FAMILY TOOLS, which is getting a last-minute run starting tonight. Tools is sitcom with a capital “sit.”  The rollicking […]

  CODE BLACK:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS – Change the Channel CBS’s new CODE BLACK is a mini-film festival of medical show cliches.  It’s set in a notoriously busy emergency room at a Los Angeles hospital, which frequently reaches the point where the patients needing immediate treatment swamp the resources available to treat them–designated “Code […]

  A MILLION LITTLE THINGS:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC ABC’s A MILLION LITTLE THINGS is about as ambitious as broadcast TV intends to get this season, which in this case means This Is Us by way of The Big Chill.  As in the latter, the show revolves around a group of old friends, Eddie (David […]

  DIETLAND:  Monday 9PM on AMC AMC’s DIETLAND is a big swing, but it seems to be trying to hit to all parts of the field at once.  The series, created by Marti Noxon (from a novel by Sarai Walker), and with its first 2 episodes directed by Noxon as well, begins with a relatable, […]

  SIGNIFICANT MOTHER:  Monday 9:30PM on CW – Change the Channel CW doesn’t air scripted half-hours in its regular season line-up, and it’s been trying its hand with them over the summer when there’s little to lose.  No one is watching its Thursday British import Dates, but it’s a surprisingly nimble set of mostly two-actor, […]

  LETHAL WEAPON:  Wednesday 8PM on FOX – Change the Channel By the time the LETHAL WEAPON movie franchise reached its 4th installment, it was virtually a TV series anyway, so there’s no reason for moral outrage that it’s now been turned into one.  But FOX’s small-screen reboot fails in the most obvious way:  it […]

  INSTINCT:  Sunday 8PM on CBS – Change the Channel It’s a coincidence that the movie Love, Simon and CBS’s series INSTINCT premiered over the same weekend, but both are facets of a newish stage in LGBTQ pop culture:  the ordinary genre story that happens to have a gay lead.  In the case of Love, […]

  LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME – Thursday 10PM on NBC   Long before Marvel had a Cinematic Universe, there was Law & Order.  Dick Wolf’s behemoth kicked off in 1990, and it was joined 9 years later by SVU.  At peak franchise in the mid-2000s, there were four Law & Orders on the air, […]