THE YOUNG POPE:  Sunday/Monday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert The cinema-tization of television continues with HBO’s THE YOUNG POPE.  It’s been created and directed by the filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, who made 2013’s Best Foreign Film Oscar winner The Great Beauty and followed it with the gorgeous but not quite coherent Truth.  Sorrentino is […]

  THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT:  Tuesday 8:30PM on ABC THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT is ABC’s 9th family sitcom currently on the air (10th if you count the quasi-family of Single Parents), which puts it in a meta position not unlike its focal character Timmy Cleary (Jack Gore), the middle child of eight Catholic sons and […]

  THE ROOKIE:  Tuesday 10PM on ABC THE ROOKIE is mostly a standard-issue police procedural, not surprisingly most reminiscent of ABC’s long-running summer series Rookie Blue, but with one big difference:  it’s unmistakably a star vehicle for Nathan Fillion.  He’s one of those actors who seems to have spent his entire adult life starring in […]

  SCREAM:  Tuesday 10PM on MTV – If Nothing Else Is On… There aren’t a lot of sure things in Hollywood, but here’s one:  you can always make some money by gathering together a group of teens and killing them off one by one.  It’s been true since at least 1978’s Halloween (and its zillions […]

  THE REAL O’NEALS:  Tuesday 8:30PM on ABC – Change the Channel Whatever its other ailments, over the past few years ABC has had an extraordinary run of diverse, smart family sitcoms,–an area where other networks have struggled badly–with Fresh Off The Boat, Black-ish and The Goldbergs building on Modern Family and The Middle.  (Even […]

REVOLUTION:  Monday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… REVOLUTION is Falling Skies without aliens, The Walking Dead without zombies, Jericho… well, actually it pretty much is Jericho.  We’ve all strolled down this post-apocalyptic road before (let’s not even try to count the number of movies set there), and based on its pilot, […]

  THE DAILY SHOW WITH TREVOR NOAH:  Mon-Thurs 11PM on Comedy Central After one night of THE DAILY SHOW WITH TREVOR NOAH, we conclusively know this:  Comedy Central isn’t bleeping the word “shit” anymore.  It was a fairly big deal when the network let Jon Stewart liberally use the cattle-related version of the word as […]

  GOD FRIENDED ME:  Sunday 8PM on CBS It’s not hard to figure out the target demographic for CBS’s GOD FRIENDED ME.  The Steven Lilien/Bryan Wynbrandt series appears to have been custom-stitched for those viewers who would have loved ABC’s Kevin (Probably) Saves the World if only it had been a little bit more urban.  […]