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 […]

  STALKER:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS starting October 1 – Change the Channel PLAYERS:  Series creator Kevin Williamson, of The Following, The Vampire Diaries and Scream fame.  Stars Maggie Q and Dylan McDermott, and a supporting cast that includes Victor Rasuk, Mariana Klaveno and Elisabeth Rohm (the latter added in a recasting after the pilot […]

  HAPPY! – Wednesday 10PM on Syfy – In the Queue HAPPY! counts as one of Syfy’s infrequent big swings, although its ultra-violent grunge aesthetic gives it a look and feel that isn’t all that different from the network’s usual diet of micro-budgeted co-productions.  This one, though, has a name star in Christopher Meloni, and […]

  FOSSE/VERDON:  Tuesday 10PM on FX A pair of shadows loom over FX’s limited series FOSSE/VERDON.  One is the ultra-meta fact that its story has to some extent been told by Bob Fosse himself, in his barely fictionalized 1979 masterpiece All That Jazz, all about a chain-smoking, pill-popping, self-destructive womanizer who was also a brilliant […]

  UNCLE BUCK:  Tuesday 9PM on ABC – Change the Channel ABC’s UNCLE BUCK is exactly what you’d expect from a network sitcom left on the shelf for the entire regular broadcast season, then unloaded two at a time during the summer.  As ABC sitcoms go, it is to Black-ish what Family Tools briefly was […]

  LOOKING:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO – Worth A Look HBO’s LOOKING is distinctive for the obvious reason that it’s a dramedy about gay characters, of a completely different order than the network universe of a Sean Saves the World or Glee.  That doesn’t just mean it’s far more sexual than a broadcast network would […]

  THE RED LINE:  Sunday 8PM on CBS CBS waited until the final few weeks of the regular broadcast season to do something very un-CBS:  over the next 4 Sundays, it will air all 8 hours of the limited series THE RED LINE, an earnest social drama produced by Ava DuVernay and Greg Berlanti about […]

  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 […]