WESTWORLD:  Sunday 9PM on HBO No one would ever accuse HBO’s WESTWORLD of being straightforward, but by the time Season 1 ended, series creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy had placed at least some of their cards on the table.  We were told, barring a surprise or two, who the human characters were and […]

  THE ORIGINALS:  Wednesday 9PM on CW Season 4 of THE ORIGINALS worked very hard to break up its band of vampires, werewolves, witches and hybrids thereof, which meant that the premiere of the show’s fifth and final season had its hands full trying to bring them back together.  Mikaelson family members Klaus (Joseph Morgan), […]

  FEAR THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 10PM on AMC Each season of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD has been somewhat different from the one before, with a setting that shifted from Los Angeles to somewhere off the coast of Mexico to various locations in Mexico itself, frequent deaths of major characters, and a tone that found […]

  KILLING EVE:  Sunday 8PM on BBCAmerica – DVR Alert Transposing an artistic concern to a familiar pop culture genre can make the artist’s work much more accessible.  When John Krasinski made The Hollars, a sensitive story about a strained family, no one bought any tickets, but when he added monsters to the mix, the […]

  LEGION:  Tuesday 10PM on FX The first season of Noah Hawley’s LEGION was enthralling, and a bit of a disappointment.  Hawley’s adult off-shoot of the X-Man franchise toyed with narrative structure, temporal and spatial displacement, and extravagant shifts in tone, until it seemed like Hawley might blow up the entire superhero genre.  Instead, it […]

  THE AMERICANS:  Wednesday 10PM on FX THE AMERICANS is coming off its first disappointing season, and the hope among fans was that it was attributable to the show receiving a final 2-season order, and showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields spending the first of those seasons indulging in such a long runway to the […]

  ROSEANNE:  Tuesday 8PM on ABC – In the Queue Television continues its remembrance of things past with ABC’s reboot of ROSEANNE, which last aired a new episode in 1997.  Like NBC’s Will & Grace, this Roseanne is a skillful resuscitation that features the original cast (although in this case, not the original writing staff), […]

  BARRY:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO – Potential DVR Alert The buzz is that HBO’s BARRY is a series that changes quite a bit from its pilot, so we’ll keep this short and return to the series later in its 8-episode run.  Co-created by star Bill Hader (who also directed the opening three episodes) and […]