24: LIVE ANOTHER DAY:  Monday 9PM on FOX – DVR Alert Jack Bauer didn’t speak until 40 minutes into the first hour of tonight’s 24: LIVE ANOTHER DAY premiere.  It’s not that he wasn’t around:  he had a fight scene, a chase, and some interrogation sequences during that span.  He just didn’t say anything.  […]

  AQUARIUS:  Thursday 10PM on NBC Of all the puzzling decisions broadcast networks have made in these waning years of their reign, none may top NBC’s utterly inexplicable renewal of its 1960s cop saga/Charles Manson history lesson AQUARIUS, a series with ratings so woeful that it was exiled to summer Saturday nights in its first […]

  MURPHY BROWN:  Thursday 9:30PM on CBS MURPHY BROWN was Prestige TV comedy before that concept really existed.  When it went on the air 30 years ago, it was a year before the arrival of Seinfeld, and 5 years ahead of Frasier, and while there were other intelligent, funny sitcoms on the air, Diane English’s […]

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD:  Monday 8PM on CBS The opening half of CBS’s doubleheader of new Monday sitcoms has one joke to tell in its pilot, and it spends half an hour telling it over and over.  THE NEIGHBORHOOD is almost exclusively about the hilarity of a midwestern white family moving into a black Los Angeles […]

  THE GOOD DOCTOR:  Monday 10PM on ABC – Change the Channel ABC’s THE GOOD DOCTOR arrives with some pedigree, being a medical series from David Shore, the creator of House, and starring Freddie Highmore, fresh off his remarkable turn on Bates Motel.  The pilot, though, suggests that there’s very little of note here. The […]

  BOARDWALK EMPIRE:  Sunday 9PM on HBO WHERE WE WERE:  Mourning an unexpected death.  In the Season 2 finale of Boardwalk Empire, anti-hero bootlegger Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) murdered his one-time protege, later rival Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt), a startling plot development, and even more so in the context of Empire as a TV series.  […]

> WHERE WE WERE:  Contra Security, a wacky high-tech firm run by the extravagantly enigmatic Oz (Christian Slater).  Contra tests the security measures of its clients by cracking them wide open, staging mock break-ins, robberies, and similar hijinks.  Its roster of idiosyncratic experts include hacker Cameron (Bret Harrison), gadget guy Cash (Alphonso McAuley) and, for […]

  COUNCIL OF DADS – Regular episodes begin airing April 30 on NBC NBC isn’t trying to fool anyone with its hopes for COUNCIL OF DADS.  The network aired a “preview” of its pilot more than a month before the actual series premiere in order to pair it with the season finale of This Is […]