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, […]

  TRANSPLANT:  Tuesday 10PM on NBC A great many shows that we consider “American television” are actually produced in Canada, thanks to favorable tax credits and currency exchange rates.  The creators of these shows and most of the more familiar stars may hail from the US, but the rest of the cast and behind-the-scenes personnel […]

  SMASH:  Tuesday 10PM on NBC The intermission that began last May is over, and what SMASH desperately wants you to know isn’t just a second season but a full-fledged Version 2.0 kicks off with the self-aware lyric “I know I’ve kept you waiting/I know I’ve made you mad.”  In an attempt to get the […]

  BEAUTY & THE BEAST:  Thursday 8PM on CW BEAUTY & THE BEAST has been demoted about as far as a CW series can go, from its original mid-week, regular season perch to Fridays, and now to summer (after being off the air for 11 months) with a reduced order of 13 episodes.  The speculation […]

  THE GREAT INDOORS:  Thursday 8:30PM on CBS – Change the Channel Fall TV has a mystery even greater than exactly what’s going on at Westworld:  Joel McHale’s presence in the cardboard CBS sitcom THE GREAT INDOORS.  It’s one thing when multi-camera veterans from the 1990s like Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and Kevin James come […]

  THE SINNER:  Wednesday 10PM on USA – Change the Channel USA’s THE SINNER wants so, so much to be Prestige TV.  Alas, Derek Simonds’ 8-hour drama (based on a novel by Petra Hammesfahr) is more like an exhibition of the genre’s tropes.  There’s the antiheroic protagonist, in this case Cora Tannetti (Jessica Biel), a […]

  AMERICAN HORROR STORY – ASYLUM:  Wednesday 10PM on FX WHERE WE WERE:  Doesn’t matter.  It wasn’t clear until late in Season 1, but the gimmick of AMERICAN HORROR STORY is that each season will offer a completely new setting, storyline, and group of (mostly doomed) characters, although some of the actors return in new […]

  UNDER THE DOME:  Thursday 10PM on CBS UNDER THE DOME has become increasingly dopey as it’s tried to justify its existence as a continuing drama after being launched as a limited series adaptation of Stephen King’s novel.  Tonight’s Season 3 premiere revealed some secrets, but with solutions that had apparently been hatched after the […]