POWERLESS:  Thursday 8:30PM on NBC – If Nothing Else is On… So far, NBC’s POWERLESS is merely a clever idea for a sitcom.  It’s set on the fringes of the DC superhero universe, in Charm City, where Wayne Security (owned by the unseen Bruce, who of course has things to do in Gotham) exists […]

  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 […]

  VICTORIA:  Sunday 9PM on PBS – In the Queue Female British monarchs are certainly having a television moment, with Elizabeth I a regular character on CW’s soon-to-return Reign, her current namesake at the center of Netflix’s The Crown, and now the PBS/ITV VICTORIA.  The newest arrival is far classier than CW’s YA soap, but […]

  HOMELAND:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime We’ve recently acquired the concept of “legacy media,” referring to things like newspapers that are actually printed on pieces of paper–still potentially useful, but decidedly out of date.  Showtime’s HOMELAND is sort of “legacy quality TV”.  It kicked off in 2011 with one and a half classic seasons, a nimble, […]

  TABOO:  Tuesday 10PM on FX – Potential DVR Alert It may be that Tom Hardy will join Clive Owen and Michael Fassbinder among British leading men who never quite became the global superstars they seemed meant to be.  With Owen and Fassbinder, there’s a certainly coldness to them that makes them perfectly cast in […]

  SLEEPY HOLLOW:  Friday 9PM on FOX FOX’s TV series version of SLEEPY HOLLOW is, of course, about a man who won’t stay dead, namely Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison), who died in the 18th century and was brought back in the 21st to hunt demons.  For the series itself, though, having been rebooted in its […]

  EMERALD CITY:  Friday 9PM on NBC – Change the Channel EMERALD CITY will make you wish you’d stayed in Kansas.  It’s a muddle of The Wizard of Oz, Mad Max, Game of Thrones (in their dreams) and that terrible Syfy updated version of Alice In Wonderland from a few years ago, and you’d think […]

  RANSOM:  Saturday 8PM on CBS – Change the Channel There’s literally one thing worth knowing about CBS’s new RANSOM, and here it is:  it’s the first scripted broadcast network series in quite a while to be scheduled for initial airing on Saturday nights, as opposed to being dumped there after failing elsewhere on the […]