If Netflix is going to be the 21st-century version of a “network,” its content will eventually have to include all sorts of genres–and the quality, inevitably, will vary as well.  There may be high-class, award-caliber dramas like House of Cards, but there will also be crap. HEMLOCK GROVE is the crap. Horribly written (Hours […]

  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 […]

  FARGO:  Tuesday 10PM on FX – DVR Alert Previously… on FARGO:  It’s chance that puts mild-mannered, beaten-down Bemidji, Minnesota insurance salesman Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman) beside sociopath Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton) shortly after Lester had a run-in with the bully who made his high school years a living hell.  But when asked directly […]

  SIRENS:  Thursday 10PM on USA – Change the Channel Even though it’s based on a 2011 British format, SIRENS is exactly what you would expect from the union of USA Network and Denis Leary.  Based on the first two episodes, shown back-to-back last night, the series is essentially what Rescue Me would have looked […]

  UNDATEABLE:  Thursday 9PM on NBC – Change the Channel UNDATEABLE, whose episodes NBC is burning off two at a time on summer Thursday nights, may not be quite bad enough to earn the obvious “unwatchable” or “unbearable” labels its title seems to demand–not at the tail end of a season in which NBC gave […]

  THE BOONDOCKS:  Monday 10:30PM on Adult Swim Aaron McGruder’s name is barely to be found in the credits for Season 4 of Adult Swim’s animated THE BOONDOCKS, absent as both a producer and writer (he retains a credit for his contribution to the show’s theme song), and since he was, unusually, not only the […]

  AGENT CARTER:  Tuesday 9PM on ABC Under showrunners Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas, the second season of ABC/Marvel’s retro comic book adventure AGENT CARTER, at least in the early going, makes a less strenuous effort to fit into the larger Marvel universe, and the result is more streamlined and smoother than Season 1. The […]

  TURN:  Sunday 9PM on AMC – If Nothing Else is On… Unlike just about any other armed conflict in history, and for reasons that have never really been pinned down, the American Revolutionary War has rarely been a fertile source of drama either in the movies or on television.  Mel Gibson’s The Patriot was […]