GOD FRIENDED ME:  Sunday 8PM on CBS It’s not hard to figure out the target demographic for CBS’s GOD FRIENDED ME.  The Steven Lilien/Bryan Wynbrandt series appears to have been custom-stitched for those viewers who would have loved ABC’s Kevin (Probably) Saves the World if only it had been a little bit more urban.  […]

  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.  […]

  AGENTS OF SHIELD – Friday 9PM on ABC It’s hard to believe that only 5 seasons ago, when ABC’s AGENTS OF SHIELD arrived on the air, the idea of a superhero TV series still seemed somewhat new and cool.  At that point, it was joined only by Arrow, in the era before CW was […]

  FRANKLIN & BASH:  Wednesday 10PM on TNT Until very recently, FRANKLIN & BASH was what people had in mind when they talked about “Summer TV.”  It’s a fluffy, undemanding procedural whose buddy heroes Jared Franklin (Breckin Meyer) and Peter Bash (Mark Paul Gosselaar) are at least as interested in partying as in winning cases, […]

  PARKS & RECREATION:  Thursday 8PM on NBC PARKS & RECREATION had a much better time in London than Elementary.  The marvelous never-a-hit comedy, starting its improbable 6th season, brought most of the cast over for a full hour of the show’s trademark mix of crazy and heartfelt.  No one who wasn’t already in love […]

  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 […]

  THE STRAIN:  Sunday 10PM on FX Despite its contemporary NY setting, there’s an old-world charm to the horrors of THE STRAIN, with its silver bullets and sword-canes.  They come courtesy of series godfather and co-creator Guillermo del Toro, who loves this stuff (his own upcoming movie Crimson Peak appears to be a compendium of […]

  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 […]