AMERICAN CRIME:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC AMERICAN CRIME‘s first season was, if not great network television, certainly ballsy.  John Ridley’s series took on race and class and religion to boot, and it was shot in a self-conscious “art film” way, with lengthy, intense close-ups, a measured pace, and a minimum of both music and […]

and MR. ROBINSON:  Wednesday 9PM on NBC – Change the Channel NBC has been making a specialty of what might be called “stealth comedy.”  The network throws a short order of sitcom episodes on the air two at a time, apparently in an effort to be rid of the shows as quickly as possible.  The […]

  REVOLUTION:  Monday 10PM on NBC Of all the mysteries that surround the events of NBC’s REVOLUTION, the one that definitely won’t be answered this season is how the show would rate if it didn’t have The Voice as its lead-in.  NBC decided that it would be safer to keep Revolution off the air for 4 months than to air […]

  PENNY DREADFUL: CITY OF ANGELS:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime (available now via streaming/VOD) PENNY DREADFUL: CITY OF ANGELS is Showtime and John Logan’s not particularly promising attempt to turn his previous hit series into an anthology.  The two shows have little in common, at least initially, beyond the general historical horror genre and Logan’s […]

  Cinemax’s QUARRY felt like a pulpier version of Rectify, and it came by that lineage naturally:  although based on a series of crime novels by Max Allan Collins, and with all 8 episodes often stunningly directed by Banshee‘s Greg Yaitanes, the series was created and run by Graham Cordy and Michael D. Fuller, who […]

  MANIFEST:  Mondays 10PM on NBC Of all the Lost rip-offs we’ve seen over the years, NBC’s MANIFEST seems from its pilot to be the laziest, and perhaps the worst.  Creator Jeff Rake (he has the eminently forgettable The Mysteries of Laura to his credit) has replaced the dense mythology of Lost with a set-up […]

  CHICAGO FIRE:  Tuesday 10PM on NBC At a time when network programmers’ fingers are ever-jumpier on their cancellation buttons, NBC has done an unusually good job nurturing CHICAGO FIRE into a success.  The show, which mixes firefighting procedural plots with more serialized storylines, got a slow start, but it was noticeably boosted whenever it […]

  ROGUE:  Wednesday 9PM on Audience Network (DirecTV only) – Change the Channel Remember when the phrase “cable drama” only implied a cheaper, racier version of a network cop show?  Subscribers to DirecTV can relive those years with ROGUE, its newest original programming and a series that gives Red Widow a run for its money […]