THE AMERICANS:  Wednesday 10PM on FX – DVR Alert The renaissance of pop culture spies–good and bad, ours and theirs, real-life and fictional–continues with FX’s new series THE AMERICANS.  Joe Weisberg’s drama is set in 1981, at the start at the Reagan administration, when Cold War rhetoric ramped up for one last frightening gasp […]

  PARKS AND RECREATION:  Tuesday 8PM on NBC There will be plenty of time to lament the passing of PARKS AND RECREATION, and what it portends for network TV comedy and especially for NBC.  Well, “plenty” may be overstating it, since NBC is burning off the remaining episodes two at a time, apparently in a […]

  PERSON OF INTEREST:  Tuesday 10PM on CBS You wouldn’t necessarily know it from last night’s ratings, but PERSON OF INTEREST had a smooth segue to its new Tuesday 10PM home.  Although there are some notable changes from the past two seasons, in general the show seems very stable, which is exactly what CBS asks […]

  NIKITA:  Friday 9PM on CW Although the cast, crew and studio would no doubt have liked it to go longer, a 6-episode final season for NIKITA isn’t a bad thing.  From CW’s point of view, it fills in the gap between cycles of America’s Next Top Model and gives viewers closure, and with a […]

  BILLIONS:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime The fourth season of a successful series can be an inflection point.  By the time Season 4 begins, the show’s makers know what works, but it’s still early enough that the talent isn’t beginning to itch for their next big things.  It’s easy enough to glide along the path […]

  TAXI BROOKLYN:  Wednesday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel NBC’s summer action comedy TAXI BROOKLYN has a remarkably full history for such a negligible project.  It started as a French movie hit in 1998, written and produced by Luc Besson, who’s now much better known here as the mastermind behind a slew of […]

  DEFIANCE:  Friday 8PM on Syfy The second season of Syfy’s DEFIANCE was often jarringly different from its first, shifting from its initial post-apocalyptic-western procedural form to a heavily mythological storyline that broke up the central father-and-adoptive-alien-daughter relationship of Nolan (Grant Bowler) and Irisa (Stephanie Leonidas) for much of the season, while embracing a mystical […]

  DOWNTON ABBEY:  Sunday 9PM on PBS In its fourth season as the most successful regular series in PBS history, DOWNTON ABBEY operates as smoothly as a well-staffed ancestral estate.  Even though the larger subject of the series is the creeping spread of democracy into the centuries-old system of English aristocracy, which would eventually undermine […]