SCREAM:  Tuesday 10PM on MTV – If Nothing Else Is On… There aren’t a lot of sure things in Hollywood, but here’s one:  you can always make some money by gathering together a group of teens and killing them off one by one.  It’s been true since at least 1978’s Halloween (and its zillions […]

  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 […]

  FBI:  Tuesday 9PM on CBS Dick Wolf and CBS have always seemed as made for each other as the leads of a rom-com.  And as in that genre, only outside interference has kept the King and Network of Procedurals from falling into a passionate airport-gate embrace before now.  In this case, it’s been their […]

  THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT:  Tuesday 8:30PM on ABC THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT is ABC’s 9th family sitcom currently on the air (10th if you count the quasi-family of Single Parents), which puts it in a meta position not unlike its focal character Timmy Cleary (Jack Gore), the middle child of eight Catholic sons 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 […]

  DEFIANCE:  Monday 9PM on Syfy – Change the Channel Despite the prestige it earned with Battlestar Galactica, as a network Syfy has never fled from the tackiness of its genre (this is the home, after all, of Mansquito and Dinocroc), and its new series DEFIANCE is all latex make-up (it’s like we never got […]

  THE ROYALS:  Sunday 10PM on E! THE ROYALS has been, if not much else, an effective demonstration of branding by E!.  Its first scripted series, recounting the antics of a fictional British royal family, fit in well with the network’s more established business of depicting the antics of the emptily wealthy in an unscripted […]

  A MILLION LITTLE THINGS:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC ABC’s A MILLION LITTLE THINGS is about as ambitious as broadcast TV intends to get this season, which in this case means This Is Us by way of The Big Chill.  As in the latter, the show revolves around a group of old friends, Eddie (David […]