VICE PRINCIPALS:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO – In the Queue Your feelings about HBO’s new VICE PRINCIPALS are likely to be determined by your instinctive reaction to the name Danny McBride.  For a decade now, since the indie movie The Foot-Fist Way, McBride and his writing/producing/directing partner Jody Hill have been turning out variations […]

  COPPER:  Sunday 10PM on BBCAmerica A tale of two low-rated series:  BBCAmerica’s two original scripted dramas COPPER and Orphan Black had comparable ratings in their first seasons.  Copper garnered a higher number of older fans (600K total viewers even after its initially higher-rated first few episodes, compared to just 3-400K for Orphan Black–which in […]

  SUPER FUN NIGHT:  Wednesday 9:30PM on ABC – Change the Channel ABC’s decision to bury the original pilot for its Rebel Wilson vehicle SUPER FUN NIGHT isn’t unheard-of, but it’s certainly no mark of confidence–the pilot, after all, is what convinced them to order the series in the first place.  (For the record, our […]

  THE 100:  Wednesday 9PM on CW THE 100 started as almost defiantly derivative of every post-apocalyptic, dystopian YA fantasy around (plus more than a little Lost, Battlestar Galactica and Lord of the Flies), but it proved to be a surprisingly sturdy piece of storytelling over the course of its season.  Series creator Jason Rothenberg […]

  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 […]

  TURN: WASHINGTON’S SPIES:  Monday 10PM on AMC After its initial season concluded, the reruns of AMC’s Revolutionary War drama TURN acquired the subtitle WASHINGTON’S SPIES, presumably in recognition of the fact that the original title conveyed absolutely nothing about what the show was about.  There was the hope that this signaled a Season 2 […]

  HOMELAND:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime Everyone knew that the fourth season of HOMELAND was going to be fundamentally different–the question was how.  Seasons 1-3 relied, for better and then for worse, on the dynamic between CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and her target/lover/obsession Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) as its central story engine, and […]

  TYRANT:  Wednesday 10PM on FX FX’s TYRANT has never been as incisive or daring as it could have been, given its incendiary setting in a fictional Middle Eastern nation on the brink of revolution, but it’s a survivor, back on the air for its third season.  After an unengaging initial run, the series remade […]