JUSTIFIED:  Tuesday 10PM on FX Final seasons, as we all know, can be tricky, but JUSTIFIED seems to be in strong shape as it enters its last lap.   Justified lost a bit of its mojo last year, the victim of some inadequate villains and scattered plotting (the whole Mexican druglord subplot seemed to come […]

  BROKE:  Thursday 9:30PM on CBS Even brand-new episodes of CBS multicamera sitcoms can have a tendency to feel like reruns, and the network’s new midseason series BROKE brings that to the “but this is ridiculous” level.  Broke is built around virtually the same premise as NBC’s midseason sitcom Indebted.  (The two shows even air […]

  THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC THE WALKING DEAD has never been prized for its subtlety, and it didn’t attempt any with the title of its crossroads Season 9 premiere:  “A New Beginning.”  Which it definitely was, as the first episode under new showrunner Angela Kang (who was promoted up through the writer/producer […]

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD:  Monday 8PM on CBS The opening half of CBS’s doubleheader of new Monday sitcoms has one joke to tell in its pilot, and it spends half an hour telling it over and over.  THE NEIGHBORHOOD is almost exclusively about the hilarity of a midwestern white family moving into a black Los Angeles […]

  THE BOONDOCKS:  Monday 10:30PM on Adult Swim Aaron McGruder’s name is barely to be found in the credits for Season 4 of Adult Swim’s animated THE BOONDOCKS, absent as both a producer and writer (he retains a credit for his contribution to the show’s theme song), and since he was, unusually, not only the […]

  AGENT X:  Sunday 9PM on TNT – Change the Channel Remember a couple of months ago when The Player started on NBC, and the criticism was that it was the kind of mindless action show that had once made the term “basic cable” a perjorative?  Well, TNT’s new AGENT X is a throwback to […]

  DEXTER:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime WHERE WE WERE:  In a frozen instant of time, as Detective Debra Morgan (Jennifer Carpenter) watched her adopted brother Dexter (Michael C. Hall), a blood spatter expert on her own forensic investigative team, murder a man in cold blood. WHERE WE ARE:  That same moment.  And there was reason […]

  TRUE DETECTIVE:  Sunday 9PM on HBO The first season of TRUE DETECTIVE was so masterfully assembled that it took some time for people to question what taste it was leaving in their mouths.  When Matthew McConaughey’s arias of philosophizing, and the brilliantly extended tracking shots, and the dense mythology were done, how new were […]