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 […]

  FALLING SKIES:  Sunday 10PM on TNT FALLING SKIES had a premise that seemed like it should be able to run indefinitely:  a war against alien invaders fought mostly on the ground, as an allegory of the US Revolutionary War, with its main hero Tom Mason (Noah Wyle) a historical scholar, family man (it’s a […]

  HALT AND CATCH FIRE:  Sunday 10PM on AMC – Potential DVR Alert HALT AND CATCH FIRE won’t remind you much of The Social Network.  (Or for that matter of Silicon Valley.)  Set in 1983 Texas and written by first-time series creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers (the series will be run by the […]

  RECOVERY ROAD:  Monday 9PM on Freeform (Episodes 1-3 available via VOD/streaming) – If Nothing Else Is On… If the idea of rebranding ABCFamily as Freeform was to escape the network’s flavor of earnest YA soap, the new RECOVERY ROAD didn’t get the memo.  It’s ABCF down to its toes, a super-sized Afterschool Special built […]

  PRIVATE PRACTICE:  Tuesday 10PM on ABC WHERE WE WERE:  Absorbing a lot of drama.  Pete (Tim Daly) was arrested for his part in a mercy-killing.  Addison (Kate Walsh), having chosen to finally begin her romance with Jake (Benjamin Bratt), was surprised by a proposal from Sam (Taye Diggs).  Amelia (Caterina Scorsone), with the help […]

  30 ROCK:  Thursday 8PM on NBC WHERE WE WERE:  Jack (Alec Baldwin) was divorcing his now-freed North Korean prisoner wife Avery (Elizabeth Banks).  Jenna (Jane Krakowski) was engaged to her Jenna-impersonator boyfriend Paul L’Astname (Will Forte).  Liz (Tina Fey) was, somewhat surprisingly, still with boyfriend Criss (James Marsden), and even more surprisingly, former page […]

  THE GOOD WIFE:  Sunday 9PM/9:30PM (depending on football) on CBS THE GOOD WIFE lost a step in an uneven fourth season that included botched characters (Kalinda’s husband, the friend/foe played by Maura Tierney) and a gubernatorial campaign that never caught dramatic fire.  But the finale set things up very nicely for Season 5, and the […]

  BOARDWALK EMPIRE:  Sunday 9PM on HBO WHERE WE WERE:  Mourning an unexpected death.  In the Season 2 finale of Boardwalk Empire, anti-hero bootlegger Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) murdered his one-time protege, later rival Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt), a startling plot development, and even more so in the context of Empire as a TV series.  […]