BEAUTY & THE BEAST:  Thursday 8PM on CW BEAUTY & THE BEAST has been demoted about as far as a CW series can go, from its original mid-week, regular season perch to Fridays, and now to summer (after being off the air for 11 months) with a reduced order of 13 episodes.  The speculation […]

  BANSHEE:  Friday 10PM on Cinemax Cinemax’s gonzo-grindhouse extravaganza BANSHEE is back for its second season, seeming to flow directly from the ids of sensitive rom-com/dram novelist Jonathan Tropper and his fellow series creator David Schickler. By Banshee standards, the season 2 premiere, written by Tropper and directed by Greg Yaitanes, was relatively sedate.  Mostly […]

  REVENGE:  Sunday 9PM on ABC REVENGE went off the rails last season, both creatively and in the ratings (its Season 2 finale managed just a 1.7).  When it was over, series creator Mike Kelley found himself bumped off his own show, replaced by new showrunner Sunil Nayar, who wrote tonight’s Season 3 premiere (directed […]

  TRUE BLOOD:  Sunday 9PM on HBO Although TRUE BLOOD shares with its HBO cousin Game of Thrones a predilection for high body count, sexual content and ratings, the two shows are very different.  Where Game is, in many ways, an exercise in elegant restraint, with climaxes carefully spaced out over years of storytelling, True […]

HBO’s version of a summer drive-in movie is back. WHERE WE WERE:  In the midst of multiple cliffhangers.  Telepathic waitress and series heroine Sookie'(Anna Paquin) had just seen her best friend Tara (Rutina Wesley) get half her head blown off by werewolf Alcide’s (Joe Manganiello) girlfriend Debbie (Brit Morgan), which led Sookie to seize the […]

  Among the many, many places where cable has been eating the lunch of the broadcast networks is in the anarchic, shoestring-budgeted world of adult late-night comedy, much of it animated, where Adult Swim has been routinely beating the late-night talk shows in young demos with lunatics-running-the-asylum work like Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, […]

  LUCIFER:  Monday 9PM on FOX – Change the Channel It’s fun to imagine the development meetings that preceded FOX’s order of the new procedural LUCIFER: Series Creator Tom Kapinos:  The Devil, Satan himself, is the show’s main character. FOX Executive:  Wow!  So what does he do? Kapinos:  He runs a nightclub, and he consults […]

  MAD MEN:  Sunday 10PM on AMC The final season of MAD MEN was conceived by Matthew Weiner to run, as the previous seasons had, across 14 consecutive weeks, and it was AMC’s decision (for scheduling and budgetary reasons) to break the season in half and run it over 2 years.  Nevertheless, whether by chance […]