EMERALD CITY:  Friday 9PM on NBC – Change the Channel EMERALD CITY will make you wish you’d stayed in Kansas.  It’s a muddle of The Wizard of Oz, Mad Max, Game of Thrones (in their dreams) and that terrible Syfy updated version of Alice In Wonderland from a few years ago, and you’d think […]

  If Netflix is going to be the 21st-century version of a “network,” its content will eventually have to include all sorts of genres–and the quality, inevitably, will vary as well.  There may be high-class, award-caliber dramas like House of Cards, but there will also be crap. HEMLOCK GROVE is the crap. Horribly written (Hours […]

  ROOKIE BLUE:  Thursday 9PM on ABC It’s quite an accomplishment for a scripted summer series on one of the broadcast networks to last five seasons on the air, and the ABC/Canadian co-production ROOKIE BLUE is now so venerable that one of the plotlines in tonight’s Season 5 premiere had the character whose rookie year kicked off […]

  OUTLANDER:  Saturday 9PM on Starz OUTLANDER hasn’t been the ratings breakout for Starz that Power has been, but it may be something even more important:  the network’s first real buzz show, one that’s put it on the drama map with its fellow cable networks, and is perhaps poised for a ratings jump in Season […]

  FALLING SKIES:  Sunday 10PM on TNT FALLING SKIES is, for TNT, the series Syfy needs and doesn’t seem to be able to pull off.  As futuristic adventure sagas go, there’s nothing innovative about it, or even stylish, and now that the original producers have departed, it’s no longer much interested in being an allegory.  […]

  THE AFFAIR:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime It’s a bit surprising to be talking about a 4th season of Showtime’s THE AFFAIR at all, and not just because the ratings have always been mild, and the series has never attained the buzz or awards attention that prestige TV aspires to.  The Affair seemed to reach […]

  HALT AND CATCH FIRE:  Saturday 9PM on AMC The links between AMC’s HALT AND CATCH FIRE as a television series, the stories it tells, and its characters have gone unusually deep.  The positive part has been that as series creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers have grown steadily more assured and ambitious in each […]

  GREY’S ANATOMY:  Thursday 9PM on ABC WHERE WE WERE:  In a plane crash.  After a difficult year in which many of our characters had to pass their medical boards and then choose/be chosen by a hospital for a permanent position–Karev (Justin Chambers) to Johns Hopkins, Cristina (Sandra Oh) to the Mayo Clinic–a group of […]