JUSTIFIED:  Tuesday 10PM on FX JUSTIFIED is pure dark pleasure to watch.  Other cable series are more thematically or structurally ambitious (which is why Justified is unfairly ignored at awards time), but Graham Yost’s series, taking its cue from the late Elmore Leonard’s original prose, is utterly assured in its command not just of plotting […]

  UNDER THE DOME:  Monday 10PM on CBS The broadcast networks don’t get much in the way of pleasant surprises these days, but last summer’s UNDER THE DOME was an exception.  CBS’s “event” adaptation of Stephen King’s massively long novel was intended as an ambitious entry in the quiet world of summer programming, and it […]

  TURN:  Sunday 9PM on AMC – If Nothing Else is On… Unlike just about any other armed conflict in history, and for reasons that have never really been pinned down, the American Revolutionary War has rarely been a fertile source of drama either in the movies or on television.  Mel Gibson’s The Patriot was […]

  TRUE DETECTIVE:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert It sometimes seems like brooding serial-killer thrillers are as plentiful on the New Television as multi-camera family sitcoms were on the Old.  TRUE DETECTIVE, though, gives the genre the HBO Deluxe treatment–premiering, no less, on the same night one of its stars, Matthew McConaughey, became […]

  CSI:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS   WHERE WE WERE:  This time, as they say, it was personal.  In last season’s finale, imprisoned former Las Vegas Undersheriff and more recently mob boss Jeffrey McKeen (Conor O’Farrell) reacted badly to losing $2M in bribe money.  He had Undersheriff Conrad Ecklie (Marc Vann)–the father of CSI Brody […]

  SLEEPY HOLLOW:  Friday 9PM on FOX FOX’s TV series version of SLEEPY HOLLOW is, of course, about a man who won’t stay dead, namely Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison), who died in the 18th century and was brought back in the 21st to hunt demons.  For the series itself, though, having been rebooted in its […]

  SWEETBITTER:  Sunday 8PM on Starz – In the Quene Starz’s SWEETBITTER is, with Vida, part of the network’s unusual run of back-to-back half-hour dramas, each of them with a short 6-episode order.  Both shows make use of indie tropes, with Vida on the “gritty estranged family that has to co-exist” end of the Sundance […]

  THE MILLERS:  Monday 8:30PM on CBS THE MILLERS is about to enter dangerous territory. Last season, the series was the very definition of a “timeslot hit.”  It lost half of its Big Bang Theory lead-in each week, but Big Bang‘s ratings were so enormous that even 50% of them counted as a success.  This […]