RECTIFY:  Wednesday 10PM on Sundance Ray McKinnon’s Sundance drama RECTIFY is the prestige television series for those who consider themselves just a little bit too good, even these days, for TV.  With its glacial pace, arid narrative, film festival trappings and copious religious touchstones, it announces its own self-importance to the world at large.  […]

  MAJOR CRIMES:  Monday 9PM on TNT MAJOR CRIMES returned for its third season tonight with a grim but unremarkable hour.  The episode, written by Co-Executive Producer Michael Alaimo and directed by David McWhirter, tipped off its hand very early for anyone raised on cop procedurals:  when the wife and mother of a missing family […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

  PERSON OF INTEREST:  Thursday 9PM on CBS WHERE WE WERE:  Watching Harold Finch (Michael Emerson), the secretive billionaire creator of the super-surveillance system that keeps tabs on all potential criminals and victims in the country, being kidnapped by the woman calling herself Caroline Turing (Amy Acker), who manipulated Finch’s system to make it appear […]

  INSECURE:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO Issa Rae’s INSECURE became progressively more assured during the course of its first season, and although it wasn’t more than a moderate success, its ratings trended upward through its run, until it was outrating its higher-profile lead-in, Sarah Jessica Parker’s Divorce.  HBO has rewarded it by scheduling Season 2 […]

  BREAKING BAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC This is actually the back half of Breaking Bad‘s last season (AMC separated the 16 episodes into two parts for scheduling and budgetary reasons–namely, that actors, writers and other Guild members are entitled to automatic bumps in pay if and when a “new season” begins).  That may help […]

  THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC WHERE WE WERE:  Finally leaving the farm owned by Herschel (Scott Wilson), where for most of a becalmed season, there had been at least as much soul-searching as zombie killing, much of the philosophizing having to do with whether pregnant Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) should bring a […]