THE FOLLOWING:  Monday 9PM on FOX (starting Jan 27) The blood-drenched, increasingly grandiose literary pretensions of THE FOLLOWING grew tiresome by the end of last season’s run.  It seemed like very good news that in the season finale, Edgar Allen Poe scholar, brutal serial killer and unaccountably irresistible cult leader Joe Carroll (James Purefoy) […]

  SUBURGATORY:  Wednesday 8:30PM on ABC For a comedy that seemed to have a strong sense of itself on its debut, SUBURGATORY suffered from a surprisingly rocky case of the Terrible Twos.  Creatively, the second season of Emily Kapnek’s series wobbled from its original tart satire of suburban mores to weakly serialized romances, dumbed-up silliness […]

  BITTEN:  Monday 10PM on Syfy Syfy’s Canadian werewolf import BITTEN is noticeably low-rent.  Even its transformation sequences use as little CG as possible:  a morphing hand, a back becoming increasingly hairy, and voila, there’s the fake wolf. Although the show has a bit more sex then the Syfy norm, it gives off a very […]

  THE FOSTERS:  Monday 9PM on ABCFamily In its first half-season, THE FOSTERS pulled off a feat of considerable difficulty.  Its saga of multi-racial lesbian couple Stef (Teri Polo) and Lena (Sherri Saum) and their mixed brood of Stef’s biological son Brandon (David Lambert), adopted twins Jesus (Jake T. Austin) and Mariana (Cierra Ramirez), and […]

  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 […]

  GIRLS:  Sunday 10PM on HBO GIRLS is coming off a notably rocky second season, one in which Lena Dunham seemed to take up and abandon narrative structures and tones with the same disregard for consequence that her characters often have with each other.  There were free-standing episodes stuck in the middle of serialized stories, […]

  SHAMELESS:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime The Gallagher family is undergoing transitions as Season 4 of Showtime’s SHAMELESS begins, and the tone is considerably less rambunctious than in previous seasons.  That’s not to say that bad behavior doesn’t still abound, but it’s a less brazen and unfettered, and comes labored with thoughts about consequences. As […]

  HOUSE OF LIES:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime HOUSE OF LIES deserves some credit for nailing the Wolf of Wall Street vibe before there was a Wolf of Wall Street.  Marty Kaan (Don Cheadle) and his “pod” of business consultants have already spent 2 seasons merrily doing drugs, having inappropriate sex and swindling their own […]