THIS IS US:  Tuesday 9PM on NBC Last season, THIS IS US was the artisanal brewery of network TV.  It didn’t fit into any of the conventional franchise genres, which made it feel hand-crafted and special.  Instead, it mixed the old-fashioned sentiment of a family soap with state of the art trickery derived from […]

  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 […]

  24: LEGACY:  Monday 8PM on FOX – In the Queue It’s difficult to watch the “new” 24: LEGACY simply as a TV show.  By the time the original series went off the air in 2010, it was already more trope than drama, its many gimmicks (the “real-time” format, split screens, on-screen countdown clock, etc) […]

  COMMUNITY:  Episodes 1 & 2 now streaming at Yahoo Screen The first two episodes of COMMUNITY‘s Season 6 are less meta than you’d expect.  Make no mistake, they’re plenty meta, with montages about montages, and much discussion of whether Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown, now on The Odd Couple) has been “spun off” from Greendale […]

  PARENTHOOD:  Thursday 10PM on NBC PARENTHOOD, like Parks & Recreation, is one of NBC’s little engines that could, chugging along to a fourth season despite mediocre ratings.  (And last night’s series-low-tying 1.6 in its Thursday night debut won’t help any.)  Whatever the network may consider its failings from a bottom-line point of view, creatively it […]

and MR. ROBINSON:  Wednesday 9PM on NBC – Change the Channel NBC has been making a specialty of what might be called “stealth comedy.”  The network throws a short order of sitcom episodes on the air two at a time, apparently in an effort to be rid of the shows as quickly as possible.  The […]

  FEAR THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC AMC’s eccentric decision to keep its Walking Dead assembly line going with a not-quite-prequel has become even more so in Season 2, which places the Season 1 survivors on a yacht owned by one of them, the rich and enigmatic Strand (Colman Domingo), hovering off the […]

  AGENTS OF SHIELD:  Tuesday 9PM on ABC It took most of its first season for AGENTS OF SHIELD to start becoming the show the synergy experts at Disney, Marvel and ABC desperately wanted it to be, and by then it had squandered most of the gaudy ratings that had greeted it last fall.  Only when the plotline of Captain America: […]