THE LEFTOVERS:  Sunday 10PM on HBO – Potential DVR Alert Part of the HBO mystique–what helps keep it so not-TV-ish–is the caliber of shows it doesn’t put on the air.  An adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, directed by Noah Baumbach and with a cast headed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ewan McGregor?  Not good […]

  DOWNTON ABBEY – Sunday 9PM on PBS When it started airing 5 years ago, DOWNTON ABBEY was an artifact of nostalgia for a vanished era of British society, one Americans for all our proud egalitarianism have always eaten with a spoon.  Now it feels just as much like a time capsule into a different […]

  MISTRESSES:  Thursday 9PM on ABC MISTRESSES lost its marquee star this season, when Alyssa Milano declined to move with the show to its new (cheaper) Vancouver shooting location.  We’ll see what effect, if any, this has on the ratings, but in terms of the show’s substance, by Season 2 Milano wasn’t being featured more […]

  USA Network has handed its keys to Sam Esmail and MR. ROBOT, and with good reason.  Although it was only a moderate success in the ratings last year, the series gave creaky old USA a jolt of pure critical adrenaline, becoming a zeitgeist show at a time when the sheer clutter of new television […]

  THE AFFAIR:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime The second season of THE AFFAIR took some risks, and they largely paid off.  (Dramatically, if not in the ratings.)  The series widened its universe beyond the viewpoints of illicit lovers Noah Solloway (Dominic West) and Allison Lockhart (Ruth Wilson) to include their respective exes Helen (Maura Tierney) […]

  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 […]

  COUNTERPART:  Sunday 9PM on Starz, starting 1/21/18 – In the Queue Tales of alternative earths are an increasingly popular form of fiction these days, possibly because our actual Earth is currently so difficult to handle.  Just as The Man In the High Castle runs the subgenre through tropes of old-time war movies, Starz’s new […]

  SUCCESSION:  Sunday 10PM on HBO HBO’s new drama SUCCESSION may be too much of its moment for comfort.  The series, created by Jesse Armstrong (previously a writer/producer on Armando Ianucci’s Veep, The Thick Of It and In the Loop), shares the fascination of its Sunday-mate Billions with the hideously scheming ultra-rich of Manhattan.  Unlike […]