> WHERE WE WERE:  Contra Security, a wacky high-tech firm run by the extravagantly enigmatic Oz (Christian Slater).  Contra tests the security measures of its clients by cracking them wide open, staging mock break-ins, robberies, and similar hijinks.  Its roster of idiosyncratic experts include hacker Cameron (Bret Harrison), gadget guy Cash (Alphonso McAuley) and, for […]

  TREME:  Sunday 10PM on HBO   WHERE WE WERE:  New Orleans, of course, and hip-deep in the lives of a dozen struggling, striving, stubborn, idiosyncratic natives and recent arrivals.  These include the feckless trombonist Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce), who reluctantly supports himself and his family as a high school music teacher; radio DJ/composer/rapper/dreamer Davis […]

  Within the first two minutes of its midseason premiere tonight, BUNHEADS featured a Harold Clurman gag.  For those not up on their celebrated left-wing Depression-era theatre directors, Clurman was–well, yeah.  (This particular gag took place in a kitchen perfectly constructed in miniature–including working electricity–in a cardboard box.)  I’m going to go out on a […]

  THE BIG C: HEREAFTER – Monday 10PM on Showtime THE BIG C has spent a lot of time trying not to be the show it was supposed to be.  TV shows, much like people, tend to want to go on for as long as possible, so although Darlene Hunt’s dramedy began with Cathy Jamison […]

  Among the many, many places where cable has been eating the lunch of the broadcast networks is in the anarchic, shoestring-budgeted world of adult late-night comedy, much of it animated, where Adult Swim has been routinely beating the late-night talk shows in young demos with lunatics-running-the-asylum work like Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, […]

  TREME:  Sunday 9PM on HBO You don’t need big ratings to be considered a success on HBO (just ask Lena Dunham), but generating buzz is essential.  That’s something TREME never did, despite a small hard core of enthusiastic fans that can sometimes drive that kind of attention.  Perhaps it was the downbeat setting of […]

  MR. SELFRIDGE:  Sunday 9PM on PBS MR. SELFRIDGE, the solace for PBS viewers between editions of Downton Abbey, has returned for its second season.  It lacks the dramatic urgency of Downton and is altogether a more conventional piece of work–it’s literally a show that, set in 1914, climaxes its opening hour by having someone […]

  FALLING SKIES:  Sunday 10PM on TNT After a falsely cheerful minute or two, the Season 4 premiere of TNT’s sturdy post-apocalyptic alien war saga FALLING SKIES set to work establishing its lines of battle for this summer.  By the end of the opening sequence, the script, by new series showrunner David Eick, had jumped forward by […]