HALT AND CATCH FIRE: Tuesday 10PM on AMC HALT AND CATCH FIRE is AMC’s charity project; every episode could bear a credit saying “This series is brought to you thanks to the generosity of The Walking Dead.” That show’s mega-success has allowed AMC to indulge itself with a drama that has only gone downward […]
AMERICAN GOTHIC: Wednesday 10PM on CBS – Change the Channel Since even ABC is having trouble these days with its trademark soaps about melodrama, dark reveals and violence among close relations (The Family, Blood & Oil, the exhausted cancellation of Revenge), it’s not much of a surprise that CBS is completely out of its […]
FAMOUS IN LOVE: Tuesday 9PM on Freeform (full season also available via online/VOD) – Change the Channel On the basis of its opening hour, Freeform’s new FAMOUS IN LOVE is pretty woeful stuff. It’s the latest version of America’s contribution to the fairy tale template, the one that tells of the gleam and oh-so-naughty […]
CONVICTION: Monday 10PM on ABC – Change the Channel It’s routine to refer to a procedural TV series as featuring a “case of the week,” but ABC’s CONVICTION takes it literally. When former First Daughter and party girl Hayes Morrison (Hayley Atwell) is arrested for cocaine possession and blackmailed by NY’s politically ambitious DA […]
ZOO: Thursday 10PM on CBS Every summer, CBS changes its drama hat from procedural to low-rent sci-fi. It’s a path the network has followed since Under the Dome became a (temporary) surprise hit, even though the results, after that initial success, haven’t been great. (BrainDead did earn points for sheer weirdness.) ZOO had just […]
WEEDS: Sunday 10PM on Showtime WHERE WE WERE: After a season largely concerned with a battle for supremacy in the New York drug trade, both within and outside the family, there seemed to be a moment of comparative serenity for Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker) and her clan at the upstate enclave she’d […]
THE AFFAIR: Sunday 10PM on Showtime THE AFFAIR was one of last year’s most confounding shows. It was at once carefully observed and gimmicky, precise and willfully vague, compulsively watchable and annoying. The problem wasn’t so much the show’s format of telling its overlapping events repeatedly, from the often conflicting perspectives of adulterous Noah […]
SECRETS & LIES – Sunday 9PM on ABC – Change the Channel Everything about the return of ABC’s SECRETS & LIES feels a bit off. Even the scheduling of the quasi-anthology series (different stories and characters, except for the connecting presence of Juliette Lewis as stern lead detective Andrea Cornell) is odd–the series took […]