MONDAY MORNINGS:  Monday 10PM on TNT – If Nothing Else is On… About 15 years ago, David E. Kelley was David Chase, Aaron Sorkin and Ryan Murphy combined.  Legendary for his ability to personally write most of the scripts for his multiple shows himself (in long-hand on legal pads, no less), Kelley was the […]

  THE GOOD PLACE:  Thursday 8:30PM on NBC starting 9/28 The Season 1 finale of NBC’s THE GOOD PLACE was a tough act to follow.  Michael Schur’s series pulled off the plot twist of the season, which turned out on further examination to have been hiding in plain sight all along.  We learned (2016-17 spoiler […]

  WILL:  Monday 9PM on TNT – If Nothing Else Is On… TNT’s WILL, a gloss on the early life of William Shakespeare (and an unacknowledged one on the movie Shakespeare In Love), would seem like an extreme oddity if we hadn’t just had ABC’s Romeo & Juliet gloss Still Star-Crossed, which has already been sent […]

> Until now, LAW & ORDER:  SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT has been unique to the franchise in not having undergone a periodic reshuffling of its cast.  For 12 seasons, SVU had been the only one of the series to be star-driven, anchored by the team of Chris Meloni and Mariska Hargitay.  But Meloni and NBC were […]

  GIRLS:  Sunday 9PM on HBO Watching the Season 4 premiere of GIRLS on the same night as this year’s Golden Globes was a reminder of how quickly things move in today’s pop culture from being state-of-the-art, cutting-edge phenomena to… if not yesterday’s news, certainly farther back from the Twitterverse heat than tonight’s winners Transparent […]

  COMPLICATIONS:  Thursday 9PM on USA – Change the Channel USA Network has been hammering away at its own image for some time now, trying to find a show that will brand it as cooler and edgier than the home of Monk and Psych.  Suits has given the network a 2d generation hit, and a […]

  THE SINNER:  Wednesday 10PM on USA – Change the Channel USA’s THE SINNER wants so, so much to be Prestige TV.  Alas, Derek Simonds’ 8-hour drama (based on a novel by Petra Hammesfahr) is more like an exhibition of the genre’s tropes.  There’s the antiheroic protagonist, in this case Cora Tannetti (Jessica Biel), a […]

  INTO THE BADLANDS:  Sunday 10PM on AMC The vigorously pulpy INTO THE BADLANDS has returned for a second season, gifted by AMC with a Walking Dead lead-in for the first 3 weeks of its run that should guarantee some viewer attention.  This time it has a 10-episode order, not necessarily good news considering how […]